Yearbook

At long last, I finally claimed my college yearbook. Before, I was so stoked with holding what I thought would be something of a record of a prestigious legacy in my hands and turning its pages, but now it sits idly in my shelf, for I do not have much use for it aside from looking at the pictures of my classmates and batchmates who has mostly half-forgotten one another. And perhaps that is the purpose of the yearbook – to remind you of the classmates, batchmates, friends, times, and feelings you have forgotten even though you claimed that you never will.

I claimed it last Tuesday with Fernan. Both of us still filled with nostalgia and excitement, we couldn’t wait to open it, look at the pictures of ourselves, our friends and classmates, and of course, the very reason why people bought the yearbook – our crushes. In my stay at UST, I had three crushes:

1. Camille Lou Agsam (AB Commerce) – she is a pretty and fair chinita who let me stay under her umbrella one rainy night in Lawton so that I wouldn’t get sick. It’s kind of a shame that she’s got a boyfriend now though.

2. Maria Christina Victoria Capistrano (BS Nursing) – perhaps my most beautiful and most eccentric classmate who is full of charm and elegance, as well as crazy antics.

My third crush is someone I do not want to remember or be reminded of. She never treated me wrong. But she never chose me, she chose not to be saved, and that is what pains me. And what pains me more is that how she has kept me out of the loop, just like our other friends, and I only get news from her through her Facebook, which I only visit whenever I see something from her in my news feed – a rare event considering that I have more than a thousand contacts and a handful of pages that I liked as well as groups that I am a member of, all more active in posting stuff compared to her.

We don’t remember each other. I don’t remember her because she doesn’t remember me, and vice versa. Or maybe we do remember, it’s just that we choose not to act upon it because of our pride, making us think that they should remember us first. But sometimes I did remember, I acted upon it, but she do not seem to respond, and it hurts quite a lot. As if what I felt for her before meant nothing. As if everything we have shared and been through meant nothing. As if we’re not even friends anymore. Just like our other friends.

The people I called friends, the people I shared a part of my your life, times, feelings, and secrets with, turned out to be friends only when I saw them every day – turned out to be not my friends at all. After all, friendship never dies a natural death, and if a friend forgets you, then there was no friendship that was born in the first place, because true friendship is never forgotten.

I have “friends” I have forgotten, and for that I apologize because I’m not being a true friend. I have “friends” who have forgotten me, and I won’t say anything more about either them or the friendship they have forgotten. I have friends who do not forget and hopefully never would, and for that I am thankful, both to them and to God who has given me them. I just hope that those who I call “friends” and call me a “friend” would remember and prove that we really are friends. And I think I need to practice what I preach.

As for my unnamed college crush, well, I don’t know really. Although thanks to her, I realized that I actually have something I regret doing in college – falling for her. I wish I never did and just focused on doing crazier antics that would make me even more infamous. Damn, never thought it would seem so sad to look at the past through the lenses of the present…