Last weekend, while rummaging through boxes in my childhood home, I came across my old cassette tapes -- the ones I used to play on my Walkman during med school nights when loneliness hummed louder than fatigue. The music pulled me back, the way music always does: to a different version of myself, and to a person who once made the world feel gentler.
This is a story about him. I have written about him countless times in my older blog entries. This story is about us, though “us” was never quite the right word. I think stories like these need to be told, if only to remind us that not all great loves are romantic. Some are quieter, rarer, and harder to name.
He found me because of The Beatles.
It was the Friendster era, mid-2004, when the internet still felt small and full of accidental kindness. He said he’d clicked on The Beatles and my name appeared among the top fans. He wrote me a message, and I replied. That’s how it began -- not with sparks or fate, but with a click and a song.
He was eight years older, already working in the airline industry: handsome, brooding, confident, articulate, the kind of person who moved through life with quiet assurance. I was fresh out of med school, exhausted and uncertain, in the messy, sleepless blur of pre-residency at the Philippine General Hospital. Somehow, we met in that strange in-between space between his stability and my becoming.
We started exchanging emails -- not the short, distracted kind people send now, but letters. Long, thoughtful, unhurried. He wrote beautifully, with the kind of honesty that invited you to do the same. He wrote about travel, music, why he believes there is a God, and why Dylan’s voice was both unbearable and true. I wrote about the wards, my frustration about the health system, about fear, about trying to become a doctor and still be human.
When we finally met, I was already a second-year resident. It was a Black Saturday. The hospital was unusually quiet, the city half-asleep. He picked me up in my home ward — Ward 1. A tall guy in a white shirt, walking in with a quiet swagger. As I stepped out from the ward half-full of patients, he gave me a half-smile and said, “Finally, we meet.” To me then, he was as handsome and mysterious as I had imagined him to be. He handed me a CD he had curated himself: a collection of songs he loved and thought I might, too: Sting, Tracy Chapman, Beck, Radiohead, Tom Waits, the Beatles.
That evening, we had dinner and beer al fresco -- the rare, crowdless Malate brought about by Holy Week spread out before us, the warm breeze drifting in from Manila Bay. We ended past midnight, talking about life, faith, music. Everything. But we were silent, too. In fact, we were silent most of the time -- that kind of silence so comfortable it felt like home. He drove my back to the hospital past midnight.
I remember floating through Ward 1 as I walked toward the residents’ callroom -- weightless, dazed, and smiling to myself for reasons I couldn’t quite name.
I think I fell in love with him that day.
We met regularly after that. And by “regularly,” I mean once a month, sometimes once in three. But it was always the same: the conversations, the comfort, the ease. Perhaps because I was heard. Perhaps because with him, I could talk about my small, silly concerns about life without fear of judgment. He listened, really listened, and even remembered the tiny details.
We talked for hours, meeting for a late breakfast, moving somewhere for lunch, then drifting to another place for dinner and beer. I never knew when our next meeting would be, but residency passed quickly because I was always looking forward to every conversation, no matter how long the wait.
He never promised anything, but I stayed in Manila longer than I should have. I stayed officially for fellowship, but secretly for him. I didn’t know what to call it then. Maybe I still don’t.
During my first year of cardiology fellowship, his mother fell ill with metastatic breast cancer. We braved that storm together: the early admissions at Makati Medical Center, the palliative care at home, the long, uncertain weeks at PGH. On New Year’s Eve, while the world outside erupted in fireworks, we hid a bottle of wine in her room and drank quietly, while a blue moon illuminated the smoky air of Taft Avenue. A few weeks later, when her breathing slowed, I was the one who checked her pulse and said the words “time of death”. He curled beside her bed and wept.
That night, I saw the tenderness of his heart. The quiet strength that carried him through grief. And maybe that’s when I realized that love can also mean staying, even when you’re not chosen.
After that, life resumed its steady rhythm. We still saw each other. We watched concerts, had both simple and fancy dinners. But my favorites have always been the conversations over beer. I met his family; he met mine. His sisters brought me chocolates and trinkets from abroad. Once, he went home with me to Digos. My parents assumed he was my boyfriend. I laughed, but maybe a small part of me wished they were right.
Some time during fellowship, there was that one night he called, distraught. Someone he’d been seeing thought she was pregnant, and then it turned out to be a blighted ovum. He was heartbroken. I stayed on the phone with him. We met for dinner and beer, skirted around the topic, and talked about music instead. I sat with him, joining him in his sadness, even as my own heart quietly cracked open.
And still, I stayed.
Years blurred. I finished training and returned home. We kept in touch through short Facebook messages -- perfunctory ”how are you’s” and “we should have beer soon”. We rarely did, but the friendship endured like a low, steady hum in the background of our separate lives. I remember staying with him when the clock struck midnight on his 40th birthday, sipping coffee in Ortigas, when I attended a cardiology conference in Manila.
And then, one day, when my mother died in 2016, he appeared. He hadn’t asked for details and hadn’t even messaged. But there he was, flying in quietly from Manila to Davao City, standing at the edge of the crowd in a white shirt and jeans. I saw him and burst into tears. He didn’t say much; he didn’t have to. He was simply there -- that same calm, steady presence that had once anchored me through the hardest nights of training. On one of the saddest days of my life, he came to grieve with me, wordlessly. He left the same day, after a long, tight hug that said everything words couldn’t. And I knew then that I had found a friend for life.
After that, the busyness of our lives caught up with us. We still meet for short catch-ups in Manila. I remember I met him at the airport once, before I set out for Japan. I told him about this man that I had recently met, but he was based in Japan. He said he was excited for me because I deserved to be loved.
In 2018, almost fifteen years after that first Friendster message, I married the man I told him about. He was one of my secondary sponsors. He was supposed to carry the Bible, but at the last minute, he cancelled his trip because of a dental abscess. It was so perfectly him: written into my story, even in absence.
When I became pregnant with my first child, he was one of the first people I told. It felt right that the man who’d known me through my most uncertain years should also know this gentler, fuller version of me.
I am happily married now, with a beautiful soul I can never live without. Our two lovely daughters keep our home lovely and bright. He has remained single, living alone in the house his mother left him. We still message sometimes: birthdays, quick updates, concerts we might like to watch together, and a song he thinks I might like.
Every now and then, I still dream of him. It’s never romantic anymore, just familiar. In my dreams, we’re usually talking over coffee or over beer, of just sitting together with both our feet up, silently watching the sun set. After these dreams, I wake up smiling, the kind of smile that aches a little.
Sometimes I miss him. Sometimes I feel guilty for missing him. But I’ve learned that missing someone doesn’t mean longing. Sometimes it’s gratitude wearing another face.
Because the truth is not every meaningful relationship fits into the boxes we’re taught to name. Some elude definition. Some never turn into love stories, but remain stories about love nonetheless.
And today, I found the CD he gave me -- buried deep in a box of memories. The handwriting is still there, looping along the edges of the disc: Two of Us. Karma Police. Shape of My Heart. Everybody Hurts. The ink has faded, the plastic is scratched, but the music still plays.
And as I listened, I remembered everything: the girl I was, the man who saw her, the friendship that held its shape even after everything else changed.
Maybe that’s how the universe works: we meet the most special people not through grand design, but through the smallest, most ordinary accidents.
And maybe love -- real love -- isn’t the fireworks or the ending we imagine. Maybe it’s two lives running side by side for a while, close enough to touch, never meant to meet, but changed all the same.
It is friendship, memory, and music. The letters exchanged between strangers, the long conversation with a friend that never really ends. The grace of being seen, once but completely, by another soul.
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