I was scrolling through my phone’s contact list, and I was surprised to find at least 12 names there that I don’t recognise. I absolutely have no idea how they got there and who those people are and how they figured into my life.

There’s this name, Rommel Bolesa, for instance, who I can only guess must’ve been a driver from a car rental firm my old employer once hired for an out-of-town gig or a contact person in a provincial office somewhere.

I guess most of these unrecognisable names are like condoms or napkins: very valuable but are really “for one-time use” only. They were very important in a particular moment in my life, but are now essentially useless.

Yet, somehow, I can’t bring myself to delete them. There’s this nagging thought that one day, maybe by some cruel trick of fate, having these names in my cell phone will save me from some desperate, tragic situation on a boring, Sunday afternoon.

So they stay there, in my phone memory and SIM card, gathering dust, clogging my way to names I frequently use, incubating, waiting for that time when they will become useful again. That time may never come, yet they wait patiently, sitting there with a sinister presence, like a CC camera in a dark parking lot watching for a couple trying to steal some time away from their husbands or wives or trying to escape a drab existence that they desperately want to spice up with a steamy extra-marital affair.

***

Then there are names that somehow mysteriously vanished. They belong to people I know who have shared important moments in my life, but whom I have not kept in touch with for a long time: a high school classmate, a close friend now raising a family in America, an old flame.

When nostalgia or a desire to believe I am somebody important and have made something out of my pathetic life kicks in, I get this urge to call or send them a text message, but they’re not there. Gone. Unreachable. Missing and, well, missed. I must’ve deleted them (though I can’t remember for sure) or they must’ve been left behind in an old phone, abandoned, forgotten, left to rot forever.

I have since resorted to tagging names, so I’d know exactly who they represent and how they figure into my life.

I tag them with the institution or organisation they represent. Office mates in my hole-in-the-wall office, for instance, are labeled “Chronicle” and then their name. So our quirky, abdominally challenged layout director, for instance, is “Chronicle Elmer A” in my phone, and all those people I came across my old job at San Miguel are “San Miguel John Does” and “San Miguel Jane Does.”

***

If we are really defined by the people we know – and don’t know – then I guess in a world that is increasingly becoming connected by cell signals, cables and invisible wires, anybody can really sum up a life by the names he or she has on their cell phones, and technology hasn’t changed much really.

Well, maybe now we get to know more people than we used to, before cell phones became as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. The quality of the relationships we keep, however, remains very much the same.

There are people we keep for the rest of our lives, a few we’d rather forget, and then there are some we experience for just one brief, special moment, and we wonder where they are and whether we’d ever get to see them again. Then we reach for our phone and scroll down our contact list and we realise that, well, we are all essentially alone in the company of strangers.