A Realization 18 Years Later

Original Post 18 Yrs Earlier: Tara, Laro Tayo – The World of Second Chances

I sometimes think relationships are not very different from the games children play.

When we are young, finding someone to play with seems like the most natural thing in the world.

You don’t make a checklist.

You don’t ask what their five-year plan is.

You don’t calculate whether they are good enough for you or whether you are good enough for them.

You simply see another child and ask, “Laro tayo?”

And sometimes, that is how a relationship begins.

There was once a little girl named Sandy who met a little boy named Ben.

Ben asked her to play.

Sandy hesitated.

She was afraid that if she played, she might get hurt.

But Ben assured her that he wanted her as his playmate. So Sandy eventually said yes.

And they played.

They played jack-and-poy, holen, jackstones, patintero, and whatever other games children invented to fill an afternoon.

Sometimes Sandy fell.

Sometimes she went home crying because she had scraped her knees or hurt herself.

But the next day, she came back.

She played again.

Because that is what children do.

Getting hurt does not necessarily make them afraid of the game.

Sometimes it only makes them want to play again.

And Ben enjoyed having Sandy as a playmate. She was kind. She played fairly. She didn’t cheat. She didn’t take advantage of him.

For a while, it seemed like they would keep playing forever.

But children grow.

And sometimes, they simply become interested in different games.

Ben began to lose interest.

He played less often with Sandy.

Then one day, Sandy went to his house and knocked on his door.

She asked him to come outside and play.

Ben said he wasn’t there.

Sandy thought perhaps they were playing taguan now.

So she waited.

She spent the whole day outside, believing that Ben was simply hiding somewhere and that, eventually, she would find him.

But he never came out.

Later, she saw him playing patintero with other children.

She approached them and asked if she could join.

Ben told her they already had enough players.

Sandy pleaded.

Just let me play.

But Ben told her to find another playmate.

That was when Sandy’s eyes filled with tears.

Ben didn’t like seeing her cry.

So he told her not to cry.

And Sandy, wanting so badly not to upset him, tried to hold the tears back.

She didn’t understand then why she was the one trying to make things easier for the person who had hurt her.

She only knew that she didn’t want Ben to feel bad.

Eventually, they stopped playing altogether.

Ben disappeared from her afternoons.

And Sandy’s mother eventually noticed.

She asked her daughter why she and Ben no longer played together.

Sandy answered that they were still friends.

They were just playing taguan now.

She was the one who was “it.”

And she couldn’t find Ben.

He was very good at hiding.

Eighteen years later, I think Sandy would understand something the little girl couldn’t.

Ben wasn’t hiding.

He wasn’t waiting for Sandy to find the right place.

He wasn’t secretly hoping she would keep looking.

He had simply stopped playing.

And perhaps that is one of the hardest things to understand when we are young: not every disappearance is a game.

Sometimes we keep searching because we cannot accept that the game has ended.

We reinterpret silence as mystery.

Distance as shyness.

Indifference as confusion.

We tell ourselves that perhaps the other person is just hiding.

Perhaps they will come back.

Perhaps there is still another round.

Perhaps if we wait long enough, we will hear the familiar voice again:

“Sandy, laro tayo.”

But adulthood teaches us something childhood doesn’t know yet.

Sometimes there is no next game.

Sometimes there is no dramatic explanation.

Sometimes nobody cheated.

Nobody betrayed anybody.

Nobody did anything unforgivable.

One person simply wanted to stop playing.

And the other person was left standing outside the house, wondering what happened.

Maybe that is why the story of Sandy feels different to me now.

If I were Sandy eighteen years ago, I might have wondered what was wrong with me.

Why wasn’t I enough?

Why did Ben enjoy playing with me before and then suddenly prefer other people?

Was I boring?

Was someone else prettier, more interesting, more exciting?

Did I do something wrong?

Those are the questions we ask when we are still measuring our worth through someone else’s willingness to choose us.

But eighteen years later, perhaps Sandy doesn’t ask those questions anymore.

Perhaps she has finally realized that being rejected by someone does not automatically mean that there was something wrong with the person who was rejected.

Ben’s decision was about Ben.

It doesn’t rewrite the afternoons they spent together.

It doesn’t make Sandy less kind.

It doesn’t make the games less real.

It simply means that the two children eventually wanted different things.

And perhaps that is true of relationships, too.

We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if something ends, it must mean that it was never real.

But something can be real and still end.

Someone can have genuinely loved being with you and later decide they no longer want the same thing.

Someone can have been important to you and still not belong in your future.

And sometimes, the most painful relationships are not the ones that ended because of betrayal.

They are the ones that ended without a sufficiently satisfying reason.

Because there is nothing to fight against.

No villain.

No great injustice.

Just an empty space where someone used to be.

I also think Sandy eventually learns another uncomfortable truth.

Perhaps she wasn’t looking for Ben all those years.

Perhaps she was looking for the feeling of being chosen.

She was looking for the little boy who once knocked on her door and asked her to play.

She was looking for the afternoons when she was someone’s favorite playmate.

She was looking for the version of herself who believed that if someone asked her to play, they would keep asking forever.

And maybe that is why some people remain in our memories long after they have disappeared from our lives.

We don’t necessarily miss who they became.

We miss who we were when they still wanted us.

We miss the innocence.

The possibility.

The anticipation.

The feeling that something could become something more.

Sometimes nostalgia disguises itself as love.

It makes us look backward and wonder whether we should have done something differently.

But perhaps we don’t actually want the person back.

Perhaps we want to go back to the beginning—before we knew how the story would end.

If I could speak to Sandy now, I wouldn’t tell her to stop looking for Ben.

She was a child.

Of course she looked.

She had no reason to understand yet that some people leave without coming back.

I would simply tell her:

You don’t have to keep searching.

The game is over.

You didn’t lose because you couldn’t find him.

He wasn’t hiding from you.

He had simply chosen another game.

And there is something liberating about finally understanding that.

Because once you stop searching for the person who disappeared, you can finally notice the people who are still standing beside you.

You can find new games.

New friends.

New versions of yourself.

And perhaps, one day, you can even look back at the little girl who spent the whole afternoon waiting outside Ben’s house and feel tenderness instead of embarrassment.

She wasn’t foolish.

She was simply young.

She believed that when someone said, “Let’s play,” they meant “Let’s keep playing.”

It takes years to learn that sometimes people mean only:

“Let’s play for as long as I want to.”

And that is not necessarily a tragedy.

It is simply one of the rules of the game.

The tragedy would be spending the rest of your life standing outside a closed door, still believing that someone is hiding behind it.

Eighteen years later, Sandy finally knows better.

She is no longer the girl who is “it.”

She has stopped looking.

And perhaps the real ending of the story isn’t that she finally found Ben.