a LOVE STORY that’s sublime ( Or Where Do I Begin To Tell The Story Of How Great A Love Can Be)

      Today is Chinese New Year but one of the first few posts that rolled out of my Facebook Newsfeed this morning was this Valentine’s Day-worthy GMA NEWS Video of two unusual lovers. Theirs is one of the strangest love stories you will come across with (probably as peculiar as the love story in the movie The Shape of Water—okay, probably not, my bad).

      But it is really unusual, so unusual that at first, I thought it was just scripted to amuse—but it’s apparently real.

      He, a small businessman, was 28 when he first saw her, and she, a vegetable vendor who went house to house, was 71. That’s a ginormous 43 years age gap and it was the woman who was older. Okay, I am probably being chauvinistic here, but it’s really more acceptable when the man is older. But he fell in love with her and wooed her, and naturally, his family objected.  They told him to find a younger woman, probably one who’s, I don’t know, 65-68 years old. But no, he refused, he’s so in love and they started living together.

      More than two decades later, he is now in his fifties and she is now 96. But his love for her remains steadfast, faithful and untiring, and he continues to take care of her, which is far from being an easy task, considering that they're poor and she’s now paralytic and senile.  If there’s a love truer than this, please tell me. Love can move mountains, they say, and his love’s a solid proof of its validity.

       It turns out that that there really is forever.

      “No, what they have is not forever,” my bum of a neighbor neighbor correcting me, “it’s fivever, which is longer and greater than forever."

      And he’s right, it’s fivever. Or maybe, it’s sixever even, or sevenever.

      Simply sublime.