#awarewolves

The ending! T.T

I had found a home in you, then, when my November nights were cruel and abrasively empty, frigid as an iceberg. And like the tip of an iceberg, the melancholy those nights brought to my doorstep was as deceptively large and affecting, too. That period of time, as I've been scarred to remember, is tainted with immense sadness. It is, quite irrevocably, impossible to forget. I imagine nobody forgets a perpetual sinking feeling. Some people would call this trauma. But this whole incapacity to forget I easily translate into good fortune when I realize I met you during this time.

I had floundered coping up, a fish out of sea--wriggling from too much air. I remember with a grin how glued I was to the sofa, repetitively watching feel-good B movies that, I imagine, would have offended your cinephilic nature. Sometimes I wonder if I ought to regret forcing you to watch some of them. My conscience remains mute on the subject matter.

I find myself randomly replaying the first night we met. It was a Tuesday night and I had my tiger shirt on which I had cut a few weeks ago into an unintentionally frumpy tank top that only looked good in photos. Below, I was wearing nothing but my striped boxers. Earlier, I had decided it was time to start sleeping early (a decision I constantly find myself making in spite of its apparent impossibility) and had showered. It was my father who always said that showering before bed makes one feel better. Presko. Prelude to sleep, to my sleep. My hair was nearly dry which I've always thought was its prettiest state when my phone rang with your name on display. At the corner of the screen was the time, it was nearly 11.

I don't know what came to me that night though my suspicions could be narrowed down. It was either your persistence paired with your youthful charm held me powerless or the thought of someone like you expressing such interest in someone like me was too good, too rare to let pass. Of course, I had agreed to see you that same night before I put the phone down, amidst and in spite of hearing my mother's voice, warning me of dangers that bloom and thrive when the sun sets and in a city such as this, I, the sheltered boy from Los Banos, had so much to avoid and learn, only she has always hoped and prayed that I'd never learn them the hard way. You see, from the beginning all of this was reckless.

The moment I put on my jacket; the moment I pulled those shorts up my waist; the moment I stepped out of my apartment door and into that dark, putrid alley; the moment I saw your moonlit disheveled hair across the park, all these moments the old me wouldn't be caught dead in. Meeting strangers in a public park at night is exactly the kind of stuff I avoided. Despite this, all of these moments somehow resuscitated me. The recklessness revived my blood. It thrilled me. I had died and you were my potent defibrillator. And I've never felt dead since.

This is a piece written by me and my friend, Petersen

That in that night light I was bound to remember:

I decided to keep November 27 in my pocket, to hold onto it like the smoke you exhaled that I attempted to snatch. Had only there been no spaces between my fingers when I closed them into a fist, I would have succeeded and the gray matter wouldn’t have dissipated. My disappointment had been dampened by the tenacity we country boys instinctively trigger when we like something or, as in our case, someone.

I was well rewarded with another night. This time, in lieu of pocketing it, I made a mental recording of us running on the opaque floor tiles of the MRT station, too late for a movie and too in love to have left for it on time. And now, there’s a film of a running film maker inside my head.  Maybe one day we could regale ourselves with this lucid vignette and maybe I could watch the way you watch films in a cinema house—with feet up and arms embracing the legs tight.

An epiphany of sorts dawned on me on a different night. We had downed bottles of San Miguel Light and on our way home found ourselves walking the placid, deserted Maginhawa St. We were in such high spirits then (far from the one and only night we entertained a dispute, one which beautifully faded into my second viewing of Lost in Translation). As I watched our intertwined hands wrapped and illumined by the scant light from the incandescent street lamps that lined our path back to your apartment, I recognized that I had become what I told you I wanted to be—a free spirit—and holding my hand was you, my emancipator.