A love letter to Lea & Tonyo

MANILA, Philippines - Dear Lea and Tonyo,

Thank you so much for letting me in on your happy-sad/bitter-sweet love story. For nearly two hours in the darkness of an SM theater, you made me smile and then laugh and then wonder if you would end up happily ever after. Oh well, only fairy tales happen that way.

You seemed to be meant for each other but then again you really were not meant to be and that was what made me shed quiet tears because for a while there, you were the likeliest unlikeliest couple I’ve ever seen.

Thank you, Lea, for making me see life and the world at large with your heart. I never thought it was possible but you made me believe that it was, that it could be. After all, isn’t the heart the most effective giver and receiver of the most intense feelings?

Thank you, Tonyo, for showing all and sundry that...yes!!!...an “ordinary” guy like you could win the heart and soul of an “extra-ordinary” girl like Lea. To paraphrase the oft-quoted line, beauty is in the heart of the beholder, and you can see a person clearly not so much with your eyes as with your heart.

Also, Tonyo, you are incontestably handsome with your clean-cut look, hair neatly combed, mustache neatly trimmed, and the shirt button of your shirt neatly locked around your neck. You created a schoolboy image that could make taller girls hug and hold you close to their heart. Without meaning nor trying to, you reinvented the traditional image of a romantic hero… that is, without being gorgeous.

How kind of you to take me on a leisurely tour of Sapporo while the bond between you grew tighter and tighter, making the “unlikely” oh-so “likely,” so that when the expected happy ending didn’t happen, I cried as Lea did.

And, yes, you were “two less lonely people in the world” as your theme song aptly put it, and the world gets lonelier minus one of you. Senseless one without the other.

As I write this letter, I see you in sweet embrace, pining for, to borrow a line from Matt Monro’s song, “what might have been that seems to start out so well” but could never be. Thank you, Lea and Tonyo, for teaching me how to see even with my eyes closed.

— Lovingly yours, Ricky

(Note: Lea and Tonyo are the characters played by Alessandra de Rossi and Empoy Marquez in Kita Kita, the sleeper hit drawing crowds in theaters. Catch it and fall in love all over again. Thank you, Sigrid Andrea Bernardo, for your brilliant screenplay and direction, and to producers Viva Films and Spring Films [owned by Piolo Pascual, Erickson Raymundo and Bb. Joyce Bernal] who did the crisp editing. Kita Kita is worth your while and your money. Still showing in several theaters near you.)