happy together

Once upon a time, there was a boy. Or so the novel goes.

But it did turn out that very way: there was a boy, a boy I loved with all of my heart. When he left, I thought he took my heart with him wherever he went. I thought then, that I was now a body without a heart, with no beating organ to show up for when I needed it. Being a body with no heart – some heartless boy at 21! – was not easy (or at least when I thought of it that way): I went around looking for love, hoping to regain my own loving by maybe stealing someone else's, but with just no love to give in return. The body can offer superficial romance, can withstand the tremors of sex and friendships that pass you by, but it leaves you hollow and empty when you're all alone with no one to look at when you settle in that cheapskate bedspace, thinking, where did all my love go?

I thought then, that it all went with you. Claren, it's been 13 years now, and I still see you everywhere. I see you when I see some bus bound for Ayala, the feeling so certain it was the very one that carried you to work sometime ago. I see you at the corner of Pasay Rotonda, where we'd take home some tortang talong for dinner, saying it's always better when that carenderia grilled the eggplants a certain way. I see you when I see the friends you left, and the way they smile when we bring up your name. I see you when I see those milk tea advertisements, thinking you always did so much better. I see you when I see something typed in Avenir. I see you when I see Ma, and Kuya Regi, who always attended my premiere nights. I see you when I see Don, thinking you'd have another thing to laugh about about your best friend. I still see you at that Cubao Expo corner, when I begged for you to stay. I see you when I walk around UP Diliman, in that spot by the sunken garden, when you first took my photo.I see you when the rain had just stopped. I see you when I see the sky. I even see you sometimes when I see a boy I like, thinking you've finally managed to shapeshift your way into my life again, disguised as another person's face and another person's body. But they never had your heart. And they never had mine.

When you left, I thought I was never going to love again the way you taught me how. But Claren, I did. Somewhere along the way, throughout those years of grief and longing and loneliness and regrets, I found my heart again. Thank you for taking only a piece of it, so that maybe I could survive this world and this lifetime with love to return.

It's your birthday today, and Kuya Regi only got to remind me when I sent him this photo of you, tucked inside a book I loved back then, when we were still together. By some stroke of coincidence – or maybe just your way of letting me know you're just around – I only got my hands on Krauss' book just yesterday, when I reorganized my shelf back home here in Pampanga. And on the eve of your birthday, your photo. It must have been 13 long years or so since this photo of yours found shelter inside these pages. I read the page your photo bookmarked, and funnily enough, a line from it said:

"I want to tell you a secret," he whispered. "Because it's your birthday."

There is so much I can do None can take me back to you

To mourn a friendship. To know the fire that consumes the memory known by my very flesh. The hand that held my darkest hour, to carry its weight with their very own. My left hand knows his right. My right hand, the shape of his shoulder, and the feel of bone and skin on his back, professing love, and feeling it whole. So much time has passed. The wood thins with this very fire. All I hear sometimes is his voice. I mourn his voice, especially when he sings for me. Mourn the food served on the wooden table, the corner of the street to make a left turn to his house. To his garden of flowers. To his backyard of dogs.

Lately why is nothing as exciting I could use a second helping Of the things my soul fed on before

I used to call him a lot.

I had stories to tell to everyone, but I chose to tell it all to him, sometimes only to him alone. I always thought he'd understand, that he'd be able to know what to say when I asked a question, that he'd always be on my side even if I was wrong. I used to think we invented a place to put on the map where the stories we gave to each other were planted, to act as its blossoming terrain.

Dancing in my head last night Dreams of different ways to die

I always knew how to find him on the dancefloor. To find him on the outside pavement, or his new address. Sometimes he moved to a new house with a new lover, but I always found him on whatever new life he had. I remember us dancing to too many tracks I already forgot. I always wanted to find him when it hurt. To find his car when it was time to go home.

If a ghost is what I am to many No one knows me like you know me

There will be song. There will also be fire someplace else. And a cold that will feel like the cold we shared together in that northern place, but we will be in different cities, wrapped in different friendships, with different lovers and stories to tell. I will sometimes command a sweater to the memory of this cold squalor of grief. To find an empty parked car to his name.

and sometimes I wish this pain could balloon and grow into its own formless wings, so I could use it to take flight to where you are.

Last night in the middle of dancing in a crowd I swear I could see you in between sweaty shoulders and the sharp streaks of bright white lights pulsating like harmless fireworks. Hear you say, "Are you alright?" while I drink away my dizzy spell, hearing now the sound of a friend's voice, muttering the same question. Swear I could identify your touch for a split-second, the familiar little hairs on the length of your arm ingrained in the memory of my palm.

It's these little things I remember, and the bigger things I already seem to forget. The way you scratch the back of your head when I laugh at you, squinting your eyes like some reprimanded kid in a cartoon show. Makes me laugh to think of that phone video where you put chopsticks at both ends of your mouth, pretending to be a walrus in Teriyaki Boy. You cared about the stupid student films I made in school, even if they were pretentious as fuck. You said with each one that they were your favorite, and I just knew behind your every smile as the credits rolled you meant it. One time, I made you part of an installation I had to do for our Production Design class. I covered your head with a bunch of scotch-taped boxes so that I could project a spectrum of my own sadness. I never even thought about your feelings, as if by putting you there it meant that being with you still made me sad, that what we had never got rid of my trivial, young sadness.

I remember walking in the rain with you in Baguio. Everywhere it was grey, and we were both wearing these colorful scarves like we were someplace else, a made-up world where we led this fancy and fabulous winterly life. You always said yes to my own fancy. Always in front of my camera trying to make a movie out of our days. These days I couldn't even begin to watch the raw footage. It hurts to see you smile.

It's not like we planned it.

But maybe I shouldn't be speaking in behalf of you, so: I'd like to believe I didn't plan it. The last guy I 'hung out' with annoyed the hell out of me when he said I was bad at planning. Maybe he was right. But if I only had more hours in a day, I would make an Excel file charting the times you've replied eagerly, the times you've probably dozed off during work, the times you've invented a feeling for me to carry throughout the day.

Another guy, from a moment ago, told me he'd resisted offering a song dedication for me. He'd feared that if we went our separate ways, which we did, the song would have been taken away from him forever. I get it. A song you once held dear, only to rot in that metaphysical space that only exists in some rundown past between you and an old lover. You never listen to that same song the same way ever again. And yet. I couldn't resist offering you Daylight. To imagine spreading my wings, if I were a bluebird, to fly to you.

I wanted the first time we meet to stick with me. But it's not like we planned it. But to remind me of the tiny embers of possibility? What if you were there, and I was there? What if you saw me for who I was, and I liked what I saw in you? A couple of beers should do the trick. To distort reality into a flurry of rabid feelings: sleeplessness, kilig, adrenaline rush, a nagging discontent, thirst for more alcohol. A familiar joy, when I finally saw the shape of your back, knowing it was you. Goddamnit. The planless, wayward night was like falling into a trap. The random instances of contact: hand gripping on my elbow, the wet perspiration from your drink on an embarrassing trail of sweat. In my head: two rivers intersecting. The rush of connection.

The second night felt like the real entry point. I excused myself from my best friend to make a trip to the restroom. Only to come out with you, next to him, smiling like you already know what that does to me.

WATCH FREE❕ www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C8T991UyTg&t= ❕

"Kaluguran daka." You're my friend. I love you.

I don’t like myself a lot right now.

The point is: I’m an asshole.

Photographed by JL Javier for Young Star’s Film Issue

The recent years have been kind.

Me? Less kind, I guess, but who cares? It feels odd to go back in this space without a good reason, but do the things we want to do need to have good reasons all the time?

I’ve been sad a lot of times, sure, but angry is what I am almost always. Happy? Sure, why not, but then there are always variations of happiness that, in the end, never completes it, & that encloses and covers it from fully happening.

I’ve been around. Friends have been around. Lovers come and go. That’s the way it is.

I came out to the closest members of my family. Onstage, after showing them for the first time a film about my first love and heartbreak. Which happens to be caused by another boy. Oooh, shocker. I guess they saw it coming, but it feels confusing that none of them has acknowledged it post-outing. I wonder if they even understand that I’m a boy who can only fall in love with another boy. Moving on. As things should.

Berlin is the coldest place that I’ve been to all my life. Cold enough to occasionally freeze my fingers and temporarily wound my lips on a daily basis. Cool enough for parties to happen on abandoned underground warehouses. Bangkok is my favorite place in the whole world. Coming back to the Philippines after a beautiful, fantastic trip outside of & away from it proves to be always a depressing episode. In 2015, I have fallen in love with being alone.

So much has been said about love. Less about leaving. When I love, I’d like to be able to know how to leave – the door unlocked, the windows open, the plants watered, the cat’s food tray refilled. How to leave – one night stands in their strange beds, my voice in someone else’s ear, and my heart in another person’s heart. Maybe, maybe not. So much about love, never about leaving.

I still have sad eyes. I still cry over movies. I still fall silent when I remember this & that. Who’s to blame?

Dear city, in you the story of rain resides fleetingly, until each word collapses onto, instead of our forgetful heads: a flight of umbrellas, the roofs of houses, the stale ground, to which the language of water is understood to a fault. Dear city, today I walk under the chapter of a drizzle, and couldn't, at all, determine the differences between the inherent likenesses of its difficult alphabet, but I feel the sadness of a man inside the story inside you, our city, who walks this lonely road by his lonesome. Dear city, does the darkness of your sky mean that a story is about to turn its last page? I skip when I witness a puddle of your prose. I pretend that my old shoes are incapable of understanding the sadness of your words. But dear city, I'll let you in on a secret: they definitely do.

November 27, 2015

Dearest city, how you've fallen from what little grace there's left. And yet here, is where he is, where I am, where people walk from A to B, from A to A, some stuck like magnets on refrigerators, some moving onward, racing, keeling like boats by low-tide docks, and yet you, dearest city, have endured your cracks from insensitive wheels, and your people, stomping and jumping and falling in love over and over and over as if they never thought about you.