Love (not) Within Reach?

I first experienced the feeling of being in love when I was about eight years old. He was in the class next to mine and he was the kind of boy that steals girls’ hearts only to break them later. He had spiky hair, tanned skin, bad ass attitude and the most dazzling smile. I started having a crush on him the first day I saw him fighting over a swing at the school playground but fate finally brought us together when we were chosen to be part of this year-end mini drama, in which I was chosen to play a mother and him, my son. I wanted so badly to protest to this unromantic role (why could not I play a distressed princess trapped under the claws of an evil stepmother instead?) but decided not to as chances are, my teachers would never rewrite the script. They would rewrite me and I may end up sitting among the audience. Our relationship bloomed during the many practices and I remember vaguely sitting down waiting for the school bus after practice, chocolate and strawberry ice-cream melting in our hands.

He never confessed his love to me and I never did mine but deep down inside, I knew that we had something. Unfortunately, the greatest love of all time was abruptly cut short when we both got transferred to another school. My dad bought a house in a different neighbourhood and him, well, I don’t exactly know what happened to him. All I knew was that the last time I saw him was when my Dad and I went to the school office to get the transfer form and he was there as well, with his mother. We looked at each other and smiled, never saying a word but only ‘goodbye’.

Saying goodbye is never easy, especially so when the person you are saying goodbye to is someone you love. When your partner has to move out of town, go to university, get a job in a different state or simply “has to go”, your heart so much wants to believe that the physical separation should not end the relationship. I once believed so as well. It puzzled me why people made a big fuss about being separated with a loved one. I thought that when you are in love, your hearts connect in a way that not even distance could break it.

Well, I suppose I thought wrong. When two people are in love, their hearts do connect but this connection is so fragile that when it is faced with distance and separation, it could just easily bend and break. Someone once said absence makes the hearts fonder but everyone so easily forgets the fact that absence hurts. It hurts when you are left alone with phone calls being the only form of communication between you and your partner and it hurts when you wake up in the next three months realizing how lonely life has gotten to be…

I am not sure if I have turned into a complete skeptic when it comes to long-distance romance. Is it still possible to keep the passion alive when you are separated by continents?


….to be continued.