It feels weird when you come home and your past catches up with you. I seldom come out of the house since I arrived here, but when I went to McGregor the other day to meet Trisha, I saw Jay* with someone I presumed to be his girlfriend. The mere sight of him revived a miasma of amateurish sentimentality. But the sight of him with another woman brings a different feeling altogether.

I don't know how long it has been—years perhaps, but he has grown taller than I expected. He has grown out of his baggy jeans and oversized shirts which used to hide his athletic physique. His hair, which hanged low and unkempt during high school, is now short and held back. He had an air of happy confidence about him which substituted for what used to be his angst. He looked new, fresh and polished. Were it not for his familiar smile, I might not have recognized him.

We greeted each other with a brief hello and I proceeded immediately to wait for Trisha inside. I tried to work out a decent plan for our org's finances but my head would occasionally turn around and find itself at the direction of where Jay was seated. Oh, there is nothing between us. But he so represented many of the boys who, in one way or another, played brief, casual yet often monumental roles in my past.

We were a tragic pair, Jay and I, but we had closure. All my little flirtations in high school were foolish attempts to know what it would feel like to have a boyfriend. I grew out of it come senior year and since then, the thought of having a boyfriend became distant. Although I have had crushes, suitors and summer flings, nothing serious ever happened. Either my crush already has an incomparably gorgeous girlfriend, or is gay; my suitors, either appallingly chauvinistic or are too soft and melodramatic; and my flings, which as time passed, eventually faded because the guy would want to change me and I would refuse or either one or both of us would realize that what we had is what it really is—just a fling. So yes, ladies and gentlemen, technically speaking, I never had a boyfriend.

But it's not such a big deal to me as it is to most women my age. In fact, I take my cue from Randy David, whose Valentine lecture (yes, the political critic Randy David had a Valentine lecture) I attended. He said that in order to find love, one must love one's self first and must establish one's self as a stable, decent and respectable person. You should not seek love, he said, but you should let love find you.

This is a rather conventional notion, especially for Filipino women like me who were taught by nuns and quasi-nuns to wait for boys to court them rather than take the first bold move themselves. I do not entirely agree with Professor David, but I take his advice on self-improvement. What I had been doing for the past four years in college, where I have had fewer attempts on boys, was improving myself through my academics, my work for JPIA, Guilder and the recent UP Sox, my occasional volunteer work for the parish and my daily conversations with friends and colleagues.

I am happy being single and I do not mind staying so until Mr. Right comes along. The women of the Opus Dei in Tanglaw, which had been inviting me for so long in their youth group, are predominantly single. Even my friends and group mates in UP with the exception for Karolyn are single like myself.

At twenty, coming home to Marbel is not without rumors as to who got pregnant in the batch. And I would just like to point out, that as my childhood friend Babes is waiting for the birth of her baby boy this month, I am still waiting for my first official boyfriend to kiss me under the vast night sky with stars in our eyes and butterflies in my stomach.