Tiptoe

I remembered it quite well even though it was a few years ago. I had fished you out from somewhere in cyberspace and brought you in a motel somewhere in Mandaluyong; I think I was 25 years old then and you were about 19.

In bed, during the requisite pre-fuck chitchat that would make us feel less like ghosts and more like humans, you asked when I knew about it — a question so standard fare for people like us that I wondered why we even bothered. But after a few years of telling the same bullshit story over and over again, the spark had faded and I found myself embellishing it with a few details here and there.

You said you had a girlfriend and though my better judgment told me that was just to hook me tighter, I believed you because I could see it in your eyes it tormented you. Plus that type of shit got me hot like lighter fluid splashed into a pile of embers; there was no way you would get away now. I threw the question back at you and you told me how you knew because of porn; you were too focused on the guy. Again — standard fare.

“How did you become sure this is what you wanted?” you had asked.

“I wasn’t sure but I did what I needed to feel good about and like myself,” I had answered, pretentiously, while puffing on a cigarette in our no-smoking room, liking myself less and less.

“How do I know what I’m doing is right?” you had probed further, tiptoeing around what it was you really wanted to ask.

I had always been good at saying things I didn’t really mean; doubly so when I was about to get me some. But this one, I sort of believed.

“You do what is easy. You do what feels right,” I had said.

And that night, it was me that was easy and it was me that felt right. We didn’t see each other again after that. And in bed sometimes when I had nothing else to do, I wondered if you remembered it as well as I did.