Say goodbye to #hugot forevah!

My timeline is filled with hugotrons. Who and what are hugotrons? They are poor sods who are sawi sa pagmamahal (roughly translated: broken-hearted). The term is derived from the Tagalog world hugot which means to extract or yank away violently. So why did hugot come to be associated with heartbreak? As far as I am aware, it refers to the way the lovelorn keep calling up once-fond memories of lost love to feed what is now the nagging pain resulting from the loss of the object of that love.

Sounds bizarre in words but most of us are surely familiar with the feeling, right? It comes not just from breakups but unrequitted love and, as I’ve been privy to with some friends of mine, friendships lost as a result of experimenting with the next level up.

Well, it seems to be a rampant condition nowadays. Social media’s made it an epidemic thanks to the way photos of good times persist in the “cloud” making it a difficult thing for our generation to forget and move on. Data is a bitch, isn’t it? We obssess over collecting as much of it as possible then lament the suffocating embrace of its ubiquity!

I see all the poignant shoutouts and tweets everyday that seem to be coming from people engulfed by darkness crying out for help. Trouble is a lot of them are so cryptic. They all seem to revolve around just a handful of themes and herein for each is what I think:

Closure. Well, tough luck folks. In a lot of cases there is no such thing. Think about it. People go missing everyday, never to be seen again. Now that is what I call a real problem. Former lovers taking off without an explanation? Not what I’d call a major issue to wrack your brains about.

Over thinking. What a waste of brain energy. Seriously, in a lot of cases it’s as simple as the other party just simply having a change of mind and heart. Nothing there complicated enough to tax our rocket science faculties over. It happens. People toss stuff out the window everyday — stuff that used to be the apples of their eyes: a cool shirt, a flashy gadget, a cute trinket. Time has a way of degrading a lot of things — including relationships. If something does not survive time then, yeah, out the window it goes. You get a lot of that when you habitually buy Made in China.

Pain. In this case it’s all in your head. Malayo sa bituka yan as the old folks used to say. It’s non-life-threatening; unless you make it so.

Moving on. Funny that. It’s the only way forward. So why take that tortuously circuitous route to what is really the only real course of action? Even if you get him or her back by some miracle, it won’t be the same.

That said, it all sounds good in theory. The part of the brain that comes up with the above bullet points is miles away from the part that makes us gluttons for hugot punishment. Oh well. Buhay talaga. Parang life. Don’t worry, it gets easier the more experience you gain. You learn which holes to not get your foot stuck in.