We had pledged that we’d stay 25 forever

Years later, at a healthy food corner at Harrison Plaza, she materialized unexpected—strands of orangey blond on the same crisp haircut, the same rail-thin frame. Rather astonished, and lit up by her toothy smile, I had cringed, nonetheless, at her night make-up in the noonday glare with whitish goo on her lids, as well, tight garish pants and shirt, which showed a sliver of her belly. A dealer now, living alone in a rented space, she would soon push a box of anti-aging pills toward me.

Apparently, she had remained the rebel of what we used to put down as a settled a.k.a. ordinary life, — she, by being an extreme activist that involved subterfuge and I, an endless seeker of inner peace, who kept lifting veils to find it with self-acceptance; gauging by how squeamish I felt, seeing her quite ruined after four decades, I realized I had long copped out and coiled into a prosaic existence. Her marriage had failed. I had been widowed by then.

Jo and I became friends at The Philippine Women’s University, where we both taught English literature and Ethics, the second, which I now think rather ironic, given how liberal we were convinced of our thinking; hence, we swaggered putting down obvious, often comical, attempts of those around us who held on to their youth, possibly the only spark in what we imagined their tedious lives, though honestly in secret, the fear of losing our ideal to ever exist outside of the box would paralyze us.

We had pledged in not quite distinct words, that we’d stay 25 forever, exactly our age then, of which I would later read, marked the height of a woman’s blossoming. We would glance at each other at comfort-room (CR) mirrors, appraising what we had thought incomparably nice, and even beautiful, without saying a word—it’s absolutely relative, of course.

I would later accept how panic attacks the beholder in a mirror, when one day, cheeks suddenly slacken. And no wonder, such fear has fueled an obscenely fat industry—exponentially burgeoned today— which, even then, brewed no end magic potions, creams, and pills, while spas began to swarm, as well as machines and contraptions to arrest aging turned up like armies.

Given our humanist background, yet another source of youthful pride, we would compete for whoever cites historical notes first. She would start with something like this: “Today’s obsession with youthful looks, though, is nothing new, isn’t it? It has always been a universal malady. Who has not heard of Cleopatra’s milk baths?”

I would counter: “Yet do any of the battles waged to stop body cells from multiplying, transforming, regenerating, and then eventually degenerating make a difference? Not at all, it turns out, because the very process that sustains life is also what causes aging,” and concluding with an expansive voice, I would also paraphrase Luigi Pirandello, “Our death begins the moment we are born.”

Jo and I had long taken opposite forks in our path. She plunged into a rather unconventional marriage with another intellectual; I pursued traditional byways to a media career, and continued breaking inner walls of consciousness, gnawing at crusts of imagined hurts, ecstasies of falling in and out not only of love but also of pursuits—thoughts of beauty by then, had turned peripheral. Later, I too, got married, and for years, lost track of Jo.

She seemed to possess a radar aimed at me, though—one afternoon, she turned up at the defunct Newsday Philippines newsroom, where I worked as Lifestyle editor, an apparition of who we had feared, by then, having lost a front tooth, and withered from a troubled marriage, as she would confess unregretful. Still with much of her old spunk, she offered to write for my page, for a fee, of course. But just as suddenly as she came, she also disappeared, until that day at Harrison Plaza, the lost tooth by then replaced.

Writing this piece, I remember a simple formula for youthfulness which we had formulated and prefaced with something like this: “There is a way out of the mirror that stares back at us, it’s finding within us an ageless universe. Indeed, while ageing shows first in the hair and skin, and for me, on lids, when slackened, the sadness of what’s gone and the oncoming night, hint the most at such external inevitability.

But what hardly manifests, until by some unexplained leap from that boundless interior universe, our own selves, is a kind of agelessness, especially in the most abstract of emotions—love, both in its beauty and ridiculousness, and joy at its most unbridled.

Quite distracted, I had failed to remind Jo of such, finding myself regretful after our goodbyes at the mall. But catching her diminishing figure sway the way she always did, somehow it struck me that somewhere beneath her armored layers of wrangling through the world she created for her own, she must have retained some of our peregrinations. Still, as I slid her box of “forever young” pills into my purse, I had wondered.