The Art of Letting Go

From time to time I have this chance of talking to my good women friends in their down moments in their love life, in moments of separation,...

From time to time I have this chance of talking to my good women friends in their down moments in their love life, in moments of separation, in moments of post-separation, or in moments of looking for another person to share love with.

But this afternoon´s conversation with a close friend of mine made me write for the first time about an experience of love that we call in friendster "Complicated" status. Perhaps i was touched by the feelings that she had shared to me or perhaps because i had never shared my part in the last letting-go that i have had; perhaps because we share the same experience and the only difference is that this sharing is more of my part rather than sharing the part of the girl.

What happens when someone fall in love with someone who have decided to serve the Lord in a life of celibacy, etc? Or perhaps it is better to ask the other way around, "What happens when a partner of a complicated relationship falls out of love?

I fell in love with a high school best friend of mine eversince when we were still in High School together. But i had never told her that i admire her because i am afraid to lose our friendship that had been going well. Oh i miss those days when she comes to our house in the afternoon after our classes and spend sometime talking, sharing her life stories and a bit of her love life, climb the mango tree, talk about what will our future be, do assignments together, laugh at many things and later when the sun is finally down i will have to accompany her back to her house either on a bicycle or just by walking. I wpuld always prefer that we walk because I could have more time to be with her. It was like the story of Lee Woo-jin and Eun-ha of the Korean tele-novela entitled "Love Letter." That´s why when we had watched that tv series in the novitiate, like my other companions, I too got sick. Literaly sick - or better to say "love sick."

Well, She had her boyfriend and i had my girlfriend too. And we´d talked about them most often times and tried to fix each others failing relationships. We were truly good friends then. She never learned that i had wished that i could be one of his public admirers, one of those who could be part of her life, and that if she would have felt the same i would not make her cry and i would never be like her previous boyfriensd who had just broke her heart over and over. (Too bad for me i did the same in the end of our story. Im sorry.) How I wish I had told her imediately before or how i wish I had a mind/heart reader to know if she she too have that same feelings for me.

But i never had the courage to tell her about how i feel for her. I was what they call "torpe" in tagalog. I didn´t understand why it was too hard to say "I Love You" to her compared to the rest who had been part of my love life too, i´d been open to them and i had easily told them that i like them or I have said "I Love You" many times. They said that if you love someone, you say it, right there, out loud. Otherswise, the moment just passes you by.

To cut the long story short, in the end she had learned about my hiden feelings through her friends, through our friends i´d rather say. But only after years. And unfortunately only when i was already in the seminary, only after M, T, Z have passed through my life. And it was only when I am about to be a postulant. That was 11 years after wishing that I could be hers and my heart could be with her for the first time. It was a big crisis for me, perhaps the biggest of them all in my seminary life when on the 11th of February she told me that all this time she also love me. I never new what to do. There was this feeling of being paralyzed and the only part of my body that was alive was my heart that was beating so fast. It was a feeling of being embraced by someone who dearly loves you, an unexplainable feeling, a feeling of joy. But after an hour there was the feeling of pain because i know the consequence of the love that i have just found.

Choosing between TWO LOVES is not that easy. It´s a question of priority, of dying, of what is really true love. The Art of Letting Go is a very painful art but an enriching one too. When that good friend of mine shared to me this afternoon that after all she learned something out of having a relationship with someone who is inside. Something resounded into my ears. That was the same thing Hon had told me in the process of letting go. And perhaps i can take the same words for me to say but only just now for my part. And to be fare, if girls get hurt when falling out of love, we too do feel hurt, we too do cry, we too feel the same struggle of letting go and of not longing for the comeback of the broken relationship. And more for us because we dialog not just with our own mind, with our own heart, we also find a hard time dialogging with God for what had just happened, for the feeling of jealousy, for the feeling of unfairness. This is not usually being perceived by our partners because of the common nature of men - never show directly or immediately the affect to preserve the pride in us.

But perhaps what touched my heart today was the status of my friend´s feeling because it made me feel guilty. Here i am trying to console this lady because her seminarian boyfriend broke her heart. Here I am trying to make her laugh, cheer her, give her hope, etc but had I ever did it to the one i always loved? It's too hard. It is too painful. I felt like I can say "what a shame on me." But i was thankful for this occasion because it kept me on the ground, it made me feel the importance of respecting the feelings of others, it made me understand more the dynamics of separation and of letting go. And honestly, it made me cry. Thanks Phen for reminding me of how was it to love and how it feels to be out of love!