i saw this advertisement in a newspaper about an essay writing contest. the ad said to write about your personal experience on a given category. i said to myself, why don’t i submit something? i love to write… and i know i have had quite a number of memorable experiences… so why don’t i write about them? — and hopefully win an overnight stay at a really expensive resort?
not a bad idea, huh?! and so i sat down and wrote.
the category i chose was Love. I wrote about a love experience… something that happened more than a decade ago. for some reason, as i was writing and reliving the event, it felt like i was transported back in time. somehow, i could still remember every detail of the story… well, almost every detail.
it felt like the whole thing happened just last year, or maybe two years ago… not as far off as 16 years back.
i often get that feeling. whenever i write about MY experiences, or things that happened directly to me, I can recall almost every little detail. more so, i remember the feeling, as well. i smile when i relive the good moments, and i still feel some tinge of hurt when i remember the painful ones. sometimes though, mere words are not enough to describe the feeling. it’s like it is there but you cannot grasp it in its entirety. yet you can feel… and the feeling sticks to you.
though i know that people normally would just like to remember the good times, i let myself recall the bad times, too. it is because of the undesirable things that i have been through that i am who and what i am today. it is because of the heart aches and the disappointments and the pain i felt at some point in time, that i turned out to be emotionally strong. it is because i cried buckets of tears over some people in my past life that i don’t get easily hurt or offended now. and the irony of it all, it’s because i experienced losing love that i learned how to better appreciate and value a new love found.
as i was writing, i realized how much i have changed and grown… from that young, hopeful twenty year old whose love story i was writing about, to the thirty something present me. truly i am no longer the naive girl that i was back then. i have come to accept how some things are just not meant to be. i have come to understand why there are hellos as well as goodbyes.
people enter our lives for different reasons. the people who make us really, deliriously happy can also be the very ones who will give us intense pain. yet this shouldn’t stop us from letting people in. because regardless of how short or long a person chooses to be in our lives, our experiences with them teach us various lessons. at the very least, we get to feel something because someone shared a moment with us.
some people stay for a while, some don’t stay long enough. but then again, there are also the ones who choose to just stay.
Supergoddess Me 