Ed's Note: I cannot help but sigh...
--oo---0-0---oo--There are some love letters we can never write.
There are those times when, no matter how much our souls cry out with their stories burning to be told, their sleepless dreams waiting to be realized, there’s just no point in writing that love letter in your head because you’re never going to give it, and they’re never going to read it, and I mean really read it.
Do you believe like I do that letters have souls? That love letter would eventually have to be an orphan, and you would be responsible for it.
My heart is breaking again, and I sit here in front of the screen, searching for meaning, waiting to be absolved, and wonder if this is really what I said I expected. Of course I deserve this feeling and everything that comes with it: those moments of rottenness, of feeling alone, those vents of pointless jealousy, those wasted tears; because if you were a girl in your proper mind you wouldn’t play with fire. But I did. I slept with a married man.
I didn’t even know what I wanted to accomplish, and I sometimes make my own self laugh when I think about that ruthless, vicious woman I make myself appear to be when, in front of all my friends, as they listen goggle-eyed and speechless, I relate my wild stories of obsession, design, compulsion, and finally, sweet conquest. Oh, they were good friends. They tried to warn me about what could happen to me. Disease and scandal. A broken heart. But I am bullheaded. Always wanting to be one step ahead of them, I reassure them that I’ve been through it all, and didn’t I survive? Look at these scars. I wear my brazen honesty like a rusty halo. The daredevil stunts I perform with these breakneck stiletto heels on the deadly ramp and my bloody pumping heart on my delicate sleeve are no match to my strength. Sister, I eat pain for breakfast everyday, and didn’t I turn out quite marvelous for it? Aren’t you glad you have me as a friend? Don’t you wish you were more like me?
But do you know the secret of my immeasurable strength? I did not derive it from common and filthy pain. I get it from the love of a man named Jeremy Glenn, a man I appear now to have forever lost, but my heart knows otherwise. Don’t ask how it knows, because my heart and I have a private language and you won’t understand it. But it knows. I know it now more than I know that the sun would rise tomorrow. I know it as much as I know that I’ll be all right when all this is over. Because Jeremy loves me, and I will find him again. And because of that I have a will and a reason to pull myself through each hitch, each mess, each broken heart, because at the end of this mud-stained and gory tunnel, he is waiting for me…
Why do I still pull these stunts then? To pass the time? To prove myself to somebody? Maybe to retaliate at this awful stupid world because it endeavored to, and still does, pull my only source of true beauty and true strength as far away from me as possible? I’ll give you three guesses. I don’t know.
This latest conquest, Shawn Ray, a.k.a. Slam, the incendiary MC who has ignited so many parties (or so many panties, God knows), whether he’s a feather on my bra or a gnat on my skin is still debatable. I still don’t know who played whom.
I met him in the bar he had just then been commissioned to DJ in every Friday, called The Heat. His first Friday. People, secondhand cigarette smoke, tequila shots, eyes laced with mascara, girls and playas out for blood. A hiphop party. He was introduced to every girl in the club, but singled me out because he thought I didn’t belong there. A UP college instructor, an MS in Mathematics, non-smoker, non-drinker, who claims to have come only to get high on the music and the night. What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this. To meet you, lover boy, to catch your eye and maybe coax your heart into my parlor if you ever wore it within sight, among your bling-blings. And maybe you can be the next prince of my poetry, the king of my fantasies, and we can live happily ever after in your thug mansion.
Then followed the chase. Ahh, sweet enticements and stimulating little rewards of hunting down the pursued. The thousand-peso L’Oreal makeup and the scandalous miniskirts. The borrowed earrings and the late-night sneaking out of the dormitory. How young I was and how brash and how reckless. How delicious each moment of breathing the midnight air and letting it wake you up to the roots of your hair when your parents are asleep at home, oblivious of where you are.
How simple it would have all been if he had not been married, but he was, and he told me right up. I could have backed off because there was no way I was going to get entangled in another one of those cute little postcard street pictures with the pretty smiling wife, chubby little baby, barbecues in the backyard and the pleasant newspaper boy riding among the acacia trees. I should have known better and I did, smart ass UP Diliman woman-of-the-world type that I was. But wanting some piece of that gangsta love I proceeded with the seduction and eventually succeeded.
Did I tell you the sex was incredible? Did I tell you my spine still tingles thinking about it, my mouth still sore where I enticed him to bite it, my senses still on fire? Did I tell you I’ll probably never forget it, the way he moved and the way I followed every time he did? Did I ever take the time to make you understand that kind of raw pleasure, that deep intense want, those illusory images of reaching out to him spiritually so we could hold each other to the core of our beings?
And here I am three weeks later diagnosed with this.
How could I have been so stupid? When the rubber didn’t fit that could have been my cue to get out, pack your bags and go home to those responsible blue books of calculus exams you haven’t even looked at sleepless week after sleepless week. He could have fathered a child in me. And him a total stranger! And somebody else’s husband! I shake my head at myself in the mirror, then I sit on my bed, bundle up the covers around me and weep for what I lost.
I’m sure I deserve this, maybe more. A girl with everything to lose should know when to stop, and I didn’t. It is not something that would kill me; I am taking medication and would be just fine in a couple of weeks. It is inconvenient but it’s not what I weep for.
I have fallen in love with Shawn. And therein I lost everything.
I wish he were the sort of guy who runs away after they get what they want from you. Or the type who gets freaked out by overly obsessive girls who can’t eat, can’t sleep, and spend the better part of each night sending moony text messages as if he and you were teenagers all over again. Or the kind of cheater quick on the draw but also on the guilt, so that right now his conscience would be eating away at him and he wouldn’t be able to look his wife straight in the eye and would make a sign of the cross every time I was near.
But God damn it, he isn’t. I come at him stripped of my lace and leather, wearing only my bruised heart crying to be nursed back to life and he takes it in his arms every time and sings to it as if pain had no place in my life. I wish he would do something that would turn me off, something that would deliberately hurt me so that I could hate him and cry about loving the wrong man and ultimately move on. But every Friday he plays out there in The Heat waiting for me.
But the fact still remains that I did love the wrong man.
But somewhere in that sentence is the fact that I love the man.
I wish, I wish, I wish. A hundred million things with a hundred million reasons standing on a hundred million dreams. Does he know that my hands are smaller than his? Does he know that his shirts smell strongly of the fabric conditioners they use on Laundromats? Does he know that he is a good dancer, and a smart talker? That I remember every word he says, and read every message he sends more than once?
And does he know that I do expect of him to put his wife before me, but it still hurts me every time he does? Does he know that when I walk, when I sleep, when I eat, I am actually writing a love letter to him inside my head, a love letter I can never write?
I am too smart to be a mistress and I’m not going to be.
And why am I still so damn proud? Talking as if I got matters in control when in truth I am neck deep and can’t cry out for help. Thinking that I could ruin Shawn Ray with one fell sweep of my pen when in fact I am sitting here in front of my screen trying to elude having to hold my pen because I am deeply ashamed.
When I hear hiphop music it scares me.
Six weeks ago, when I met him, I wrote with these hands, with my pen, “…I am feeling a beautiful ache, the sweet and gentle one that makes you sing and cry and shout at the moon. How a single night and a couple of fantasies utterly change you. Words can only take you so far in describing it. Somewhere in this vast universe, there is a beat playing itself, and I resonate to its drums as if I had danced to it as an unborn spirit. The next time I see the sweet and sexy MC Slam, I’d thank him for doing this to me.”
Just the other night I wrote, while I still could (I can’t now), “I am so intensely miserable. Sometimes you’d imagine it’s scary being in the complete mercy of a married man but then you end it to start getting things right again and you realize it is unbelievably frightening to let go of that crazy illusion that he just might love you back when that illusion had been the backbone of your nights and the beauty of your mornings for quite some time. It is very scary to realize that not only have you been alone all alone, but that you are alone right now.”
My friends say I write poetry.
I want to write a love letter, but I can’t.
Please, don’t judge me. I have already judged myself.
Article was contributed by alliyah at Peyups.com
