In the 2019 Netflix movie “Someone Great,” up and coming music journalist Jenny Young (played by Gina Rodriguez) is dumped by her boyfriend of about 10 years just a couple weeks shy of her big move from New York to Los Angeles. The movie follows Jenny and her two best friends, Erin and Blair, as they try to be there, comfort, and even tolerate her moving on shenanigans.
Toward the end of the movie, we find Jenny alone inside a moving train. The narration reads out the words that she’s scribbling out on her notebook: “Do you think I can have one more kiss? I’ll find closure on your lips and then I’ll go. Maybe, also, one more breakfast, one more lunch, and one more dinner. I’ll be full and happy and we can part. But, in between meals, maybe we can lie in bed one more time? One more prolonged moment where time suspends indefinitely as I rest my head on your chest. My hope is if we add up the one more’s, they will equal a lifetime.”
The end of 2025 is just around the corner–before you know it, you will be writing down your new year’s resolutions; you will be announcing to your friends that this year is finally the year that you will go to the gym, travel abroad, find a partner, live your best life, and the list goes on … just like every other year that has passed r every other list that you’ve made and managed to forget after two, three weeks. It’s a perpetual cycle that everyone always finds themselves in. It’s not always the same things on the list, but it’s almost always the same ending.
As December grows colder, the streets of Manila are filled with horrendous traffic and a variety of pollutants–some people are lucky to come out of the smoggy haze after an hour or two, while others stare at the blinking red, green, and yellow lights for hours. Last week, while I was on the way home to my apartment in Pasig, on a Saturday, I was surprised by the heavy yet moving traffic along Katipunan Avenue. I did not expect my usual 20-minute Angkas ride would stretch to a full hour.
As “Kuya rider” and I approached the intersection near LRT-2 Katipunan Station, the traffic stopped moving, an impasse of acrid smoke blanketing all the way to and through Marcos Highway, mixed with the undecipherable groans of angry drivers and impatient passengers. Kuya rider decided to take the longer route going to the destination because it was a better option than being stuck in what could have taken forever.
It’s quite easy to fall into the pattern of forgetting when everything around you never seems to be at rest–always hustling, bustling, and busy. As I sit and imagine myself zipping through the unfamiliar streets of Marikina, I could not help but think about how time is about to reset again, like how the clock strikes twelve during the new year’s, it is both a beginning and an end–to the me of 2025, to you, to us, and to everything that we think we might have known. The lack of absolution is in and of itself absolute, redeeming, healing.
I’d like to think that that is where Jenny got it wrong–not in the fact that she wanted it to work out with the long-term boyfriend, but because time had already run out and she was asking the universe for a little more. I’m trying to understand the humanistic want for things to go on for as long as they can; that’s why we invented the word “forever,” right? But does that not also relinquish the value that time has added?
Flowers bloom in season, they are more beautiful during a certain time, so we climb up the mountains of Baguio and even further up to Atok, Benguet; birds migrate to the tropical climates when the Americas get a little too cold for their liking and so we see the colors of their plumage in our trees and forests; the sun is only present for about 12 hours, the moon the same, and we have one life. To say, “I will never die,” is hopeful yet, how am I to live my fullest life if I know my time will never run out of time? Finity.
As a sentimental person, I often look back on memories, people, and the lives that I have lived in my 25 years of existence. And like every other person, I think about the good times and how I’d like things to be the same again. But, unsurprisingly, they never will and we are all better for it. The bittersweet reality that December brings is how everything comes to an end–take that as you will, but I’d like to think about it in a positive light. Memories become good old times because they are suspended in the ambers of warmth and joy, laughter and drunkenness, not because we continue to be in them whenever we want to.
