The Stubborn Old Tree

A few days ago, I met an old friend I hadn’t seen in more than three years.

I was attending a conference in Manila and remembered his birthday was coming up, so I jokingly asked him for a birthday lunch treat before flying back home. Surprisingly, he was free. (I had forgotten Wednesday was a holiday. People in medicine don’t really have holidays.)

So we decided to meet in a posh restaurant near the airport. His treat, of course.

But while he was on his way, a motorcycle bumped his maroon vintage Mercedes and he had to go through all the tedious fuss of Philippine police bureaucracy. So naturally, our supposedly sophisticated reunion downgraded into uncertainty and logistical chaos.

I decided to head straight to the airport instead.

While waiting for the check-in counters to open, I completely lost track of time immersed in my worn-out secondhand copy of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Then he called and said he was driving straight to the airport.

So after all these years, we ended up having our reunion at airport Chowking over glasses of water. No food ever arrived. Which somehow made the whole thing even more funny and appropriate.

We talked loudly about everything and nothing at all: faith, or its eventual demise; DDS and the dismal state of the country; death; loneliness; resignation letters; why I insist on drowning my existential angst with all sorts of busyness.

At one point he laughed so hard at me and said I was the only person he knew crazy enough to simultaneously collect so many jobs and responsibilities, as if I were voluntarily hitting myself on the head with rocks. Then after a pause he looked at me and said, “You enjoy it. You just pretend you don’t anymore.”

Only old friends can say things like that.

We are very unlikely friends. We met twenty-two years ago because of Friendster, brought together by our mutual love for the Beatles and books.

Since then we’ve weathered through the many seasons of our lives.

I went back home down south, got married, and now spend my days raising two beautiful daughters while balancing medicine, teaching, writing, and all the chaos in between.

He climbed the corporate ladder in the same airline company where he was already working when I first met him online. He remains single despite his good looks, extraordinary intelligence, and brooding charm -- qualities my PGH friends insist are visible only to me. Haha.

He still thrives in solitude and adventure. I, meanwhile, continue overcommitting myself to institutions and responsibilities in ways only he seems capable of seeing through.

Eventually I had to look at my watch and panic because my flight was boarding soon.

At the airport gates, we hugged each other. That long, tight, affectionate hug you give only to people you know will remain part of yourself no matter how many versions of you have already existed.

And somewhere in that absurd airport reunion, over fluorescent lighting and untouched Chowking trays, I realized how lucky I am to have friendships like this.

The older I get, the more I realize that love exists in many forms, and often escapes neat definitions and categories altogether. Some people arrive loudly and briefly. Others simply remain. Quietly, persistently, through years and seasons and silence.

Years ago, I wrote in this same blog that conversations with him always leave me feeling “Ondoyesque” -- a post-typhoon Ondoy analogy I coined around 2010. He had this way of unsettling me, making me contemplate my life, my choices, the dangerous what-ifs and could-have-beens. Back then, our conversations often left me with a strange ache I could never quite explain.

But this time felt different.

After more than two decades of steady friendship, I no longer came home with pain or longing or the urge to abandon the life the universe has so generously given me.

Instead, I came home overcome with immense gratitude -- for both answered and unanswered prayers. For the life I have now. For the husband and family I fiercely love. For old friendships that endured. For all the roads taken and all the roads mercifully left untaken.

And perhaps maturity is finally realizing that not every meaningful love story in our lives was meant to culminate in possession or permanence. Some were simply meant to accompany us through our becoming.

A day after our airport reunion, I greeted him for his birthday and sent him a caricature I made of him using ChatGPT (haha!) -- him with his books, mountains, guitar, backpack, beer, all the things that somehow became symbols of his existence through the years.

His reply was simple and deadpan as always: “Patience, you’ll get to be just as OLD soon, and yup, you can count on it, this much older friend will still be around.”

And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things life can offer us: people who quietly persist through the different seasons of our lives like some stubborn old tree refusing to die.

And when you know what you have while it is still there, aahh, perhaps that is life’s greatest gift.