dead stars

i and a friend of mine once talked about past loves. eventually, i had to ask him if he still had feelings with someone from the past. he told me he was seeing dead stars.

i thought i heard him wrong. i certainly didn't get it. then not long after that, he handed me a book (which was a collection of short stories by some of our favorite authors) and told me to read one particular story entitled "dead stars".

set in a conservative filipino community, the story was of an engaged man who, almost at the eve of his wedding, falls for someone else whom he had met only briefly. will he dare choose a stranger, a woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of his life? or should he follow the dictates of society and marry the woman practically everyone he knew expects him to marry? he ended up marrying the woman he was engaged with but not without having to suffer from the excruciating dilemma. many years later, he chanced to visit the stranger whom he had spent only a few brief moments with. he thought he had been longing for her all those years. but he realized that he only had been seeing dead stars.

interestingly, a line said, "he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, but seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens".

then i remembered that some of the stars we see at night have long been burnt-out. it takes a lot of years before a star's light rays reach us. sometimes we still see those light rays even when the star has long become a dead star. and that's how we look at our feelings sometimes.

sometimes, love dies. some of us will know when it's about to die. some of us don't. but most of us try to hold on. for how can you part with something that gives you so much joy? how can you part with something that makes you feel so human, so alive? no, you desperately cling to it.

sometimes you think you're still in love; however, when you try to rekindle those old feelings and try to spend time with that special someone, you might suddenly realize that you were simply hanging on with the feeling.

only with the feeling.