DEAR 2013

Dear 2013,

If you were a person, you'd look somewhat like this:

Photo from Pinterest

Okay, maybe not that skinny. But you get the picture, right?  You'd be stylish, calm, collected and poised, with your beautiful shiny wavy no-need-to-be-blowdried-hair.  And everyone would turn their head while you strut around town in your sexy stilettos without worrying about blisters on your toes or ankles at the end of the night.  You are sexy and you know it.  You are worry-free and it's true.  You are reeking of awesomeness.

Thank you for giving me so much--a lot of which I had to work really hard for (hey, give credit where credit is due!). But nevertheless, thank you for opening up so many wonderful doors for me.

Thank you for making me believe in my body and what it is capable of doing.  For giving it the confidence to finish 2 half marathons this year. For giving me the strength to continue to run and lose weight in the process. I'd like to think that this is the best I have looked in the past 7 years (please feel free to correct me if I am wrong).

This year, you taught me how to bake and while I no longer bake as often as I would like to (too much sugar is bad bad bad. Diabetes runs in my family), I am very grateful for this new skill.

You gave me a really unexpected gift this year--an opportunity to do what I have always loved--going out, meeting and talking to people. It was not something I had asked for.  I don't even recall ever hinting that I wanted it.  I thought I had gotten too old for change. I thought that that ship has sailed. But thank you for knowing better than me.  Thank you for taking me out of my comfort zone and for planting me in a job where I am always on my toes. To say that I am happy for this chance to be challenged (sometimes infuriatingly) again in my career is an understatement.

Thank you also for making me fall inlove with myself again. I can't remember the last time I had so much fun just not being in a relationship.  So much fun that I surprisingly didn't miss being in one.  I don't know if you and Karma had a conversation but it seems that this was the year dear old karma worked in my favor.

You were tough too, at times.  The biggest git this year was having to force myself to say goodbye to someone I wasn't ready to say goodbye to. You took away my Uncle Dan, my dad's brother, the only person on this earth who didn't make missing Papa so hard because he was so much like him. He was always asking me and my sisters to visit him in Baguio but we never got around to doing it.

Sigh.

Anyway...

Thank you for my family's health and for helping my son continuously improve as the days go by. He is doing very well in school, better than I had predicted, in fact.  Thank you for making us laugh, sometimes at our errors. Thank you for keeping us safe, for always keeping us together and for never failing to give us what we need.

My favorite bit about you, 2013 was the wonderful relationships (old and new) that have blossomed within your months. My family and I grow closer everyday, even when we sometimes find ourselves breathing down each other's necks from a thousand miles away. Thank you for fortifying my friendships and for teaching me to learn to let go of the ones that no longer bring me positivity.

As you draw to a close, I can only hope that 2014 brings me more joy, learning experiences and enough pain to gather strength from.

I love you, 2013. You were a very good year.

Now, on to the next one.

BREAKING UP WITH A FRIEND

A couple of years ago I stopped talking to a very good friend because in the middle of a very stressful personal situation, he hung up on me.  I texted him right after to tell him how bad I felt that he would hang up on me at a time like that and he never replied.  Not even the next day or the week after. Before I knew it, a year had already gone by.

I still think about the kind of friendship I shared with him from time to time--of what a shame it is that he would just throw it all away like that.

I got a facebook message from him this year asking me if I was still mad. I didn't reply.  A few days before Christmas, he messaged me again saying, "Advance Merry Christmas". I still didn't reply.  On Christmas day, he sends me another message greeting me a Merry Christmas.  And yep, you guessed right--I still didn't reply.

Our common friends have been asking me why I haven't bothered to reply when he is obviously reaching out. And I tell them the same thing--If he can type something as long as "Merry Christmas", I'm pretty sure "Sorry" wouldn't require so much effort.

But then again, the latter would also require lowering something he has so much of: PRIDE. And if it has to take someone 2 years to message a friend who has always been there for him, I mean, really--what kind of a friend is that?

And no, don't even get me started on the whole real-friends-don't-need-to-say-sorry crap.  Manners are manners, period.

Among all those who have done me wrong, his was the only apology I was still hoping to receive.  And I guess that's one of the reasons why I never unfriended him on Facebook. But, well.

They say life gets easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.  And looking back at the 2 years that we haven't been friends, I have gotten by very well.  I almost had the urge to call him a couple of nights ago and ask him out for drinks.  Just to thank him for reaching out.  But mostly to remind him why we are no longer friends, to let him know how awful I felt that day he abandoned me by hanging up on me in the midst of my distress. Just to let him know for one final time that so much time has passed and that I don't think we can ever be friends again, ever.

After all, time heals all wounds and as of date, the wounds I have incurred from that fateful day have already turned into scars--scars which I can no longer even see, unless I look very, very closely.

Maybe I should just send him this entry, noh?