Lessons on Love

Fishes and Frogs

How do you know if you've met 'The One'? Are there signs? Indicators? Giveaways that will help you determine who the real deal is from the rest of the fishes and frogs out there? How do you determine the real deal from the ones that are meant to simply pass by and teach you a lesson?

A soulmate.

That elusive man or woman that almost everyone seeks out and only few ever find.

According to esoteric research, before you were born, the name of your perfect half is already determined. Your souls, one half of each other, already know what the other will looks like and the two halves will spend countless lifetimes trying to find each other. They will be born and will pass as many times as it need to find It's perfect match.

Even then, the soul needs to grow. Like a child, growing into a teenager and then into an adult. So you and your soulmate may have interacted but without the right maturity, your souls don't recognize each other. They grow familiar through each lifetime until that moment when the stars seem to align and you just find each other.

They say that when you meet 'The One' it'll be like looking into your own soul. Like you can see a part of yourself in that person. Like you can see or feel that person's soul. That you've know this person for the longest time and you two are old souls rekindling a confession. This is because your souls do know each other. In an innumerable amount of lifetimes, they've been interacting. Whether as friends, exes, or something as insignificant as a stranger on a subway or the cute barista that puts an extra shot of cinnamon in your hot chocolate.

To find one's soulmate is the soul's life goal but it's not always a pleasant experience. Often the meeting is too intense to absorb immediately and our poor minds can't keep up with what our soul already knows.

Long story short, my quest at finding 'The One' and failing gloriously was the reason I ended up back in Manila. For years I had thought I found him, my soulmate. He was handsome, funny, smart, he said all the right things and made me feel beautiful; but somewhere along the way things changed. After him, I had found myself attracted to women.  Specifically, one of my father's employees at the shop. Nothing about her screamed lesbian and as far as I knew she was straight; which made my growing admiration  all the more unbearable.

At first, I thought it was nothing more than admiration for my fellow woman; that I liked the way they carried themselves, that I loved her dress or the way she wore her hair. After months of denial, I realized that it was more than just admiration, my love for women had grown to full-blown attraction.

I liked her dress, I loved the way it hugged her curves.

Her lipstick was pretty, it made her lips look sinful.

I loved the way she would smile and laugh whenever she talked to me. The way she would touch my arm when she whispered a secret to me or the way she made me feel whenever we were alone together.

Eventually, I came clean to my best friend, Batchi. Instead of encouraging me like how I imagined it would go given that she was a lesbian, she told me to proceed with caution. To make sure that I wasn't feeling this way because of my ex. That I was sincere in my motives.