We were miles apart, and it had been years since we last talked – a dozen years, to be exact. Yet here I was, going on overtime because I was having too much fun chatting with her.
“So how is Cate?” she asks, after I tell her about how I spent Christmas with my roommate who was her elementary best friend. “Is she really Cate now? She used to be Cathy.”
“Yes. Look who’s talking. I still can’t get used to your new nickname.”
It wasn’t just her nickname that had changed by now. She had a very cute little boy and an estranged husband. She had moved from our hometown to another town to Manila to Japan to London. She was working in her third company which also happened to be my sixth.
She had looked for me in our intranet and sent me a message in our internal chat, and that was how I found out that for the first time, I worked in the same company with a high school classmate, though she is based in London and I in Singapore.
Despite all those changes, though, we found ourselves talking like the 14 year old selves we had been when we last saw each other, alternately bringing up do-you-remember-when’s.
She remembered how we had been groupmates for a Social Studies project and we had burned the edges of black construction paper in our house.
I remembered how she had been such a fan of Brad Pitt, which I hadn’t understood until after college. I was a late bloomer, always have been, I apologised.
She had a lot of questions about lots of people, and I gamely answered them all to the best I could. After she had exhausted her questions, it was my turn, and she filled in the blanks of the events that happened all those years ago.
It was our second year Christmas party, and our class (called Mohicans) was having it in the audio visual room. I found it a bit odd that our moderator had suddenly been assigned somewhere else and we were being babysat by our principal, of all people.
After we had exchanged presents and ate food, the principal went in front, took the microphone, and made an announcement: our moderator and our class president had eloped and ran off to another city.
It was bad enough that she was a student and he a teacher. Worse that she was only 14 and he was 26, and worst that he was on his way to becoming a Jesuit priest.
I was in shock. She was a pretty girl who was the most intelligent in class; she had a bright future ahead of her. What had she done?
Far away from home, she was thinking along the same lines and somewhat regretting that she had been carried away by her emotions. She wanted to go back, but she realized that in our small city, she would never be able to live a normal life after the “scandal.”
So she stood by her decision, which her family understood. She went on with her studies, graduating a year later than she would have. She became president of the student government and graduated with magna cum laude honors (suma cum laude if not for PE) despite getting married at 18 and giving birth to a son at 21.
She became a CPA and moved to Manila to work for one of the big 4 auditing firms before moving to Japan to work for a big bank where she was eventually headhunted to work for another bank in London.
She could so easily have thrown her future away. Instead, it turned out brighter than most of those who had stayed and graduated in 1999.
I was really amazed, and I told her so. She had not lost anything, so I didn’t quite understand why she was asking me, “What would have happened if I had not been the unlucky one he fell for?” I’m sure she would be exactly where she is right now, but without that really cute boy of hers, and I told her as much.
“People wouldn’t have hated me, though,” she mused.
“Hate? We didn’t hate you,” I protested, incredulous. “Him, maybe – after all, he was the 26-year-old near-Jesuit who cradle-snatched you – but not you.”
She laughed at the words I used. Of course I would never have used them in her presence if she had not confided earlier that she no longer had any feelings for him. They had faded gradually, over the years, and she realized now that they were two very different people, and probably wondering how she could possibly have loved him.
“You were very very young,” I said. “After all, how many high school sweethearts do you know who are still together? I can’t even think of a single one right now.” She said I had a point.
“How would our classmates react if I suddenly dropped in on a reunion, uninvited?” she wondered.
“I’m sure you would be very much welcome, and very much invited, if only they knew your number. And they would probably be a bit shy around you at first, then after awhile, they’ll start asking you the very same questions that I put you through.” She laughed at that.
And that’s when I understood. She is not regretting the lost opportunities to be successful, of which there are none. She is regretting her lost adolescence, the chance to have spent those years normally, in the company of her family and friends.
She may have graduated a year later, but she had become an adult years ahead of us.
Suddenly, being a late bloomer doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to me anymore.
wow..she definitely has a story…<BR/><BR/>curious lang, what did you do when you were working for the company here in the philippines? and what are you doing now in singapore?
i didn’t recognize you with the new screen name. hehehe. i’m with a different company in the philippines and here. i’m now in IT when i used to be in accounts payable.