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