W.

I was around five when I first fell in love. My very first day in grade school. I remember it oh so vividly: I didn’t want to go to school, at least not yet, preferring instead to spend my afternoons chasing dragonflies in the grassy lot behind our house. I had had my taste of kindergarten and didn’t quite get the hang of it. But Mama, who was a public school teacher, wanted to enroll me as a salingpusa in a colleague’s class; there I was – furiously wiping away tears with my hands as I stood behind my mother’s skirt and oblivious to her entreaties that things will be okay as soon as I meet my teacher- when she passed by.

She seemed to float as she walked, this pretty girl who, from out of nowhere, entered my life at such an inopportune time. It was such a fleeting but heavenly moment; she threw a glance at me and and my tear-soaked gaze met hers; the embarrassed cry-baby in me smiled at her, and she smiled back, and then she went on her sweet, sweet way; I don’t remember now if at that time, she was with her mother. All I remember were her lovely round eyes and the dimples on her cheeks. Inexplicably, my heart beat like mad as my tender gaze followed her, until she disappeared in the noisy sea of students excited to attend their first day at the Lagao Central Elementary School.

Right there and then, I decided that I was going to like school after all, and then–dutifully headed for Mrs. Tulio’s class.

(Non)stirrings of the past


I feel a certain tug in the heart reading this poem by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska:


FIRST LOVE


They say
the first love's most important
but not my experience.

Something was and wasn't there between us,
something went on and went away.

My hands never tremble
when I stumble on silly keepsakes
and a sheaf of letters tied with string --
not even ribbon.

Our only meeting after years:
the conversation of two chairs
and a chilly table.

Other loves
still breathe deep inside me.
This one's too short of breath even to sigh.

Yet, just exactly as it is,
it does what others still can't manage:
unremembered,
not even seen in dreams,
it introduces me to death.

- from the New Yorker Anniversary Issue (2004)
(translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)