Today, my past lives came back to haunt me.
First there was my first crush in High School.
He was my classmate, and for some reason I developed a crush on him because I was the one who always checked his testpaper whenever the teacher asked us to exchange papers so we could correct each other’s work. Yeah, I know. Weird. But hey, I was in High School then, so come on, gimme a break.
So there it was, my high school crush asking me if we could meet up today. Since I hadn’t seen him since High School, I figured, why not?
So we agreed to meet up in Ministop near our place before going to my apartment, so he could see where I lived. I arrived at 3:30 on the dot. He called me before I went into the shop. The first words he said to me was about how I’ve become prettier. He then said, when he had seen me from afar, he had told himself, “If that’s Heidee, I’ll kill myself.” I just laughed.
But I can’t really blame him for his reaction. I was such an ugly duckling back in high school — a very fat awkward girl who had long messy hair she seldom combed and who wore baggy clothes – guy’s t-shirts & pants, mommy-ish blouses that hid everything. I didn’t even use baby powder or lip balm.
Now I’m not exactly a beautiful swan right now, but at least I’ve improved. I now know how to apply makeup, style my hair and wear clothes that accentuate my curves.
Rachel: I mean why, of all people would you want to go out with Chip?!
Monica: Look, you and I went to different high schools…
Rachel: Okay, that doesn’t help me, because we went to the same high school.
Monica: You went to one where you were popular, and you got to ride off Chip’s motorcycle, and wear his letterman jacket. I went to one where I wore a band uniform they had to have specially made.
Rachel: (shocked) They had to have that specially made?!
Monica: It was a project for one of the Home Ec classes.
Rachel: (stunned) Oh my God, they told us that was for the mascot!
Monica: Back then, I thought that I would never, ever get the chance to go out with a Chip Matthews, and now he’s-he’s called me up and asked me out. And the fat girl inside of me really wants to go. I-I owe her this. I never let her eat.
Rachel: Oh, you go out with him. (goes over and hugs her)
I brought my classmate over to our house where we catched up on each other’s lives. Then he offered to treat me to dinner, over which I admitted to him that I used to have a crush on him in high school. It’s funny how easy I found it to talk about such things now that it’s all in the past, but how heavily I guarded that secret from him back then, to the point of using codenames.
Still, it felt pretty good to have my old crush actually compliment me, since back in High School this would have been an impossibility. I almost felt like Monica then, in the episode “The One with the Cat.”
Who knows, maybe someday I might still get to go out with my “Chip Matthews” (a certain hearthrob codenamed Kai, by the way). Hahaha. Suntok sa buwan, Heidz!
When I got to our apartment another one of my past lives was sitting on the couch. I had actually been warned about him a day before he arrived. All my housemates ganging up to tease me about his arrival did not exactly make the event any easier on me. It was my first boyfriend sitting on that couch.
He was in town for four days and needed a place to stay, so since he was the classmate of everyone in the house, it therefore followed that he was entitled to sleep over.
Now of course I’m over him by now and we both have separate lives already, but it did take me a long long time to get over the pain he caused (the first cut is the deepest) and it is the first time we’d see each other in a long long time, the last time being when I was still in love with him. So… this was a test. And I admit, I was actually a bit nervous of the outcome.
And the result? I passed it. I was able to prove to myself that I am truly over him. Not that my housemates stopped teasing me anyway.
I guess your past lives will always come back to haunt you like that.
I remember back in College, I was serving in the registration committee of the alumni homecoming. As the silver-alumni (25-year reunion) queued up to pay for their registration fees and get their IDs, one of them said to me conspirationally, “See those two? They were a couple before,” while pointing out a man and a woman who were exchanging brief greetings at another table.
But both were married already, each to different persons. And yet their former classmate still remembered them as a couple. I just laughed, thinking how we’d forever be associated with those we loved.
I better be careful about choosing my love interests, then. I don’t wanna be known in the future as the woman who used to date a terrorist. Or something equally bad.