Love is All Around

I need to renew my passport. One requirement is to submit a copy of my birth certificate. As I search through my piles of paper, I came across a poem written by my first boyfriend K circa 1995/1996. As I was reading the poem, this song by Wet Wet Wet came on the radio. This was one of the songs he used to sing to me. It brought me back to bittersweet memories of my first love.

Here's the poem:

a poem to discard
(missing you)

lolling on a
midsummer bench
wet-painted with
sultry sun long overdue
on red brazen carpet
of molten cobblestones
like barefoot embers
where butterflies dance,
dance their dandelion game
of find the coolest gust
a bit of hide-in-shade
while the rulebook
spells only futility
lolling i squint at full bloom faces
colored like the sun,
and worshipper spirits
jumping skywards as
the very smiles perspire
in cloudless searing pastel
hot-drowned stillness,
thinking this was just
what happines meant
last winter.

He said he wrote this poem in downtown Stockholm. So what was the dealbreaker with K?
Early in the relationship he mentioned in passing that he did not really believe in God. It must have not registered in me. After all, how can one not possibly believe in God? Surely I thought, if I invite him to Church, he will eventually believe that there is a God. (His dad who was one of the leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines is a political exile in Sweden.) He did start attending church but in the end he said that he did not see himself converting into my religion. Flashbacks of my dad's only relationship instruction to me when I left home: never date anybody who is not a member of our Church. I read somewhere that women always look for a lesson learned in a failed relationship. I think what I have learned from this one is that people believe what they believe in. There is no amount of love that can change someone's fundamental beliefs. Of course, you always pray for grace that the other person finds his own truth.