Dead Stars

While emailing with a friend today, we somehow got round to the topic of her ex boyfriends. She told me about how her first boyfriend, many years ago, had asked her to elope with him before his grandmother could bring him to America for college.

So they made plans, but she changed her mind and didn’t show up at their designated meeting place. She could have been kinder and refused politely, but she knew that if she saw him then, she would not have been able to say no and would have gone with him despite her decision.

She had two long relationships since then, but both didn’t work out, tainted with the shadow of her first love.

It has been years since she has been in a relationship, and she finds out that the guy she sort of jilted is back in their hometown. She has not made any contact with him and she doesn’t know if he’s married or in a relationship or it’s complicated (maybe she should just invite him to Facebook to find out). She has no delusions of their getting back together but at the same time, she is afraid to contact him for fear he’ll break her heart if he tells her: “I’m married, back off.”

After narrating her story (including that of her second and third boyfriends) in so many words, I had only one line in reply: “Have you read the short story Dead Stars by Paz Marquez Benitez?”

Dead Stars is the first Philippine short story in publication, and has always been one of my favorites. The story is about this guy, Alfredo, who, afraid that he was being left behind by life, avidly seized on the shadow of love and got engaged to a girl named Esperanza.

Then he meets Julia, the woman that causes violent commotion in his heart, yet has no place in the completed ordering of his life. He becomes torn but in the end, he marries Esperanza out of obligation.

Many years later, he finds himself in Julia’s hometown, Calle Luz, and he is eager to see again the woman that he has been thinking of all these years. But when he does talk to her, he realizes that even though she had not changed that much, his feelings had.

“So that was all over. Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?
So all these years–since when?–he had been seeing the light of dead stars,
long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.”

Stars are so far away from earth, you see, that it takes millions of years for their light to reach our eyes.

Sometimes, by the time we see the light, “see” the star, the actual star had long since died and is no longer there.

Such was the case with Alfredo, who had been in love with a memory, a “what if.”

Could such be the case with my friend? We’ll find out when she eventually makes her way to her own Calle Luz.