Girl in the Mirror

I watch her eyes sweep through her 5’2” frame. She takes a quarter turn, looks over her shoulder and scrutinizes her sleeveless arms, butt and legs. She frowns as she steps on the weighing scale for the 3rd time that week: 125 lbs. She looks me in the eye for a moment and then I hear her sing, “Gotta make a change for once in my life. It's gonna feel real good, gonna make a difference, gonna make it right…”

I see her changing into sweat pants, an old shirt and Nike shoes I’ve never seen before. She goes inside the gym. She warms up. She tries to reach for her toes and winces in pain. She steps on the treadmill and walks for 10, pause, 20 minutes. She jogs for another 10.

“You don’t have time for this,” I tell her. “How can you leave your work behind?” She stumbles but catches herself in time. Glaring at me, she proceeds to the stationary bicycle and starts pumping with her feet. She groans. I mock her, “See? Way less painful to tackle those reports than do that.”

Defiantly, she picks a pair of pink-colored weights and flexes her arms. Next her abs. Inhale, exhale… she cries out in pain. “You’re crazy,” I tell her. “Stop torturing yourself.”

After an hour, she stops. She goes to the weighing scale. I laugh at her, “You really think you’re going to lose pounds after one session?”

Nor did she lose pounds after a month. She goes to the gym three times a week and checks her weight as often. I can feel her frustration. “Give it up,” I tell her, “You’re suffering for nothing.”

She ignores me and works out even harder. She ups her cardio time and stretches herself some more. I have to admit her body is starting to look more toned now, but I don’t tell her that. I watch her twist and turn on the floor. I wonder why she would prefer to be stuck in the gym at this hour when she can be out with her friends at the mall, sharing a bucket of GPS and Yellow Cab’s New York’s Finest.

I sneer, “You’re doing this for a man, aren’t you?” She blushes. I knew it. Typical, oh so typical.

Before long, I see the Man in the mirror. I look at his form and decide, not bad. He picks up the girl. They decide to go out for dinner. She checks herself in the mirror. I know what she’s thinking. Is she pretty? Is she thin enough? I never quite understand why girls in this dimension and age always calculate beauty in terms of pounds. As for the girl, she has lost only a measly pound after two months of working out. But I tell her fondly anyway, “You’re beautiful.” She beams.

I see the girl less and less in the gym. Then she is gone for a long time. On a Saturday night, she comes back. I wake up to find her staring at the mirror with swollen eyes and tears streaking her face. Alarmed, I ask her, “What happened girl?” She just cries some more. She bawls, she screams, she sleeps.
I don’t see the Man in the mirror anymore so I take the hint.

After a while, I get bored looking at her getting ugly as days pass. I ask her to change her ways. I tell her, “You’ve got to stand up and lift yourself now. You’ve got to move, girl. Move on.”

Maybe it’s habit. Perhaps, she knows no other way to fill her time. But eventually she changes into her sweat pants and old shirt, climbs on the treadmill and starts running again. The air dries her tears. For days, she runs. As I watch her pick up the bloody weights once more, I wince and tell her straight, “You don’t have to do that now. With you crying a river, moping around and missing meals-- you’ve kissed more than enough pounds goodbye.” She ignores me. She doesn’t go to the weighing scale to confirm.

“Are you doing this to impress someone again?” She does not answer. My cynical self keep waiting for another man to appear in the mirror and whisk the girl away once more. But weeks pass and there was just the girl sweating, stretching, and sometimes, swearing on the floor.

I begin to understand that this time she’s doing this for no one else but herself. She runs to heal. She lifts dumbbells to make herself stronger. She stretches her body to conquer her limits. She works out to make herself better.

Slightly panting, she lifts her body and faces me in the mirror. Her face is flushed, her hair and white shirt are soaking wet. But oh, her eyes are clear and no longer troubled. She smiles triumphantly. In that moment, I tell her honestly, “Girl, I’ve never seen you look more beautiful.”

I follow her to the treadmill. This time, I run with her.


--SunStar Weekend, 24 April 2010

catching up

Over brewed coffee and cranberry juice in Starbucks Ayala Terraces, long time BFF Emi and I were catching up on each others’ lives. Although we practically live on the same avenue, we haven’t seen each other in six months.

I’ve almost forgotten she was pregnant and due to deliver her baby in two weeks. She’s forgotten that I write a column every other weekend, and not weekdays, in this paper. But even so, we’ve been through enough drama and insane moments in our growing up years to understand each other and easily pick up where we left off.

After about an hour of obsessive discussion on the new chapters of our seemingly normal lives, we moved on to the juicier stuff. That is of course, the stories of other people we know and those we don’t know so well. From one gossip girl to another, here’s the buzz:

Actress Sandra Bullock just won the Oscar’s, but is now divorcing her husband for allegedly cheating on her while filming The Blind Side. Talk about being blind.

Friend-Can’t-Sleep suspects her husband is cheating on her. With another man. Unbelievable.

College Crush #2 is single again and is back in town. Hmm…

Guess who hooked up with a 20-something beauty? Someone’s 40-something widower uncle.

Lesbian classmate is pregnant, married a man, but thinking of getting back together with the 5-year girlfriend. Huh?

Fiction is nothing compared to real life drama. As talk of babies, breakups and friends turning gay filled the night, I couldn’t help but wonder: where have I been? Things are happening so fast. How could these people be breaking up already when I haven’t even been married yet?!

Emi just shrugged, “Well, it’s been 10 years since college. The world now is crazier than we know it. Changes are bound to happen.”

Ten years already? Wow. I looked around and realized that indeed a lot could happen in 10 years. The Ayala Terraces, for one. There’s the evolution of I-Pods, electronic notebooks, Facebook and Twitter. And then, when we weren’t looking, the invasion of short-skirted teeners and preppy twenty-somethings in coffee shops on weekdays and nights. Whatever happened to study hall or conference rooms for that matter?

But the most telling change is the fact that we’re in a coffee shop on a weekend, already deliberating to go home before midnight. I looked at my half-filled coffee cup and remembered how, in our 20s, we’d be crazy dancing in bars to the popular tunes of “Mickey”, “Give It Up” and “September” till the wee hours of a Sunday morning. My, where did all that energy go?

“Hey, are we getting old?” I asked, half-amused, half-sad. “Yep, isn’t it great?” Emi chirped, patting her belly contentedly. Must be the hormones talking, I thought.

“What’s so great about it? Time’s catching up on us and yet there’re still so many things to do and see. Don’t you just miss the time fresh off graduation, when we’ve practically got the whole world at our feet, when we’re more carefree, 10 lbs lighter and basically just had more time to do what we wanted to do?”

Emi laughed, “You mean that time when we’re all a little lost, undecided, emotional, clingy, chasing boys and hopping from one party to the next? If you ask me, being 30-something ain’t so bad. At least now, we know ourselves a little better and we know what we want, what matters to us.”

That got me thinking. At this point, what does matter? Raising a family, pursuing a career, getting rich? I may not figure out everything yet but I know it’s no longer just about our Facebook status, the number of tequila shots we can down in a night or knowing who broke up with whom.

In all things though, big or small, time does matter. At least through time we know things happen for a reason. Some things we fight for, some things we cannot change. I guess the beauty of getting older is finally learning to pick our battles.

Emi went on, “Just imagine going through it all again – first job interview, first love, first breakup, first walk on high heels…”

I cringed a bit. Well, no doubt the past years had its highs and lows. Miss it? Yes. But go back? Nah.


-- SunStar Weekend, 10 April 2009