YOUNG VOICE
Love Search
Where do we find love? Love is everywhere. We’re just blinded with our own definitions. We are just preoccupied with the boy-meets-girl stories.
Where do we find love?
It is a million-dollar question that would take a lifetime for some people to answer. Those we see in movies, the ‘kilig’ flicks and those we read in precious pocket books are love stories that we dream about but we rarely see in real life. A handsome rich bachelor falls in love with a bubbly poor ice-candy vendor. He defeats all odds, rejects his own family and wealth just to be with the girl he loves.
We are so obsessed with the romantic and ideal definition of love that we begin to seek for it in beautiful conditions. We find for love in amazing sunsets along white-sand beaches, in high school and college proms, in the person of the ‘uber’ hot basketball varsity star player and in the image of the sassy and charming campus fashionista. Well, love is supposed to be a beautiful experience. But let us not limit our search. I believe that love doesn’t only dwell in the best of things. It even thrives more in adversities.
Love is not just exclusive to good-looking sweethearts who smile perfectly around the lenses of cameras. Love is not just the passionate affection we have for the opposite sex. Love is a shape-shifter and it comes in many forms. It survives in different biomes.
I happened to see love in the discomforts of a toilet-smelling, crowded and chaotic service ward of a public hospital while I was having my student nurse duties.
It was a sad scene. An old woman clad in her wrinkly pale skin was crouching, shivering as she lay on her bed. Soon, a boy around ten years old went to her side and greeted her good morning. “Lola, kamusta ka? Ari na di pamahaw mo.” I saw the old woman smiled weakly. Her grandson placed the brown paper bag on the bedside table. He smoothened the linens, tapped the blanket and wrapped his grandmother warm. “La, daw nagwapa ka subong haw?” The old woman’s smile widened, she moved a little to the side and her grandson lay beside her. He encircled his arms around her and patted her cheeks with kisses. “Lola, nabudlayan ka na? Ahay. Sige lang La ah, love ta man ka.” I couldn’t bear to keep on looking; my eyes were already soaked in tears. But before I went to take the vital signs of my patient, who’s three beds away, I swore I saw the old woman smiled her widest; her widest smile in her four weeks’ worth of confinement.
Isn’t this love too? Despite the wrinkled skin, the flocking of contraptions or the regretful odor, the little boy loved his grandmother. Romance shared between a Romeo and a Juliet is just a mere slice from the delicious pastry that is love.
A classmate once blurted out, she is loveless and her love-life is over. She recently broke up with her boyfriend whom she believes to be two-timing her. She must have forgotten that two lovers await her consistently every weekend when she goes home to her province. Can you see love after a relationship break-up? Yes, it may be not from the same two-timing guy but from two amazing parents, from a family.
Where do we find love? Love is everywhere. We’re just blinded with our own definitions. We are just preoccupied with the boy-meets-girl stories. We failed to search for it in the ordinary, seemingly boring, disgusting, foul-smelling, distressing and unlikely places.
This Love month, may our chocolates and roses won’t be limited between our Babes, Honey, Sweetheart and Pangga. This love month, I will extend my search, beyond the hot and extremely handsome resident physicians. I hope you do the same.
Search for love.
It’s easy to find after all.
(Send me some love. reylangarcia@gmail.com)
