Bohemian Woman

August 9, 2007

I happen to have a friend who’s bohemian. And just like the many beautiful tragedies of her life, she hardly recognizes that she is one.

As a matter of fact, among my friends, she’s the only one left who still believe she is normal, and by ‘normal’ I mean to refer to the rest of us: those who treat life like a serious threat to itself.

But she isn’t, though on the basis of first look alone, she would appear like a “delirious monochrome,” to which she would blindly agree if you just insist. Now, if you never exchanged pleasantries before, you would think, by the manner she walks, that she’s putting up a middle finger on you as you pass by, because she’s angsty, and petulant, or all that maybe because she doesn’t have a romantic alter ego. Either way, she comes to you with a thud, just like how the great John Joseph Theodore Rzeznik did on her. Stick a little and you would really wonder “What’s a bohemian doing on this boring part of this boring town?”

But before anything, let me tell you that I became friends with this bohemian woman by words of reputation first, a way not common to a convent-bred boy like me. I first heard of her from Jen, who, in one cold day of June some 6 years ago, told me in a sixth-grader brand of gossip that she had met a pretty smart woman with beautiful, long panne black eyelashes which curled naturally. Back then, Jen never knew she had just met a bohemian woman. Long behold, the next time I talked with Jen, she was turning into a bohemian gizmo, herself. For instance, she staunchly refutes all of a sudden the highly derogatory need of men to every woman, including herself, but of course with the exception of Mr. Rafael Nadal if you kindly excuse her. Jen’s new-found philosophies on female chauvinism never came from me, I swear to god. This only made me dying-to-meet the person behind such revolutionary shift— yes, you got it: the bohemian woman.

But years passed, and the bohemian woman remained incarnated to me only by stories of other women. One said she was gnawing poetry, and others told me she was perfecting the art of painting nails black. Jen said that I have to meet her because we would ‘click’, for the lack of a better prediction.

Eventually, we met up and exchanged pleasantries to officially cut her middle finger. I don’t know if we ‘clicked’, but I guess we did because we had too much beer for a night twice and too many idiomatic hate words for our individual unromantic alter-egos to get by.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the dent that this bohemian woman would cause on my frailties, just like how you weren’t supposed to try heroine but then you did it anyway and it felt like heaven. She scarred me, but how beautiful these scars were, because she knew where to put them, as black and deep as the fonts on my computer screen, and as beautiful as the words she can speak.

I wouldn’t enumerate here the reasons why, for me, she is bohemian. Chances are, you wouldn’t recognize them anyway, first because, she hasn’t told you about her first love, and second because she hasn’t told you that she’s falling in love yet again, in her favorite bohemian manner.

I have a friend, and she’s bohemian, and that’s all there is to know.

Happy birthday Dee Dee.