I still remember the first time I really heard Walang Hanggang Paalam—not as background music, not as something drifting from a radio, but as a wound opening. The title itself feels like a contradiction: an endless goodbye. How can a farewell have no end? And yet, that is exactly how some relationships, such as friendships, leave us—not with a slammed door or a final argument, but with a slow, echoing departure that loops back on itself, never quite finishing, never quite releasing its hold.
What has stayed with me for decades is the haunting melancholy of the guitar accompaniment in the original version by Filipino singer-songwriter Joey Ayala. It is spare, almost skeletal, as if it knows better than to explain too much. The guitar never resolves where you expect it to. Notes trail off into silence. Chords hang suspended in the air, waiting for closure that never arrives. It feels unfinished on purpose, like a conversation that stops not because it’s over, but because there’s nothing left to say that would make the truth any easier to bear. That sound lodged itself in me early on, in the hollow space between my ribs, and it has followed me quietly as I make and unmake friends across years, cities, and versions of myself that no longer recognize each other.
The song doesn’t dramatize loss. It doesn’t demand closure or resolution. Instead, it sits with the quiet, unbearable truth that some people walk out of our lives without cruelty, without fault, without the mercy of explanation. They simply fade. And the fading—gradual, almost imperceptible—is what hurts the most. One day you realize you can no longer remember the exact pitch of their laugh, the specific way they said your name. The guitar understands this kind of loss. It hums in the background, patient and uninsistent, the way absence does when it becomes so familiar it starts to feel like companionship.
Friendships don’t always end because something broke. Sometimes they expire the way seasons do, the way light drains from the sky. You don’t notice the exact moment summer ends; you just wake up one morning and realize the air has changed, that your breath is visible now, that something essential has been taken without permission. Calls become less frequent. Messages turn polite, then brief, then occasional check-ins on birthdays or tragedies—the kind of contact that acknowledges history without honouring it. One day, you realize you no longer know the ordinary details of their life—what keeps them awake at night, who they’ve become when no one is watching. And they no longer know yours. When that realization arrives, uninvited and final, I hear that guitar again, its unresolved ending mirroring my own unanswered questions, the words I never said because I believed there would always be more time.
In Walang Hanggang Paalam, there is no villain. No one is blamed. The goodbye isn’t sharp; it’s tender, resigned, almost grateful—a recognition that love existed even if it could not survive. That feels truer to adult friendships than any dramatic falling out. Most of the friendships we lose don’t deserve anger. They deserve mourning. They deserve the kind of grief we give to beautiful things that could not last. As immigrants, as queer people, as adults who keep remaking ourselves in the image of survival, we outgrow people not because we want to—but because survival demands transformation. We move cities. We choose different forms of love. We shed old versions of ourselves that once fit neatly into someone else’s life, that needed their approval to exist. Sometimes the people who knew us then cannot follow us now—not because they don’t care, not because the love wasn’t real, but because the bridge between who we were and who we’ve become no longer reaches both sides. We’ve drifted too far. The distance is too vast.
There is something deeply Filipino about this kind of farewell, this capacity to hold contradictions without resolution. We are a culture that knows distance intimately—migration, overseas work, long silences punctuated by balikbayan boxes that arrive months late and late-night calls where we strain to hear each other over bad connections. We know how to love across oceans, across years, across the unbridgeable gap between memory and presence. We also know how to let people go without formally saying goodbye, trusting that affection can exist even without proximity, that love doesn’t require constant proof to remain true. The guitar in the song carries that cultural knowledge embedded in its strings: the ability to hold longing without spectacle, sorrow without bitterness, absence without abandonment.
And still—despite everything—endings make room. While some friendships fade into silence, others begin—not loudly, not ceremoniously, but with tentative kindness and the cautious hope of people who have learned how fragile connection can be. New friendships form later in life with fewer illusions, fewer promises of forever. They offer honesty instead, companionship for this chapter, for however long this chapter lasts: coffee conversations where silence feels comfortable, shared recognition of scars we don’t need to explain, the mutual understanding of those who have survived their own unmaking. These friendships don’t replace the old ones. They can’t. They exist alongside them, shaped by memory rather than erasing it, informed by loss rather than pretending we can live without it.
I used to think every friendship had to be lifelong to be meaningful, that anything less was failure. Now I know better. I’ve learned the hard way. Some friendships exist to teach us who we were, to bear witness to versions of ourselves we’ve since abandoned. Others help us survive who we are becoming, who we might still become if we can find the courage. There are friends I will always carry with me—not in daily messages or photos, not in any tangible proof, but in the cadence of my speech, the jokes I make, the values I refuse to abandon even when abandoning them would be easier. Like that guitar line, unresolved and haunting, they remain even after the song has ended. They echo. They refuse to be forgotten.
Walang Hanggang Paalam doesn’t ask us to cling. It doesn’t promise closure or healing or the tidy resolution we’ve been taught to expect. Instead, it asks us to remember with gentleness, to hold what was real without demanding it be eternal. To accept that love doesn’t always mean staying, that sometimes love means releasing someone without resentment, trusting that what was true between you does not need constant proof to remain true. The guitar fades out, unresolved, suspended in the air between ending and continuing—and somehow, that feels exactly right. More honest than any neat conclusion. More faithful to how loss actually lives in the body.
Some goodbyes never really end. They linger. They loop back. They catch you off-guard years later when a song comes on the radio or when you see someone who moves the way they used to move.
But neither does our capacity to begin again, to keep reaching toward connection even when we know how it might end, to keep offering our hearts even after they’ve been quietly returned.
That, too, is what the guitar knows.
Renato Gandia 