by Louie Marquez

Now I know what it feels like to be an OFW.

Leaving your family for a length of time in search of a better future, putting the very reason for your happiness at risk. Sacrificing yourself for the sake of those you love. Don't come to my door and tell me I don't know what family is.

Less than a year before hitting the big four-O, you can't afford not to be introspective. Four decades into the battle of life, I've survived two previous relationships I thought would last forever.

While I was in college, I met my first. Three years later, she survived the grueling dental board exams and emerged victorious while I was in my freshman year in proper medicine. Pressures from all over began to rip us apart. She wanted to start her career in the United States and I needed more time to concentrate on my studies. The timing could not have been more perfect. Needless to say, it ended soon after she left.

Medicine was not for me. As soon as I hit the clinics in my sophomore year, I knew that that was not what I wanted. Having to read thick books and seeing blood all the time was the easy part, what I couldn't stand was seeing physical suffering day in and day out. Just like with my medical career, my second relationship did not prosper.

My current partner had gone through a bitter break-up and a divorce from a foreigner with whom she bore two sons. We had been good friends in college. In all throughout her marriage and travels to Europe, the Americas and Asia she never failed to send me pictures and when she returned to the Philippines, she had always invited me over to see her.

What was surprising was not how the relationship had evolved, her coming from hetero relationships, but how easily she had embraced me into her life risking ostracism from family members. It was downright awkward!

I struggled with my identity and even as my family was dead quiet, I continued my feeble attempts at concealing my sexuality when my wardrobe screamed out the truth.

Soon after, I composed an email to send to all my brothers and sisters and finally relieve them of the anxiety of asking me questions about my life. Just like pulling out a band-aid in one swift movement to get it over with, I finally got myself to sit in front of the computer and without hesitation navigate the mouse onto the SEND button.

I swear I must have made dozens of revisions of that historical email "outing". I thought my chest was going to explode when I saw my "Outbox" gray-out, indicating my message had irreversibly hit cyberspace and was moving at breakneck speed to three continents.

Day to day problems was like the salve that got me through that. The elder son was struggling in his last year in High School and his mother had reached her point of exasperation when she found out that the likelihood that he would not graduate was almost certain.

We arrived home one night and I had noticed odd red granules on the dining table. The texture was familiar and I knew that it was rat poison. When I told my partner about it she shrugged her shoulders, too tired to give it another thought, but I could not sleep that night and I shook her and did not let up until she agreed to get up and check on her son.

He emerged groggy from being rudely awakened but with a little prodding he admitted that he ingested some Dora rat killer and was hoping not to wake up the next day.

We rushed him to Makati Medical Center where they forced a tube down his throat to clean his stomach. Fortunately, at 6-feet and 240 pounds, he didn't suffer any symptoms and the treatment had apparently been at the nick of time. His mother cried bucketsful while he was lying on the stretcher in the crowded ER and asked him why he did it. He was frightened to tell her that he failed some of his final exams and it was likely that he would not graduate.

She later told me that she had also asked him if it bothered him at all that I had come to live with them and it was most touching to know that he, on the contrary, found me almost too good to be true. As it turned out, he was able to graduate and we both could not contain our emotion as we watched him walk to the stage in his toga to accept his diploma.

At the end of the month I shall be leaving for six months minimum hoping to find a better life for my family. Hopefully, this country will have the laws to support the needs of couples like us who have children. Twenty-nine months of our relationship and it seems like the same amount in years.

All the struggles and difficulties of life are bearable when you have someone to help you see you through them.