reviews_and_ramblings | Always Forever by Ansh Das

The main question this memoir left me is: did AD meet Mikee too late or just in time? From the blurb of the book, you know that Mikee is dead and that his lover AD is attending his funeral. You start the book thinking you will read about a passionate love story, boy meets and loves boy, they will live happily ever after but fate has other plans. In any case the feeling is, this is a long term couple that only death shall part… and instead you open the book and read this date: 10 March 2011. And it’s now August 2012, and the book is already printed and released, so how is that possible?

AD is flying to Manila to attend the Mr. Gay World competition as web reporter and the first day, 10 March 2011, he meets Mike Francis, Francis for his foreign friends, Mikee for his family. I don’t think AD likes Mikee at first, but there was something pulling him to the guy. As an epiphany, when AD sees Mikee’s angel wings tattoo, he realized Mikee is the love of his life. He would do everything for living this story, even moving to Manila from Hong Kong. But then, on 26 May 2011, not even 3 months after they met, Mikee is dead, and AD is coping with the loss. Or not coping. The strange thing is that AD didn’t really know Mikee until he is dead; while attending Mikee’s funeral, he has the chance to meet Mikee’s family and friends, to start to understand who Mikee really was and what he wanted from life. AD will also understand that Mikee’s reticence to talk about their future together was since Mikee knew they didn’t have a future together. AD is really a fatalist guy, very into spiritual things and dealing with your emotional side, so, strange as it sounds, he is accepting Mikee’s death, what he is not accepting is that he, at first, doesn’t understand what was the meaning of meeting Mikee. The aftermath of Mikee’s death will give him the chance to grasp that meaning.

This memoir was written like an outpouring of emotions into papers. It’s not perfect, sometime I wanted to tell AD, stop doing that, but that is the difference of memoirs and novels, memoir is life and it doesn’t have a carefully planned plot, and you cannot chance an event since you don’t like it.

If I have to be true, I have the feeling that AD and Mikee were not destined to be a long term couple. They were too different, in age, in culture, in social status, even in their beliefs. AD met Mikee for a reason, and you will understand it reading this book, but the reason was not a love story. Truth be told, AD and Mikee don’t have neither the time to decide if there was or not a love story between them; at today, AD considers himself Mikee’s husband, he adopts Mikee’s surname, and he made Mikee’s family his own. But I think AD will find love sooner or later, and Mikee will be always a cherished memory, or at least I hope for him.

Amazon: Always Forever: From the depths of sorrow begins a journey of hope
Amazon Kindle: Always Forever: From the depths of sorrow begins a journey of hope
Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 23, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1477422269
ISBN-13: 978-1477422267

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