Lost and found

It should not have mattered to me, and yet it did. Reading the news that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are expecting a child caused such overwhelming sadness that caught me by surprise. What was it that truly saddened me?

Partly, I must have been depressed by the fact that a large part of my reality is decided by media. In magazines and television shows, I partake of this Western culture. I see it in the way I am embroiled in Brangelina (a made-up name for Brad and Angelina’s affair). How oh how did Jennifer Aniston suddenly have a place in my life?

Reading the news online, my mind began to wander. I could see Jen (yes, I imagine we are close) in her Malibu home, her chiseled abs through her yoga outfit. Her perfect, famous hair must have been slightly messy, what with all the tossing and turning she had to do the night before. I presume she’s been tossing and turning since October, when her divorce was finalized. She sits there waiting for the bomb. Media has been rife with rumors about this pregnancy. Everyone is waiting. She’s hoping Brad will tell her himself. Instead, in my imagination, she finds out from her manager, who calls her.

I tried to invent how hearing the news might have felt to her. What words would she have used to define this event? Would she have called it a betrayal? Would she have called it tragic? Who knows, perhaps she would have called it – relief? What words would she have used to describe her feeling? Anger. Sadness. Regret?

With confirmation of all that she might have suspected, what must alter ever so monumentally is this weight of memory she has of Brad. Instinctively, she will have to go back to the past and figure out where the chain began to rust. It all looked so promising, she would think to herself. We think the same thing as we recall all the perfect pictures we’ve seen of them in various red-carpet events. She is always in the perfect dress, he in the perfect suit. They gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes. It looks as if their joy is real.

She will revisit conversations. She will try to figure out what promises were made. She will try to guess if she looked desperate or strong near the end. Naturally, all the memories move back and forth and she will be confused as to what was true and what was merely imagined. For sure she will attempt to question, when was love lost?

For such is the case with any loss, whether trivial or serious. We plunge into our memories hoping to find the definitive moment when something fell through the cracks; as if zeroing in on a specific moment (yes, that moment during dinner when Jen admitted she didn’t like Brad’s taste in furniture) can help in dealing with the loss.

Here, in my own life, as Jen struggled with losing love, I was struggling with having lost my purse. I was in Makati waiting for a meeting and decided to wait at a corner coffee shop. I had two bags with me – a black purse and a forest green briefcase. My meeting was a good two hours away, and as per usual, I decided to while the time away, writing. My black purse was on the chair to my right and the green bag on the chair to my left. The tables beside me were empty. I must have written only a good 10 minutes when I realized that my purse was gone.

The purse and its contents were dear to me. The purse itself I had bought on a free trip to Bangkok my husband and I took two years ago. I had just delivered my third and last child and it was our first trip alone, together, since we had started on this journey called parenting. In the purse was a small makeup bag my sister had given me from her trip to Belgium. All three of us sisters had this same makeup purse in different colors. My journal was in it as well – a Moleskine journal given by Butch Dalisay himself. Moleskine journals were what Picasso and Hemingway used as their everyday notebooks. Mine contained first lines of essays I was planning to write. They contained text messages from friends and family that I did not want to lose. They contained comments from writing workshops I had attended. Even more painfully, I had placed a picture in-between its pages – a picture of me at six, singing onstage. The discovery that all that had gone, in the blink of an eye, was painful. I could not even remember how much money I had in it. It did not matter to me at the time.

Like my imagined Jen, I find myself in the coffee shop repeatedly. I think if only I had placed my purse on my lap instead of on the chair. I see it in my head and know that I was easy prey. If I had stayed in my meeting earlier maybe someone else would have been the victim. When was the purse taken away? It is a pretty big purse and how could it have slipped my eye. I do the same replay game as Jen. We, Jen and I (yes, we are almost like sisters now) replay to check the veracity of what we remember. We replay (I see Jen nodding, agreeing with me), because we want to understand why what happened, happened? We go through the steps, second-guess choices we’ve made and try to make sense of the ambiguity and absurdity of it all. We replay to give ourselves the opportunity to be wiser, better or faster.

A few months earlier, in May, I lost my father. I look back to April when he went swimming with my children. I look back to February when I gave him a new alarm system so he could call his nurse more easily. I look back to January at the beginning of the new year. I replay to torture myself and wonder if I would have acted the same if I knew he would be gone in a few months’ time.

At night, I think of what I would say to Brad. This is really what I want to ask him: do you mourn losing Jen? Because this is what upsets us, we who have to speculate on celebrity couples breaking up. We get upset with the pace with which people move from lost to found. We are upset how easily celebrities move from love to love. We (this time I am in sync with the readers of the tabloids) think that loss should be honored. We do not think spending time in the zoo with Angelina is honorable at all. We want loss to be recognized. We want it to be given its proper space.

To Jen, to me, to anyone who has lost anything dear: what do I imagine I would like to say to you?

I always think of this paperclip I had lost as a kid. I loved this yellow paperclip for some strange reason – maybe it was the shape I loved or the color lost. One day, I lost it. I remember clearly understanding for the first time loss, that it could happen so easily, no matter how vigilant one was; no matter how much one loved something, or someone.

A few days later, I found it among my clothes. Such joy at the revelation that it was only lost, to me. Because that is one thing Jen and I can take hope in: things are never lost completely. They are put away. They are misplaced. Someone else takes them. Sometimes, they are transformed into something else. But nothing ever disintegrates or disappears. That precious paperclip lies somewhere in this world – it must have a new shape, or a new color, or even a new form. Just like the love you have for someone who has gone. That love does not disintegrate either. One day when you least expect it (this I can imagine because I am a romantic), you will find that things are less…achy. You will be amazed at how much the heart can bear. And yes, you and I will be grateful for all that we’ve lost and all that we’ve found, in time.

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You can reach me, looking for my lost pen at Rica.Santos@gmail.com.