We Never Change

Hi folks.

Last May or so I spent my vacation in Zamboanga City, where I was compelled to write the ninth part (of ten) of a short short story compilation, all connected by one thing - the titles are all titles of Coldplay's Parachutes album. This particular one, entitled We Never Change, was about a man who met his lost love one day in an amusement park whilst dressed in a panda suit. The inspiration came from events from my own life, things that really took a toll on the last few months of my college life. Eventually my cousin pasted the first draft in his blog and posted it as his own (which didn't make me happy at all) I went home, cleaned it up a bit to make it fit in one page and removed a few repetitive parts. Here is the finished result, from the original source:

We Never Change

I notice that she has cut her hair a bit, yet neither her demeanor nor her manner of acting has changed one bit. Two years have passed; and I thought to myself: we never change. No, I had thought with a bit of confidence, the past was the past: faded, gone.

And yet here she is in front of me again.

She doesn’t see me, underneath the suit, suffering under the heat of the summer sun, aware of her presence; instead, she sees a cute panda mascot for a local amusement park, fodder for endless photographs: temporary memories. I am invisible, trapped in my own personal prison- and yet I would not have had it any other way. But I know that I had revealed myself to her now, she would probably react very differently. Today, for both our sakes, I am Mr. Panda Man.

Now where do we begin with a person like Marie? She loves sleeping. She comes into school in her van wearing sunglasses on sunny days. She likes to eat lots of food yet never seems to gain a single pound. She hates large crowds yet loves a bit of company. She loves to talk, and loves to listen at the same time. We were different, she and I. We never exchanged glances for months, years prior. I knew her as this somewhat strange, attractive girl with a strange quirk everybody seemed to like. She seemed to see me as this kind, introspective fellow with a weird streak of his own, basking in the various reveries of his own imposed silence.

I didn’t know exactly when it began, but it happened fast. Suddenly we would spend lunch together, having little excursions into the city walking side by side, a pair of sojourners lost in a sea of people. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, being with her. When we talked about nothing in particular, it felt like we had everything in the world to share. When she crept up behind me and held me from behind, I merely smiled, a strange warm feeling coursing through me. When she rested her weary head on mine during chemistry lab class, I wouldn’t move an inch. She needed the rest, I had thought. Once she had told me about how she loved pandas – I had once given a little panda trinket to her as a gift. My nights were often sleepless, full of waking dreams and endless thoughts of Marie and how I would spend tomorrow with her.

Then, as suddenly as we had discovered each other, we drifted apart. I don’t really remember how or why it ended up that way; memory is a strange thing, you know. It seems infallible, unchangeable like stone. But emotions mold the stone tablets of our memories, muddling them as if mixing some strange concoction, until eventually something different and exotic emerges. We try to hold on to them, these poor, tattered memories, yet they fade away into the recesses of our minds like the print on old books, or the print of fading photographs.

By the end of the year we were no longer speaking to each other. The few times we spoke were formal concerns when we simply needed to talk. She had turned to face the crowd the last time I saw her, to her family and friends, far away from me and her past.

She poses beside me, hugging the fake fur and sighing in her own cute way. She pats my costume’s head and thanks me for posing with her. It was like nothing had ever happened between us, as if we were friends again, I had thought at that moment. Yet I know she was talking to Mr. Panda Man, and not me. If she saw me now, what would she have said? Would she even talk to me? I wished a million different things to happen, but there are no time machines or Deus ex machinas in this life. Only missed opportunities and fake, altered memories remain.

She walks away with her friend, disappearing in the crown, and I walk the opposite way. I begin to notice that my heart had been fluttering ever since our little exchange had started. No, I thought. I could not move on. She still holds me in place, a stranger bound by doomed love, lost in time, suffering under a cute, furry prison of solitude.

Two years from now, I will still be in love with her – and Marie will still love panda bears.

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It's been two years since I've seen "Marie," and since that moment in time we haven't spoken directly. No, nothing will change.

Here's to you, my friend.