the year was 2001 and i was 16.
scrawny and unpretty, i only had one boyfriend under my belt. it was by default because we were paired up eversince. (eversince is since 1992 and that was half of my life then).
my cup size was a mere A. The only ticket i had for a bit hotness was an ID number which showed that i was at least one of the ten smartest (or luckiest, haha) people in the university’s entire freshman population.
my hair was the era’s work-in-progress, after a good part of highschool was spent doing extravagant wonders for my big, crooked teeth.
also on that year, i had my first kiss. it tasted like red sardine and blue Colgate. i had cracked lips and sore throat in Chemistry class the next day.
i only had two crushes,; both weren’t even aware i existed: Michael Nacan and Paul Tagarda.
i knew of him. his was a household name. gushed about by girls from block to block. poster boy. eye candy in a nick carter kinda way. pretty boy.
eye candies weren’t really in my line of sight. they were night stars: beautiful but far-fetched. there was too little an unpretty, bespectacled nerdo with underdeveloped breast and engineered teeth could do.
he used to say hello whenever we bump in the corridors, but i shrugged it off as customary given the narrowness of CSM corridors and because we shared the same major.
there was a time too that we held gazes longer than the average. for a while i was considering shooting to the moon and back. but a perceived (and as it turns out now, wrongly assumed) reality got better hold of the situation. in the end, i decided not to believe the knowing looks.
fast forward nine years, i found out about these:
the knowing looks were right. in little ways, he kept track of what i’ve been up to from the interwebs. friendster, facebook and the like. the veneration never wavered. he can actually enumerate the times he saw me in Cebu, with descriptions so vivid it can only be borne out of moments that mortals play and replay in daydreams over and over again. and that up to a certain extent i was a star to him too : bearer of sparkle and scorch.
i was after all, the eye candy of the planet’s eye candy. (don’t step on my hair, deymit. 
)
the first thing i asked him when he barged in with revelations i was oblivious about for almost a decade was,
“how did you know me?”
and very subtly, like how he slipped into my once predictable life, he answered,
“i asked around.”
