Yesterday, I met my two friends, French and Shey, for coffee and years worth of updates. We’ve been planning to meet since French expressed intention to finally leave her cosmo life for good.

I met French through Sharlyn 8 summers ago when we both stood as Godparents of Matthew, Shey’s endearing son. Later that year, we became housemates at Teachers’ Village, cooked dinner together, and stayed up all night to watch CNN’s coverage of the World Trade Center attack. A year later, I went to law school while Sharlyn became a producer at a giant television network and French produced a film called Luna that earned her a Gawad Urian (Philippines’ version of the Oscars) nomination. Then we went on to live in different places, got married and have kids (except for French), and went on to search for our passions in life.

Yesterday, the three of us met here in Iloilo—the town we left 12 years ago in exchange of becoming scholars of the people.

A few weeks ago, I got an unexpected Facebook message from French announcing that she’s going home for good after living in Manila for more than a decade. I made the same decision last year when we—my husband and my son– relocated from the central business district in Makati to a friendlier (not to mention more quiet) neighborhood in Iloilo. Sharlyn followed suit, after living a semi-recluse life in the heart of a pineapple plantation in Marbel. The place is nothing short of heaven-on-earth for those who love nature but all she heard at night was the air passing through her lungs.

We were supposed to meet at 3 but I couldn’t leave the house with my hair dripping wet. Living in the tropics has its pros and cons and blow-drying your hair, which takes around 15 to 30 minutes depending on its volume, is one of the most frustrating things a woman can deal with especially when she’s already late for her appointment.

Thirty minutes later (yes, I was that late) I arrived at Coffee Break where French and Sharyl waited with empty coffee cups on their table. Aside from feeling guilty for my tardiness, I thought, Wow, is it for real? Yes, it was for real—the three of us met after years of not seeing each other.

We didn’t waste time. We immediately discussed business as if we purposely met for that. French is having a product launch this Saturday for her organic health products, which already show enormous potential in the market. Sharlyn is taking up accounting and tourism courses before she starts with her Master’s. While moi is always busy—in a good way.

We talked about a myriad of things: French’s stint in San Francisco, the importance of a Mac computer, living in Singapore, videography and some cool video-editing tools, photography and some cool photo-editing tools, video editing techniques, amazing business ideas, our beaus, and the exciting life ahead of us. We all like Slumdog Millionaire and it was interesting to share some trivia about the movie with them. There were also a lot of mundane things that cracked us up including the fact that mundane things crack us up.

We talked as if we had an unfinished discussion yesterday. For a moment, I thought of those times when we were still fresh out of college and undecided whether to take up another course and become erudites, work in Makati like majority of the graduate population, or wear our UP ideology and defend the masses (yes, I salute those who do), and then I realized how time flies so fast.

From our stories alone, I could tell that it was a decade well lived and we have blossomed into beautiful and sensible women whose real journey in life has yet to start.

It was great meeting these two women again. We didn’t only share stories, we also celebrated an extraordinary friendship.