lOve... sOft aS aN eAsy chAiR... yOu kNow tHe neXt liNe...

“love is torture.”

i look at cat. somehow i can’t imagine those two beings--love and cat--together. “yes,” i say slowly. “love is torture.”

she looks at me strangely. Then, “lab, sasha. i said, lab.”

oh.

“but yeah,” she concedes. “love’s torture.”

<<-->>

it’s torture. self-inflicted, most of the time. hai. deep, deep down, we are all sado-masochists.

take this girl. she’s nineteen. a freshman at an exclusive school for girls. there she is, in that plain uniform, made extra-special with high-heeled pumps, dozens of bangles, numerous gold earrings, a “rattan” bag made of plastic. hair in a high ponytail, eyes lined, cheeks rouged, lips glossed. the whole shebang.

every night—or whenever no one’s using the phone—she goes online to talk to the man she loves. hmm.

he’s a 30-year-old married man. with a child.

i hate adulterers, okay? don’t ask why. basta. I hate them.

and i also can’t help but hate their women.

meron naman daw justifications yung love affair na to… haven’t i been the sounding board of all of them? …as if saying them out loud can convince herself.

aside form the fact that they’re star-crossed lovers....

it was a shotgun wedding, the guy’s. the woman he married had threatened to kill herself after they had sex. fucking creates life, after all, even a drunken tryst such as that. doing the noble thing, the guy married her. aw, fuck, so romantic.

nine months later, still no baby. surprise.

the guy is the friend of the family. of the father’s actually.

the mother of the girl knows. she’s heartbroken.

the girl and the boy—they haven’t had sex naman daw. he’s in Dubai. what they have is something deeper. daw. hmm… does that mean na the lack of sex in a relationship adds depth to it? makes it truer?

and i don’t like the way she’s in love. maybe because people who aren’t in love naturally despise those who are. or pity them. it all depends.

eniwei, love has made her selfish. my mom’s asking me—in those rare chances that i get to talk to her—if ive been talking to my boyfriend since the phones are all clogged. mom. come on. you can at least pretend that im your little girl who’s NBSB.

love has made her even more grammatically-challenged.

love has made her forget that she spent thirty minutes scaling the locked gate of our dorm once she sits in front of her laptop. (another long story.)

love has made her leave her (used) panties on the floor more often than usual.

love has made her sleep at 1 in the morning for a 7:30 class a few hours later.

love has made her pore over A Walk to Remember as if it is a Bible.

love has made her move into a cheaper room—my room—because the extra thousand will let her buy internet cards.

love has made me shake my head in sorrow. it’s not right, no matter how much she romanticizes it. fine. fuck it all, it’s true love. but there’s a child. a child who looks up to her. there’s a woman—it doesn’t matter how vile she’s been described to me—who lies beside her husband at night, completely aware that she never had his heart and is now battling someone she cannot fight. because a woman knows. knows. a look. a kiss. a touch. sex. words. laughter. even the way he suddenly loves working (internet connection and privacy.) please. she may be a cold-hearted monster for all you’ve told me about her but she has a heart, damn it. she feels these things. she knows that the man she vowed to be with for life has betrayed her in a more… more, agh, in a cruder fashion than sex.

damn it. even the child knows these kinds of things. ano ba?!

hai.

when I go out of this room to get what is left of my flat tops, i’ll see her, dressed in skimpy shorts that tells me she didn’t shave her legs that morning. she’s in that corner, monstrous headphones around her head, a marshmallow mic between her lips, muttering nonsense, laughing hysterically as my other dormmates watch the emo part of A Cinderella Story.

nightie-night.