dancing on the ledge

Friday, September 08, 2006

Two Men, a Baby and a Yaya

From my PC journal, dated 31 July 2006:

I caught ‘Jerry Maguire’ on HBO last night, and as is my wont whenever I watch it, I cried me a river during the “You. Complete. Me.” scene. (Why Tom Cruise didn’t win the Academy Award that year I can never figure out, he was friggin brilliant.)

That line has gotten a lot of flak from people – you shouldn’t let somebody ‘complete’ you daw, you should be complete and happy all by yourself, you don’t need anyone to make you a whole person, yada yada yada. I must admit I was on that dissing bandwagon for a time, and then last night I got to listen all over again to Jerry’s entire speech from the beginning, and I realized how much meaning is lost when one takes lines completely out of context.

Anyway, all he’s saying is: being happy by yourself is fantastic, but being happy with someone else is, well, bliss.

‘Jerry’ was the perfect, serendipitous ending to a day that saw me spending an entire morning and part of the afternoon at the baptism festivities for Gino, the firstborn of my best girl friend’s former ardent suitor. The baptism story is a good one, because a big part of it will be about how my friend C. and T. used to date, and how they’ve kept in touch since, and why I think T. might still have a thing for C. – but it’s not the point of this blog entry, so I will save that for another time. Suffice it to say that I spent most of the day thinking about how it would be great to have a kid someday, preferably with a partner who looks like Gino’s dad, who is cute and lanky and who reminds me of Russell Wong.

But moving on.

After our usual Sunday mass and dinner thing, Reg and I were going down the Music One-Max Brenner escalator in Greenbelt when we saw two good-looking guys, probably in their late twenties or early thirties, going up on the opposite escalator… with a toddler and a yaya. I forget what we were talking about, but we both stopped in mid-sentence and just stared.

My exact train of thought: “Well there’s a strange group, probably the kid belongs to one of the guys… Hmm, ang cute nila pareho, in fairness… This other guy must be his brother, or maybe… Holy crap, baka that’s his boyfriend!... Omigod, that can’t be… Oh wow, that must be their kid!...”

Reg must have been thinking the same thing, because we both looked at each other simultaneously and grinned.

“Omigod, that’s supposed to be my life!” Reg exclaims, and we both burst out laughing. We were kilig out of our minds. For a while we couldn’t get over the picture of domesticity that we had been witness to: two guys in a serious, committed relationship, both taking care of one guy’s child, all of them spending a pleasant, albeit rainy, evening in Greenbelt. And they had a yaya in tow pa! Good Lord, that was the killer.

Ordinarily, seeing a scene like that would have made me green with envy, but instead I felt euphoric. Hey, we could have been wrong, diba? Baka naman pala magkapatid yung dalawa, tapos yung baby anak nung isa. But at that moment, it seemed like the Universe was giving us a glimpse of the future, a vision of the life that we both aspired for, and damn, the vision was really, really good.

Of course I’m happy now. I have a job I love, I have my health, I have a family that nurtures me and good friends who watch my back. Yeah, it’s hard making ends meet sometimes, but all in all, it’s a charmed life. But who am I kidding? Meeting The One, taking care of my firstborn with him, spending a rainy Sunday evening together in Greenbelt with our baby boy – and, lest we forget, finding a good yaya – that would make it complete.

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