Discerning where one thread ends and where the other one begins.

“ASA NGA! Hindi ikaw yung tipong lalakeng dapat seryosohin, no.”

Of all the pair of eyes that would tell me that kind of sentence in point-blank frankness, yours are the misaligned and the imbalanced of them all. Maybe because once when you were young, you’ve had a cancer in the eye. That makes your left eyelid slightly protruding - somehow a hindrance to have an unbiased opinion of your beauty - but I’m afraid that the smear, the irregularity of such in your face makes me look deeper than the surface and the skin.

We became one of those love teams among the members of our college organization, but of course those love teams are nothing but bluff - intentionally made for entertainment; intentionally made to curiously touch those emotionless hearts to eventually produce a spark. We were one of the victims. We were fooled by the people. And it turned out that we were fooling ourselves too.

Sometimes you would throw a cheesy line or two on me, and I would excitingly continue it with another, until we have woven an intricate mesh of lies and rehearsed quotes. The talk would go on forever, or until one of us decided to quit the playing and snap back to reality.

But it became as often as our general meetings.

I suddenly thought about our conversations: it is acquiring much depth and much emotions. All I thought we’re doing this simply to entertain our friends; all I thought this is nothing but bluffs and jokes. Of course, I’m playing numb again, but I can’t distinguish where we are standing right now. I started asking myself how can I feel where one thread is ending when I don’t even know - with all the spinning and the weaving - where one thread ends and the other one begins? It became a carpet of lies to cover-up everything and for me, this is going nowhere.

So I started throwing you questions in a calm, serious manner - just to ensure that my question’s out of the script and not made to fit the audience. Are you feeling something towards me, are you getting serious about what we are doing, are you somehow confused with what both of us are doing? No, no, no.

“Okay. I’m sorry if I have to ask you that - I just want to check how’s things.” I just want to check how’s things behind the limelight - behind everyone’s stares and entertainment, behind everyone’s laughter. But since I want to quit the jokes, I decided to quit the job. Hindi na ko sasakay sa mga trip nila, I once told you.

The next thing I know, after two months of not seeing each other (ever since summer vacation began), I haven’t seen you. We haven’t texted each other. We identify each other as friends, or so I thought? Maybe we both have hit bottom, and maybe it’s time to quit the play.

“Di mo ba ko mamimiss, ha?”
“Ano namang topak ko para mamimiss kita, ha?”

Again, we have started another unannounced scene of our drama with spontaneous scripts generated on our minds. But this one, I felt, was true. The questions aren’t delivered with the same flirtatious tones - your face magnified your eyes smeared not with irregularity, but now with honesty.

“Ba’t ba kasi lilipat ka pang Diliman?”

We were on our way home from a summer outing. The jeepney habitually slows down due to traffic along McArthur Highway - the traffic builds up since it was seven in the evening: time for the workforce to go home and eat supper with their family, and, maybe - time for us to settle everything before one of us leaves. After all, this might be our last minutes together.

“Di ah. Ba’t naman kita mamimiss - siguro mamimiss kita kasi ikaw ang pinakabanban kong kakilala sa DoTA…”

She uses Lina Inverse a lot since she’s - according to her - “hot”. We usually play on the same side, and I oftentimes teach her what button to press when an enemy hero crosses her path. I’d always tell her to push T first (Light Strike Array to stun the enemy), then S (to do damage - Dragon Slave, that is), then G (to finish the enemy with the Laguna Blade).

“Alam mo bang ngayon na lang tayo magkikita? Hindi mo ba naiisip?”

“Kumana ka na naman sa mga pick-up lines mo. Magtigil ka nga! At nakakahiya - kapag humihinto yung jeep, ang OA ng pagkakadikit mo saken! Seryoso - daming nakatingin saten kanina..”

“Ano namang paki nila!?”

I sat on the other side of the jeep to get away from her side, and perhaps to see her face for the last few moments. What I saw, back then, was a sparkling set of eyes, and this time, she means it. Her eyes are on the verge of pushing tears down her face, and I just looked away from her for a while - scanned the rows of cars and every night sceneries the Highway can offer for a bastard like me.

Until now, I have not yet discerned the real deal between us. I guess it’s one of the mysteries I would dare not to unravel.

Ba’t ko to sinulat, ewan ko lang. :( I rarely write non-fiction.

Header post courtesy of this link.

May 28, 2008 at 9:49 pm, filed under IRLs, Sentemotional and tagged DoTA. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.