Boracay Island, June 2017
“Honey, Kulas is being weird again,” I told Astrid on the phone while I was walking around the resort swimming pool. I was on vacation in Boracay with my family. It was my fifth day there, and I was starting to worry because last night, Kulas had sent me a cryptic text telling me that he was going through something but that he couldn’t discuss it with me while I was on the island.
“How did you react to that?” Astrid asked.
“I said, ‘You can tell me anything. What kind of boyfriend would I be if there was something you couldn’t talk to me about?’”
“That’s a pretty safe reply.” Astrid said, then there was silence. “How do you really feel about him though?”
I stopped walking. Astrid finally asked the question I’ve been going through over and over since Kulas broke up with me via Instagram message a month before. “I…” I tried to start, forcing myself to admit what I’ve known since my first date with my boyfriend.
“I know he’s not the one,” I finally said. I started going through my nth circle around the pool. “And it’s the same reasons I wasn’t that into him in the first place—he’s short; he’s sensitive about money; he’s no Walt in bed, and his face is nowhere near as good as Diego’s. It feels like I’m settling when I know I’ve already done better.”
“Do you hear yourself saying that?” Astrid asked. “It’s like you’re forgetting who you are, so why do you keep fighting for him?”
“Because he’s what I have,” I said with conviction, then I collapsed onto a pool bench. “He’s all I have.”
“I’m sorry for saying this, but you’re settling, and I think you’re doing it for the wrong guy,” she said.
“You’re right, anyway.” I told her, letting out an audible sigh.
Later that night, drunk from doing a pub crawl with half of the tourists on the island, I sent Kulas a message reminding him that I loved him, begging him to open up to me because I felt like a bad boyfriend. In the morning, he broke up with me. Again. Over Instagram message. Again. While I was on vacation. Again.1
I reinstalled all of my dating apps for the fourth time after deleting them that year. The only gay guys who were within proximity on my preferred app Growlr were the waiter who wore too much foundation in the restaurant that was a 15-minute walk from the resort I was staying at, and a guy named Jess, who was 100km away from Boracay. Figuring I wasn’t getting any rebounds on the island, I chose to talk to Jess, instead.
After exchanging hellos, we unlocked our private media, and I found out that Jess was a buff chaser with pecs for days and biceps that could crush my head. I had to ask him if he was into fat guys because “chasers” on Growlr have a bad habit of looking for other guys built like chasers on an app designed for bears and chubs to escape the toxicity and body-shaming of something like Grindr.
Having confirmed that Jess was a chaser in the truest sense of the word, I later found out that he was also a nurse who dreamed of moving abroad. Flirting quickly turned into exchanging tips for how to pass the institutionalized English exams needed by Filipinos wanting to work abroad, having taken the exams myself when I attempted to move to Canada. We stopped flirting, but we did follow each other on social media, with each of us dropping the occasional thirst trap, yet always getting the flirtatious reactions we wanted to get from each other when we did, and this went on for a whole year without us ever meeting in person. I thought that would be the extent of our relationship, or so I thought…
Manila, September 2018
In a Grab car heading to my condo, I called Leo. “I went on a date tonight,” I started.
“With whom?” Leo demanded, sounding very excited.
“Remember the hot nurse? He texted me when my class ended. He told me that he moved to Manila and that he thought of me when he got here and wanted to meet in person.”
“Oh my god,” Leo exclaimed. I could hear his pussy getting wet from excitement through the phone. “What’s he like in person?”
“Exactly what he looked like in his pictures,” I said, recalling his tight button down and his bulging muscles. My pussy was getting a little damp, too. “Only… he’s really short, like as short as Kulas,” I said with an awkward grin. The hot nurse was sitting when I first saw him at the chapel in Greenbelt mall. His opening line was, “I didn’t expect you to be so tall,” which confused me at first then I realised how short he was when he stood to give me a hug. His hug gave me flashbacks of how I had to stop myself from laughing the first time Kulas tried to hug me—he insisted on doing it from behind, and his head could barely reach my shoulders.
“Fuck the height, though,” Leo said. “He’s a hot nurse! What’s he like as a date?”
“Well…” I started, recalling Astrid’s comments from when I called her about the date before I called Leo. She wasn’t a fan of the hot nurse, not even of his muscles. She was more worried that if we continued seeing each other, I might end up with another Kulas. She summed it up in a phrase I never expected to use myself—“I’m out of his league.”
Leo burst out laughing on the other end of the line.
“What’s so funny?” I asked in a serious tone.
“Someone’s full of himself,” Leo replied with a scoff. I was offended.
“I know you’re not attracted to me physically,” I said in defense. “I also know that I’m not attractive in a conventional manner. I’m aware that I’m overweight, that my face doesn’t exactly make you take a second look when you walk past me, but I wouldn’t say that I’m not a catch just because of that.”
“Sure…” was all Leo could say.
“You’re being an asshole,” I said quietly. This was what I hated about Leo. He constantly accused me of being shallow when it came to boys, when I had comments about me feeling that something about me makes them insecure or comments about coming from a different background that I come from. He thought that as long as they were cute or looked exercised, there was nothing wrong with them. That’s what made them a catch, and because Leo didn’t classify me as attractive, I wasn’t one.
“Can you hear me out, at least?” I asked, really wanting to arrive at my point.
“Okay, fine,” he said.
“You know I’m a ramen whore, right?” I started. Jess asked me to choose where to have dinner because it was only his second day in town, and I knew my way around Greenbelt a lot more than he did. “He stopped to ask me if we were going to use chopsticks.”
“Oh no,” Leo said, understanding my point. “Please tell me you didn’t give him your judgmental look.”
“I didn’t, bitch!” I said with a small laugh. “I was being understanding. I asked him why, and he said that he didn’t know how to use them.”
“Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. How old is he again?”
“He’s 26.”
“Who doesn’t know how to use chopsticks over the age of five?”
“The hot nurse, apparently,” I said. “Again, understanding. I told him that I could teach him how to use them, as an excuse to hold his hands, and we tried and failed miserably. I just asked the waitress for a fork.”
“I’m cringing.”
“He did redeem himself. His ramen was too spicy for him. He was starting to sweat, so he had to unbutton his shirt. I saw the line that divided his pecs.”
“You fucking slut!”
“Shut up! I wasn’t even looking to hook up with him. It’s just that we’ve been talking for an entire year online. It was nice to make a new friend.”
“So why all this talk about you being out of his league?”
“I’m trying to justify never seeing him again.”
“Can I have him?”
“Oh, he’s all yours.” I then gave Leo all of Jess’ social media handles. “Fair warning, though. He’s pretty boring. This is where ‘I’m out of his league’ really applies.
“I asked him about his hobbies. He has none except for watching anime. I mean, it’s 2018. Watching TV doesn’t count as a hobby. You have makeup. I have writing.”
“I guess it has something to do with working a lot,” Leo defended.
“Okay. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Still, he hasn’t been anywhere, like he’s never travelled out of the country. He’s barely been anywhere in the Philippines, too.”
“You’re being matapobre2 again.”
“I am not! The way Astrid described it, he was someone who dreams about doing things. I was someone who has done those things. There is a divide that will make someone insecure. If I were going to be friends with someone, I didn’t want to keep holding my tongue out of fear that I was making someone jealous, or worse, make it sound like I was better than them because I like to take advantage of the opportunities handed to me.”
“Then what did you two talk about?”
“My medication…” I said with a sigh. We discussed it while having dessert. Jess scolded me for being on maintenance medication for hypertension at 22 years old. I reminded him that although chasers like him found chubby guys like me cute, they often forget that we’re prone to dying earlier.
“That sounds sad,” Leo said.
“Because it is,” I said, starting to feel annoyed. “I’m one of the most interesting people I know, and I just went out with one of the most boring people in the world.”
“Wow on being the most interesting,” Leo said sarcastically.
“Leo, I’ve gone skydiving.”
“You’re not the only person I know who’s gone skydiving.”
“I’m a licensed scuba diver, too.”
“Again, you’re not the only person I know who’s a licensed scuba diver.”
“I’ve also been to ten countries, and with the exception of one of them, I’ve been to all of them at least twice. On top of that, I speak three languages.”
“So have most of your classmates in school.”
“But maybe you’re forgetting that all these things I told you, they all refer to one person—me. If those things don’t make me interesting, I don’t know what will.”
It took Leo a while to say anything. “Okay. Point taken. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, I’m not so jealous that you went out with a hot nurse,” Leo said.
“We did not go out go out. I just agreed to meet up with him because we’ve been talking for a whole year, and he sounds like he could use a friend in Manila. But after tonight, I don’t know if I’d be the right fit for a friend. Really, he’s all yours. Even sex isn’t going to salvage a friendship with him”
After that night, Jess and I were back to our old habits of leaving each other thirst traps on Instagram. In the four months that passed since that date, we never saw each other again, but if he were to ask me out, I might say yes. Who knows how living in Manila after all that time has changed him?
- This wasn’t the end of my relationship with Kulas. It lasted for six more months after that, the details of which are sporadically discussed in No. 41 | Off With His Head.
- Matapobre is a Filipino word for someone who looks down on another for being poor.
Life from the Closet 