When Pollock Meets Neruda
Hi. I will not be writing my autobiography in its entirety because I don’t want you to sleep (and probably snore) in the middle of reading this so I’ve decided to write this certain part of my life. This is the story of how I met my soulmate. No, not the one you are in love with kind, but with a kind of familiarity that people often misread in books that accompanies love. Because let’s face it, people think that if you are in a relationship , you two find each other as soulmates, automatically. I beg to disagree. For me, Love, is a choice. You can fall in love with anybody by choice , but being your soulmate? Just one. One soul that could understand your very own complexities like it’s their own. That one soul that can read exactly what’s on your mind and would continue it for you because what comes out of your thoughts comes out with his too. That one soul that knew your soul ever since before you were born, that the two of them had some memories that you can’t remember but they find it like it’s yesterday. That one soul that could complete what you lack. The missing puzzle piece.
Out of 7 billion people in the world, I found mine. Crazy right? I, Janna therese M. Uy, of Filipino-Chinese descent and overweight, would find my soulmate? I know it’s very hard to comprehend, that the probability of me finding that one soul is let’s say 1 is to 98 million (total population of the Philippines) minus the people who’ve already found their soulmates, and I still found him. I bet you may be asking now, how in the hell would I know that that’s him? Simple. I just know.
You see I am a romantic. I fell in love, I broke my heart by loving the wrong guy yadda yadda. It took me two years and a couple of flings for me to realize that I’m tired. That all the things that happened to me is just down right discouraging that I stopped looking for it altogether. Maybe I’m having a series of failed relationships because I really don’t know what I want, or what I am looking for. Every time I enter a relationship, I feel like I’m looking for something that even I don’t know. I grew cynical and the last relationship I had was my turning point when I told myself “you know what, that’s it (with both hands raised like I’m giving up) I will never find what I’m looking for so I’m just going to do my thing and take a rest with all this…looking. And so I did, until my friends started bugging me to dive into this phone application where all worldly, temporal, totally shallow people go to find their latest “hook-up”. At first I was like “huh what? Me? No way”. I’m not going to waste my time in some stupid phone app. And talk to people that doesn’t even know how to spell sarcasm. But because my friends are good with what they do (being annoying and very good in persuading), I tried it out just for them to stop their nuisance. They taught me how to navigate the app and the more I stayed there, the more I feel alone and hopeless. With what’s been happening to the world on how to connect with people, souls are getting more and more detached from what is right and good than what is fast and would settle for “good enough.” My friends told me that If I find that person not good looking, I should deny them by swiping left. I told them, I’ll be the one to choose on who I want to deal with. I started reading their about info, hoping, at least to know that they could read (I’m sorry for being so condescending about all of this but at that certain moment I really do find myself stereotyping the people by their appearance in picture and to give them justice, I read their about info). So I keep reading the words “high” , “let’s rave”, “loves to party” , “hook-ups” and each time I read their description box, I feel really disgusted. Until I swiped another left when I found him.
He doesn’t have a face in his picture. I can only see the top of his head with a lop of clayed hair. I read his description box and my heart dropped. He wrote in his description box “Loves late night conversations, coffee, movies, poetry, anything about art.” What he wrote there is almost exactly the same as what I wrote on mine. I wrote “Deep conversations, books, poetry, black and white movies and coffee.” I found myself for the first time to swipe right. He swiped right too and we became a “match”. I found myself amused by all of this. For the first time in my immersion of that stupid phone app I found a person who is exactly like me. In everything. So the moment of truth begins as it’s said on my phone screen that he is “writing”. I waited for a few minutes before I read the words that he asked me and it was the most peculiar thing that I’ve ever need to answer to a random stranger. “Favorite Writer?” he asked. My blood rushed to my head, and my heart was beating so loudly. He’s going to judge me by the people that I like to read... “Neruda”, I answered.” He gave me a smile before it was my time to ask him. I thought long and hard before settling into the same peculiar intensity of a question “Favorite painter?” I asked. After a brief pause, he replied me a smile before answering that it was Pollock that he liked. The Pollock with the chaotic painting and surreal colors bathing and splashing canvas after canvas. Right there and then I knew that he was my soulmate. And I knew that he felt it too. There’s this imaginary puzzle that clicked together inside me that made me feel so…complete all of a sudden. Like I’ve known him ever since, that for a couple of centuries, I just lost him and now I found him again. Everything before him was just a blur. Everything I knew…or I thought I knew about men, about souls, about the world…is nothing compared to when I’ve met him. It’s like he added sounds to the scenes that I’ve been watching all my life. He was the reason why some things happened, and why some things need to fall apart…It was as simple as that. Everything made sense now.
Every time I would say something to him, let’s say a phrase of poetry , he would continue it and I know that there wouldn’t be any other right line more than what he just added and I love that about it. He completes me in ways that I never knew I can be completed. I don’t love him romantically. I feel like we were just destined to be soulmates where we share the same soul, the same mind, the same perspective of the world. I knew then that when Neruda met Pollock, Neruda was finally, truthfully and incandescently happy. Neruda couldn’t ask for more.