Mean Mushy Feelings

“and when one of us is gone, and one of us is left to carry on then remembering we’ll have to do, our memories alone will get us through, think about the days of me and you…”

 Those were the very words and line of the song “You and Me against the world”, which strike me every time I hear it playing on the radio. It was the summer of 1989 when we first met, we were both participating in a theater workshop to be held just outside Manila, and we were on a meeting at the Heritage art gallery then. I saw her, and I must admit it was not love at first sight, being an activist we happen to have embedded the theory of “dialectical materialism” in our blood that falling in love in a bourgeois environment would be in futile.

 We meet and become friends; that's all we know until one day we find ourselves deep in a relationship. The groups that we separately belong to disapprove of our relationships, she’s in the intelligence sector of the freedom movement while I’m in the cultural division where responsibilities and undertakings differ, thus creating problems and conflict to both division of dissidents.  To make matter worst our families also object to the relationship for reasons known only to them.

 While nursing a wounded heart due to condemnation we got from people around us, the song You and Me against the world personified greatly what we felt during that time. We did not officially select that particular song to be our theme, but it does find its way to our senses that whenever we hear that song played on the radio.  It reminds us of the struggle we had on both sides of the world.

 The dissident movement may now wane, it self destructs and goes down to the drain, along with it is the relationship that we nourished for quite a long time. The relationship didn’t last, but it created a mark and scar highlighted by that song.

 Looking back, I can only now sing that song along with my guitar and some tiny remaining bitterness that easily fades away as I glance upon the two hopes from that stormy past—my two daughters. I hope I will never sing that song to them in any given time of our remaining lives.