OUR MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN LIFE

Have you ever woken one morning to discover you have become the person who's not really you?

Rebecca, an Anne Tyler heroine ("Back When We Were Grown-ups") was horrified to find out late in life she has turned into the wrong person.

In her youth, she was known among friends as "The Queen" -- dignified, serene, quiet, regal. In college, she was all set to major in history and to run for honors, too.

When she met Joe Davitch, 13 years her senior, a divorce' with three daughters, she jilted her"half-baked" boyfriend Will, sacrificed a college degree, and let herself be swept off her feet into Joe's life, his ready-made family, his whacky party-hosting business.

Before she knew it, she has become a professional party-giver, outgoing and cheerful, frivolous and funny, on the outside, given to making toasts as inane as:

"A toast to the bunch of us gathered together
In this glorious spring weather
And to Zeb for scoping out the site
And Biddy for cooking with all her might.
And most of all to Nono and Barry
We're delighted they're planning to marry."

At 53 and a grandmother, and having just hosted a disastrous picnic, Rebecca suddenly wondered: "Am I an impostor in my own life?" She looked at the mirror and gasped at the "bag-lady" she saw there with chaotic heaps of cornflower hair, a ramshackle face, and a loose flowery smock.

It was then she began to live on the stealth an imaginary, could-have-been life.

Now comes my friend, Vicky, a full-time University professor and part-time writer, married to a stable, devoted husband, with four grown-up children, being badgered with the same question. She was halfway reading the copy of "Back When We're Grown-ups" I gave her on her birthday two months ago when she called.

She identifies with Rebecca, she says in her plaintive voice.

Yes, Anna, she whimpers. "You blink, and whoosh! There goes your life. Where has it gone to?"

She used to fancy herself a bohemian, she elaborates. Someone who doesn't have a care in the world. Who does things that pleasure her -- and the devil may scratch its head. Not the obsessive-compulsive mom and wife and teacher that she has turned out to be, who worries over duty and responsibility in all her waking hours.

In the early years of our friendship, she had second thoughts about marrying Ben, her boyfriend of eight years. "I have outgrown him, I think. He seems so immature." I remember chiding her: "At least he knows what he wants. You don't." for at that time someone new and exciting had entered her life. Eventually, she married solid, stolid Ben just the same.

Nowadays, Vicky has sedition in her mind. She has to bite her lips to stop herself from barking at her husband, kids and other people around her: "Go away! Give me a break." They seem unable to do anything without her, she frets.

In the last 10 years, she has been bringing her students to Boracay. "When we get there, I just tell them to enjoy. Then I leave them alone. What they do not know is ako talaga ang mas enjoy." Walking, swimming, eating, sleeping by herself, she is herself, if only for a breather.

Her psychological age stopped at 23, she confesses. "Physically, well, another matter" -- this while chuckling.

She apologized for taking up my time, even as she "threatened" to call again and again. "So sorry, you're the only one I can talk to about angsty and irreverent topics." She made me promise not to make "sumbong" to our other amigas who all seemed so content, balanced, religious, and family-centered.

I told her I enjoyed our conversation. And added, how can I make sumbong? "For all you know, I am as out of the box as you are."

That's why I talk with you, she repeats. "There is an aura about you that is girlish and helpless and angsty."

Angsty? Yeah. I think there is a Rebecca in me too that wonders what might have been if I had taken a different road. Different job, different country, different partner. But that is not the predominant me. I can usually convince myself I am happy with my imperfect life and the not too simple, not too complicated person I have become. And when I get the blues or -- uhmm, okay -- the angst, I simply look at the person next to me to know he or she is sometimes bugged, too, by his or her own imaginary, might-have-been life.

Who was it who said that God designed man to be ever hungry, thirsty, craving, and yearning? All because He wants man to at last learn the vacuum cannot be filled by food or water, nor persons or things.