No. 54 | Lana Del Rey

Manila, October 2018

In the middle of October, I found myself realising that it had been four months since the last time that I had had sex. The thought haunted me, especially since hanging out with Simon meant that the hour before our classes started, there would be a story of how his latest little black book entry exhausted him last night. I also had the habit of reading my old blog entries, not only to remind myself about that summer with Andrés, but also to look back at how I got to meet him in the first place, tracing my way from the Connor disaster all the way to breaking up with Kulas, including all of the orgies and affairs in between. I found myself asking, “what happened?” The dry spell was taking too long, and with the stress from school, I could really use a fuck.

No, I told myself. I didn’t need a fuck. As of that day, Andrés was still the last boy I had sex with or even kissed, and I intended for it to stay that way for as long as I could until we saw each other again and talked clearly about who we were for each other. I didn’t know when that day would come, but until then, I was pretty much decided that that was how I wanted things to remain. I was definitely still in love with him, and going out to have sex with another guy felt like I was betraying my feelings for him. I didn’t know how he felt about me, though. Although we still talked, our conversations weren’t exactly deep—save for his occasional speech about how I’m being too hard on myself when I was breaking down from the pressure from school. 

But then again… I would start to think. It was also the week after my midterms, but with the way school was set up, we didn’t exactly get any sort of break after our exams. The Monday after the Saturday of exam week, the daily grind resumed for all of our classes. By then, I was sure that my anxiety and my depression had come back with a vengeance, pulling me up by my collar, as if teasing me for letting them return. Things weren’t great. I started smoking on a daily basis and drinking way too much on Saturday nights. I was subconsciously pulling my hair out to keep my hands busy while I had to go through my study routine. Every night, I was eating takeout from my Korean neighbour who delivered food in my building.¹ There was no healthy way for me to relax without feeling guilty about needing and wanting to take care of myself. It drove me crazy. The sanest and healthiest thing I could think of doing for myself was to take a bath, a really long one in a steamy bathtub, with a glass of wine in hand, and a pizza, preferably. The only problem was that bathtubs weren’t a standard in Filipino bathrooms, and with an upcoming trip abroad that I hadn’t told my parents about, I couldn’t afford to book a hotel with one.²

No. 53 | Campus Crush, three

Manila, January 2018

“Simon. Nice to meet you,” he said with a toothy smile, holding his hand out to shake mine before taking his seat. Did he have to take the seat next to mine? I asked myself, rolling my eyes.

There was nothing wrong with Simon. The reason for my annoyance was his face—he was so fucking handsome, a fact everyone could agree on. He was also built like a print ad model, with his body sculpted by years of being in his high school swimming team and good genes. His parents looked like movie stars, and they might as well have been, since they represented some of the most infamous politicians in the Philippines of all time. That meant that his family had money… a lot of it. On top of that, he’s a really smart student. I thought I was good at being a law student, but Si was just better. He always sounded confident, although I found out later that he barely prepared for school. He also worked well with what I lacked skill in—common sense.

All that meant that sitting next to him was distracting. It was hard not to have a crush on him. He was perfect.

No. 52 | Hot Nurse

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.

No. 51 | Bad Date

Manila, June 2018

I did not see this day coming, I thought to myself while waiting for my luggage to come out on the baggage carousel. Somehow, I forgot to think about how I would go on with my life after coming home from Australia. All throughout the year, I had never thought of post-vacation, not since I booked my flight to see him again. I hated myself. Sometime between today and booking my flight to Melbourne, Astrid had already told me to apply to university so I wouldn’t need to go back home after summer vacation. I kept delaying it, and now, it was too late. My mom had already texted me, asking me which airport gate I would be coming out of.

It was a bit of a surprise that my mom was picking me up. She hadn’t done so in the last three years. It was always just my driver dropping me off at the airport and me DM-ing him on Viber the night before my return flight so he could come pick me up. My mom wasn’t specifically in Manila to for me, though. While I was having brunch at the Grounds the previous day, she called me with news. The first was that a pipe burst in the condo I was leasing near school, and that it had caused a flood on my entire floor. The reason she was in town was to assess the damage with my landlord. The second was that my grandparents had bought me my own condo.

I should have been happy. I was grateful, of course, but it felt like I was being chained in the Philippines when I had plans to leave. That was always the part I never understood about them, about my family. They insisted that it was too expensive for me to study abroad, that there were good law schools back home, and that my life here was great. Yet they buy me a condo that cost more than three years of uni even after I told them that I wanted to move. They don’t even like me—my mother, especially. More so when she finally realised that I was gay.

Even my Melbourne trip was an issue for her because I was going alone. Days before my departure, she kept dropping hints that she wanted to come with me. She insisted that she wanted to because she enjoyed how relaxed she felt when she visited last May, how she would enjoy just going grocery shopping and cooking at Tita Vera’s. I played along with it, telling her to come with me if she could still book a flight, all with a smile plastered on my face. It would mean that I wouldn’t have to pay for my own meals anymore, I teased. But it was obvious why she wanted to go—so she could make sure that I wouldn’t go out with boys.

I guess that’s why my mom and I hadn’t had a real conversation since she sent me those emails last year, the emails telling me that she knew that I was gay but that she couldn’t accept that I had a boyfriend. She said she was disappointed, to the point where she’s ashamed of me, because I was paying someone to be in a relationship with me. Since those emails, I hadn’t been able to go out to dinner, even with Astrid, without a look of disapproval from her. I hadn’t been able to host classmates for cram sessions either because apparently, my classmates were more boys I paid to date me. I no longer felt that I was her son. I felt dirty when I was with her, when she hinted that I was disgusting for being gay. I felt the same way I felt that summer when I first realised that I was gay, that there was nothing I could do about something apparently so shameful. It made me want to kill myself.

So it was sad to be back in the Philippines… because for the last three weeks, I felt nothing but love and acceptance. I got the role model who advised me what I should and should not do without making me inferior and irrelevant. I found someone who wasn’t ashamed to hold my hand while we walked down the street. And I allowed myself to walk away from it and to walk into my own cage, as if handing the key to my prison guard on my way in.

No. 48 | Take Me to Church

Melbourne, Australia, June 2018

Why am I not allowed to keep secrets from you? I texted Andrés while I made my way to HuTong, a dumpling shop I wanted to cross off of my Melbourne itinerary after a full day of snow ball fights with strangers and solo photo shoots I accomplished by hanging my camera tripod on trees and arming myself with a bluetooth remote at Mt. Buller. I asked him if he wanted to eat there for our date the following night, but I had a sudden hankering for Asian food after a bad serving of fish and chips up the snowy mountain and felt the need to go there sooner. He also asked too many why questions about going to HuTong, which made me think that he didn’t want to go. He later explained that he just liked to know the why of things, and I said that it was a Lonely Planet recommendation. He slapped me with, Lonely Planet? Really? He definitely didn’t want to go, so I went on my own.

Oh, you’re allowed to keep secrets from me, as much as I’m allowed to try to get them out of you, he replied, as I scalded myself from the soup from a xiao long bao I bit the wrong way. He followed up with, Why do you want to hide things from me anyway? Apparently, feeling embarrassed wasn’t a good enough reason for him.

I don’t know, I replied. Maybe you’ll find out sooner than I do when you abuse me emotionally tomorrow.

What do you mean? he asked.

When you comb through my messages, I said.

Him: You’re not gonna let me though.

Me: Yet you find ways to do it.

Him: LOL, because you let me. Duh. 

Me: I don’t know the right words for my answer yet. I’ll tell you tomorrow.

I lied. Apart from what I would tell him the next day, my reason was pretty straightforward: I didn’t want him to see that I was trying to go on a date with another cute Aussie, an iOS developer named Gav. I was supposed to meet him for dinner on the night Andrés and I went to the winter night market, but he had to cancel last minute because he forgot that he had already RSVP-ed to a monthly work thing. If Andrés wasn’t going to be my boyfriend, I was going to need a parachute. I was spiralling into a free-fall, and my heart wouldn’t survive a crash landing. All the while, a ring was still missing from my finger.

No. 47 | Labels

Melbourne, Australia, June, 2018

I didn’t see the cute Aussie for six days.

But that was okay. While he was in Sydney, I spent the weekend exploring Melbourne and the greater part of Victoria with Tita Vera and her family. Catching up with her was particularly fun, and having come out to her recently felt like gaining a new friend. Over brunches and soy flat whites, she would rave about Melbourne’s openness to diversity, how it exposed my cousins to a culture that didn’t label human beings, how I had the option of getting married there. It was all so inviting, and she would always end with, “you should move here.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, explaining to her how I had tried to move to Canada two years ago, but my mom and my grandparents wouldn’t let me, despite an offer of admission from a university for a pre-law program. They wanted me to become a lawyer in the Philippines, something I didn’t come to terms with easily because when I met Connor, what I wanted more than anything was to explore my sexuality without being shamed by my own family. As a twenty-something, the only way that that felt possible was to head out someplace far, where my family, who only seemed to notice me when I was doing something wrong, couldn’t intervene. In return to her telling me to move there, I would always joke that maybe I’d get engaged by the end of my visit.

Monday came, and Andrés flew back to Melbourne. I took his return as an opportunity to ask him out on a date. I had plans to spend the day brunching and boozing around Fitzroy, a charming Melbourne neighbourhood akin to Chelsea in Manhattan. I was going through my list of places to eat at, which Andrés helped me curate over the last five months and finalised when he asked what my plans for my visit were on our date last week. After exchanging hellos at 9am, he stopped responding to everything I was sending him, text messages about getting drunk at 2pm, snaps of the croissants from Lune, queries about what coffee to get at Industry Beans.

I didn’t take it against him. I figured and later confirmed that he slept in, exhausted from his overnight stay in Sydney. It didn’t stop me from calling Astrid while I was sipping a third cocktail at Naked in the Sky.

“I need to break up with him before I leave,” I told her after exhausting my stories from the last five days. I took a sip from my cocktail and said, “We’ve only been on one date here, and I’m already starting to feel things I’m not supposed to feel. He’s supposed to be a summer fling, but what does that mean? What happens when I go back home to Manila and never come back?”

“You’re you. When have you never gone back someplace you’ve been?” Astrid said. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Why do you need to break up with him?”

“Because…” I started. The alcohol was ineffective in numbing my feelings. “I don’t want another Kevin incident. I don’t want to feel guilty about kissing another boy, about wanting to kiss another boy. I don’t want to go out excusing bad behaviour just because we don’t have a label. I don’t know if he’s seeing other people, and I’d rather break up with him than find out something I don’t want to know.”

“Well, it’s good you’re setting boundaries,” she said. “Maybe talk to him when you see each other again. I don’t think asking him to be your summer fling helped you at all. Get some clarity.” Get some clarity.

No. 46 | Out of the Closet

Events in this issue take place immediately after the events in Melbourne Magic.

Melbourne, Australia, June 7^th, 2018

I was in a text flurry with Andrés on my train ride home. The first half of my commute was spent discussing what him being my summer fling meant exactly. I wasn’t sure either. I had never asked someone to be a summer fling, and all of the guys I categorised under summer fling earned their labels when the relationship ended. The perfect description came much later as I passed by a station called Sunshine.

Me: Remember what you said about the 4am iced coffees? Be that person for me while I’m here?

Andrés: It’s a bit cold for me

Andrés: And 4am is a bit late these days

Me: You know what I mean

When I got off the train, I had already missed my curfew by two minutes. Still toting my suitcase, I ran from the station to the parking lot where my uncle was waiting with my godson Bambino. “Hey, you made it,” my uncle Tito Vincent said when he saw me.

No. 43 | Familiar Faces

Manila, April 2018

“Ray just texted me,” my classmate Tiara announced. “He said he’s on his way.”

I looked at Sara, another classmate, whom, along with Tiara and Miguel, I was working with for a moot court competition we joined in school. Sara and I laughed awkwardly, remembering the long-running inside joke a few of us had been sharing since law school started last year.

“What’s so funny?” Tiara asked.

“Should I tell her?” I asked Sara, the both of us still laughing.

“It’s up to you,” she said. “It’s not my secret to tell.”

“We’re not in any classes together anyway, so it couldn’t hurt. It’s too funny not to share!” I said. “Can you keep a secret?” Tiara shot me a puzzled look, but eventually, she nodded with her brows scrunched.

No. 42 | Kevin from Tinder

Manila, March 2018

Two years ago, I matched with Kevin on Tinder. He was 5’10” and handsome, cultured and well-traveled,¹ and was the heir to a small paint supply empire that had business all over the country. On top of that, he was an archer, which, considering by Filipino boy standards was pretty fucking unique. Our online conversations were sporadic because he had a busy work schedule, and I wasn’t sure if he was even interested in me because while he was responsive to my questions, he wasn’t engaging in conversation. By this point, it’s a bit obvious that we had never met for a date.

By March, the cute Aussie and I continued to talk online. I had already booked a flight to Australia in June, and I had mentioned a few times that I wanted to see him again. I could never tell if he was excited to see me or if he even wanted to because by then, our relationship² had become a little stale, not unlike my relationship with Diego a few weeks after coming home from New York.³ But there would be times when he would say something that would remind me that he was a hot guy who happened to be into me, a species more endangered than the sumatran rhinoceros.⁴ The uncertainty of who Andrés and I were to each other made it difficult to say yes to a date with Kevin when he finally asked me out.

No. 40 | Before Sunrise

Events in this issue take place immediately after the events in Before Midnight.

Sydney, Australia, January 4^th, 2018

“I don’t want you hanging out with guys like Gary.” he said, and proceeded to dig through my phone. It could not have been a worse time to have four other dating apps to make sure I would get laid.

I seemed to embarrass myself around Andrés a lot. Yesterday, he saw me doing my iPhone photo shoot. Hours back, I had to ask him to split the bill. Before heading into the empty club, I got carded, and the bouncer didn’t buy my story about why my driver’s licence was a piece of paper.¹ Now, he saw how many guys rejected me on my apps.² But then I thought how easy it was to make him say yes to a second date, despite him seeing me at my most vulnerable. He hadn’t asked me to go home yet, and it was already past midnight. I guess everything I was insecure about was all in my head.