Because I needed something to fill the gap of your absence, I typed your name on the Google search bar and waited for the search results to appear in five…four…three…two…one. Dangerous territory. I half-hoped half-feared that a Google search of your name would yield a blog your goldfish memory might have forgotten about. A blog filled with old pictures of you and entries that might yield more insight on the way you think and view the world (which was exactly what I wanted to find), or a declaration of love for the woman in your life a year or two ago (which was what the eternally irrationally jealous part of me was afraid of finding).
Instead, I find that you are a forty-year old fashion photographer based in Rome. Your Linked In profile says you are a General Financial Supervisor at the Ferrabraz-Becker Group and that you graduated from a university in Brazil. You have also worked with John Malkovich in the 1991 film The Object of Beauty.
I went through pages and pages of search results and kept seeing your name minus the traces of the you that I know.
The internet has it all wrong. You have a film camera in your room somewhere that you haven’t used in years. You’re a linguistics major who graduated from the University of Milan and you wrote a 65-page thesis on the pidgins and creoles of (insert north African country whose name I can’t remember here - but I do remember that if you had had more time, you would have flown over to north Africa yourself to get your sample from the native pidgin speakers instead of interviewing every black immigrant you stopped on the street). You’d sooner become a right wing party member than get a career in finance (or maybe it’s the other way around - either way, I can’t imagine you in a suit and tie). You watch movies with your parents every night but you’ve never expressed the desire to make them. I do know that sometimes, you wish you had gone to med school instead.
My knowledge of you versus the world’s largest repository of information. I’m better off sleeping your absence away.
Reading RJ Ledesma’s Lies My Yaya Should Have Told Me (which is really more about dating rather than, well, lies my yaya should have told me) made me feel immensely relieved about being fished of the murky waters that is the local dating pool. A little over a month ago I got myself into a very postmodern sort of relationship and for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting used to assuming the social role of “girlfriend” again (on top of balancing academics, work, and a social life).
Actually, scratch that. I can’t stand using the word “girlfriend”. I am nobody’s goddamn girlfriend. To me, the word “girlfriend” brings to mind a sniveling, whining female who can’t be away from her “boyfriend” for two minutes without collapsing like a helpless heroine in the tragic conclusion a bad romance novel, or without coming up with the most ridiculous accusations about how he probably found the opportunity to sleep with some ditz during the whole two minutes he was away. Sometimes the word “girlfriend” makes me think of a vapid, empty creature driven by PMS, irrational bursts of anger, and the need to shop shop shop - while having the boyfriend pay for everything and carry all the shopping bags because oh noes, my life is OVER if my pink nail polish gets so much as chipped.
I am so lucky that Alessandro isn’t into that whole girlfriend-boyfriend label thing either.
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This is the story of your red right ankle
Life has a funny way of giving me what I want, and of all the many random things in my life, the proof that teenage romance doesn’t die once you hit 21 is one of the greatest things to happen to me. What I love about my relationship with Ale is that it’s got a healthy mixture of the maturity of adults and the insanity of idealistic youth. An outsider would probably think that our relationship is doomed to failure (I think some of my friends did when I first told them about it, and my mom’s sitting on the fence). What could be more uncertain than a relationship that’s intangible? If relationships between people in the same city are complicated enough, long distance relationships add another layer of complexity by virtue of the fact that the miles between you make it difficult to do things together and include each other in your lives.
And how it came to meet your leg
That’s how an adult would think. Adults are afraid of the strange and unfamiliar because they want to have control over every single aspect of their lives. They stick to routine and view new developments as problems, difficulties, a disruption of the safe predictability of their lives. And once they identify a new thing as a problem, adults end up becoming too afraid to grab the opportunities for happiness that life throws at them and ultimately end up never doing what they really want.
And how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangled
And how the skin was softly shed
Every relationship has their own set of difficulties and issues, and the distance problem pretty much falls under the same Relationship Problems Category as infidelity or communication issues. Actually, I’d rather have the distance problem than infidelity or communication issues. Once the trust has been broken and two people find it difficult to be completely open to each other - the relationship is dead, and living within driving distance from each other can’t fix that.
And how it whispered “Oh, adhere to me
I never thought I’d say this but we’ve got Steve Jobs to thank for our relationship. No matter how busy we both are with our own lives, we find the time to talk on iChat (the Mac video chat service) every day. Last he got his bass and I got my guitar and we spent over two hours figuring out a bassline for a song Kristel and I wrote sometime last year. It was absolutely amazing. 
Every time we do stuff like that together, he doesn’t feel so far away. That makes it difficult for me to rip myself away from my Macbook when he’s there. At the same time, however, I love that I can still go about my regular routine and pursue what I want in life. I love that he’s doing the same thing with his life.
For we are bound by symmetry
This relationship is teaching me that there’s a big difference between giving up your life for someone (which is the fatal mistake I did in my last relationship) and integrating someone into your life (which is what I’m doing now). There’s a difference between building your life around someone and modifying your Life Plans to make sure that that person is among your top priorities.
And whatever differences our lives have been
The best part about our relationship is that it’s not going to be long distance forever. We gots plans! And I’m talking about real plans that that can actually come true because unlike teenagers, we’re old enough to have spending power. (Oh adulthood, you are good for something after all!) The future is still a mighty uncertain thing of course, and I know that there’s that slight chance that maybe it won’t work out. But why focus all your energies on that slight chance when you can do so much to make it work?
We together make a limb.”
Oh and did I mention that he speaks four languages and he tutors me in Structuralism and he skates and he’s progressive and open-minded and he means everything he says?
This Ale guy, I love him. <3
This is the story of your red right ankle.
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