When I first heard of the news, I had just gotten back to my dorm carrying books of Carver and Gore Vidal that my friend had lent to me. My phone was dead so I plugged it in and slowly watched the apple logo appear, and then disappear. My mom was calling the moment my phone had started, and my battery was running hot, but still I pressed it to my ear. She asked me about my first day of the semester, I lied and told her I went to campus when really I had gone to an Italian restaurant and my friend picked me up in his car. She asked me how soon I can get back, I said, but I just got here yesterday. “Arlyn,” there it is, the silence that consumes “your Tito Dec had a heart attack.” I do not miss a beat. “Where is he? Which hospital?”

I feel my legs bringing me closer to my dining table. “He’s gone, Arlyn.” I let myself fall unto a chair. I remember asking my mom if it was true, I don’t remember how the call ended and I don’t quite know where to place this sadness, in fact I do not know where to find it. It seems to be everywhere. Then the people came, they left me texts and calls asking me when I will leave for home, am I going home yet? Where is my uncle? Where as in, where is the funeral being held? The truth was that I could’ve gotten home as soon as I dropped that call, but I waited. I rendered myself useless on Tuesday, I lay there in devastation on my bed, and I refuse to take an inch closer to your city. Because I thought that if I refuse to come back to your city, then you aren’t really dead yet.

My uncle was buried without me finding the courage to look at his dead face. Each time some priest or official would tell the immediate family members to say their goodbyes, I refused to stand, and squeezed my eyes shut. My mom was besides me encouraging me to go on, and from my silence I burst into tears. I tell her, “Mommy, hindi ko kaya.” The church would go on to echo the way my voice broke. In my mind, I want to remember him with life, remember him saying bye to me with a smile. If I do not know what he looks like dead, then it doesn’t really feel like he has left me. That he died and it was going to be forever, there would never be anything again, he died and he was absolutely nothing now. Buried to the ground. I would never have another Tito Dec again.

The first memory I have of Tito Dec, I was with my cousin in the mall. He had lost us, and he began to panic as he frantically searched for us in the mall. He lost us for almost an hour, I don’t exactly know actually, but now we cannot confirm anything because he’s dead. He probably lost us for a few minutes or so, but we have lost him forever. And I keep thinking—still, that if I look hard enough, then I’ll find him again.

The other day, I had run out of load for my cellular, so I opened my GCash to buy myself some data, and his contact pops out as the first recommendation. Almost every week Tito Dec would ask me to buy him a prepaid load, it was so regular that my phone defaulted to buying his number load instead of my own number. Sometimes, when my money isn’t enough in GCash I do not accept his calls, because I know he would ask me to buy him load again. That Sunday, the day before he died, Tito Dec left me 6 missed calls, which I kept rejecting because I thought I didn’t have money to buy him load right now, it was just such a nuisance. 6 missed calls that I didn’t return, 6 missed calls that I will never have the chance to return again. We were all he got, he had no wife, no kids. He got my grandmother, my mom, and then me and my little siblings.

He would always ask me to bake him something with chocolate. Him and my mom love the chocolate lava cake that I would bake for them fresh with raw ingredients. My mom had bought a vanilla ice cream to top it off with that Saturday, when he was still alive and hadn’t said his bye yet. So I serve him a ramekin, but on Saturday I decided I was lazy and used a boxed brownie, undercooked them in the oven, and served. If I knew that was going to be the last chocolate lava cake I would serve him then I wouldn’t have done such an offence. And my writing isn’t even good enough to fully comprehend your loss. I’m so sorry.

I know that just because we are dealing with death, we do not have to make a virtue out of the whole thing, that the entirety of ourselves shouldn’t be entrenched in sadness. But the truth is, I will never have the chance to buy my uncle some prepaid load again. His name in my contacts will now hold no meaning. And my jokes will not make anyone laugh as much as Tito Dec decides to light up a room and spread his disease of laughter. I have associated this lightheartedness to Tito Dec, so if you are looking for that, do not turn to me, turn to the dead. But my God, I wish then that he would show up at his own funeral alive and well, just to make us all laugh again.

I know that we have to be strong and continue with our lives. But there is a reason why grief has its own word. Grief is a pain that can never be compared to sadness or loneliness. This grief acknowledges a significant loss. We all feel that loss. But until then, in the tomorrows that I have yet still, even in the days that aren’t Christmases or New Years. When I eat a particularly delicious food, or discover a new place. When I watch a new Netflix slop, and log it into my Letterboxd (and I cannot tag his name anymore, because I had not watched it with him.) Grief will visit me, and there will be days where it will be easier. But right now, I cannot be left in silence with my grandmother. I see her sometimes, in the late afternoon, she goes to her room, and weeps. I talk to her sometimes, in the kitchen, while the sun has just risen, and my mother offers me the coffee in her hand, and her voice breaks the same way mine do.

Talking about how she refused to hug her son, because he cannot bear to look at him like that. Like. Like he was dead. He was dead and nothing can bring him to our lives again. I cannot take a step closer to my grandmother nor offer her a hand on her back. I felt that I needed to be so still, so that my grandmother can find where to anchor her grief. My God, I had just eaten an incredible cheesecake. I wish you were here to eat it with me. Your loss has paralyzed me. Please God. Last week I had just woken up, and I had dreamt that I needed to do some paperwork, so I called you on my phone. I forgot you were dead. It didn’t even ring. All my mornings have been so lonely since. But as long as this happens to me, as long as the back of my mind refuses to let you go, then somewhat, you continue to live. You are living with the people you loved and had loved you. All through your good and bad days. Because while lives do end, our love will always prevail.

I have stopped actively attempting for a year now. My best friend told me that she once thought that if I ever actually went through with it, she would be in peace with that. She said that she knows that my decision to kill myself would probably put me in a better place than where I currently stand in. I know she understands just how entrenched loneliness is within me. I have developed a habit of saying sorry to people when I catch myself drifting too deep into my state of being. Sorry, I hope my loneliness isn’t permeating through this conversation into your own psyche. Then my best friend said, but right now, I think that, if you killed yourself I wouldn’t know how to live my life knowing that my best friend is gone.

I keep sitting down with this thought ever since she said it to me in May. I don’t think she has to worry about it though, I keep seeing glimpses of my future in my dreams. I mean after all, all our first instinct is to survive. I was reading Katherine Mansfield’s “A Dill Pickle”, a short story about two lovers who reunites after six years. With such a familiar longing that makes you realize that people have been feeling the same feelings since 1917, and perhaps the moment the idea of love was conceived. A longing for a life that could and still would be inherently possible, and yet it is left to dust. You meet again, and you consciously drop the ball—no—you put the ball down carefully. As though you are balancing your lit cigarette on the nip of depression of the ashtray. This is sort of how I understand it, I thought, like I have a longing for my life and I am very slowly putting my cigarette down.

After all, a lot of my idols had killed themselves. Tough crowd. I remember last year, I had put a picture of Hemingway as my profile on Instagram. Some guy I was talking to told me that it puts him off, he feels like he is talking to an old man. I said Bitch, that’s Hemingway. Then I never talked to him ever again. Then my colleague texted me, ‘I just now understood your pfp omg. Ily.’ She just now understood that perhaps I’m also going to shoot a bullet through my head. And then, one of the first lines of a guy I had found myself to have loved a year ago says, ‘Is your profile Hemingway because you also want to kill yourself?’ And that finds a laugh out the back of my throat.

When put so lightly and frankly, my loneliness doesn’t seem so bad. Look at Bourdain, his loneliness is some sort of charm isn’t it? Perhaps his tattoos are almost meaningless to him, reduced to merely just another thing he has done because his skin had never felt like it would be with him forever. Because he also knew he himself would like to not live forever. So I rewatch Parts Unknown and I get to the part where he revisits Southeast Asia, he is just so much older than he was in the first seasons. I also want to get to that age, and then grow some white hair, smoke that black tea Vietnam Camels, drink a little local beer. I’m sure in between all those years when you reach a certain age, there must be some relief in between that will always kind of push you to stay around a little longer.

Well for instance, yesterday I split my first G. I don’t know why that Guinness brought such unabated joy in my soul and mind. I wouldn’t mind this at all. Not at all. But then again, how much of my time spent in loneliness do I have to go through for a singular moment like that. Like a moment where it leaves my being, and I forget it as though it has never been with me in the first place. I am not practicing this loneliness as a virtue, don’t get me wrong. I like to think I am someone who proactively combats their own loneliness. I do not use the term sadness anymore because it deprives the sense of this loneliness feeling so… alone.

I recently read the work of Lin Yi-han. I thought about how brilliant it was. Searched, and then she also killed herself. So I read Pessoa’s infamous book.

Ah, how often my own dreams have risen up before me as things, not to replace reality but to declare themselves its equals, insofar they exist apart from me whether I want them to or not—

My dreams of being older, well perhaps it will not be a dream anymore after all I keep finding myself breathing year after year. But even when it is not a reality, I supposed it will still exist, I trust my friends to sort of carry me with them. Not as intimate and constant as this loneliness I grapple with, but perhaps during those moments like when they split their first G and they are filled with joy, and there in the back of their throat: a thought of me—a passing thought. Then they’ll feel different for a while, like grief just punched their chest, but nonetheless the joy will pacify them—and I would have grown old with them. I promised my best friend I will never kill myself. But just in case, I think this is how she will be able to continue through her life.

Perhaps we can even stretch it to the obsession with healthiness by taking it to the extremes of raw milk and anti-seedoil rhetorics. There is a breeding ground for conservatives who are partaking in what was once a hippie culture as people would used to stereotype, they have become milkmaids in trendy clothes and wannabe cowboys with a pornstache. Julia Nurse describes these milkmaids as a symbol of wholesomeness and romantic pastoral innocence. In a series of catalogues, she delves into the sexualization of milkmaids turning their fresh milk into something that is sour, that a milk is bad if its milkmaid is impure.

According to recent fashion trends, it appears that the properties of the milkmaid and her associations with health have long outlasted their career. “Milkmaid chic” emerged out of post-Covid optimism to suggest that the wholesome image of the milkmaid look was aspirational and glamorous. A resurgence in the need for invigorating country air, exercise and entertainment has apparently revived the image once again. — “Milkmaids and the image of purity”, Julia Nurse

The milkmaid chic is a fetish, the woman had failed to transform into something else. The woman had failed itself after a series of girlboss feminism and white liberal pomposities. The pandemic had put everyone in their own bubble. During a time that BLM protests were so performatively alive and gay rights along with their microlabels and pronouns are more important than ever, people have deluded themselves into thinking that this was true progress. But in the creation of these agendas an evil space had emerged and lurked, the redpill, blackpill, incel spaces. There is no reason that a Filipino teenage boy is as much of a Nazi as a German soldier in WW2. There is no reason that obscenities towards women and the language of intimate acts themselves are reduced to something so shallow. Cracked, hit, tapped, clapped. This reminds me of a Substack article that delves into how porn is everywhere and eroticism is not. Wherein porn eliminates the existence of the other person, wherein desire is now perceived as something that is entitled to us. It minimizes the risk, the consequences, it is merely meant to be efficient. Seems familiar? This is the problem with the online trends when done out of ignorance. It completely kills a culture and their community. There is a reason why fashion enthusiasts keep on crying about taste, why Carhartt is no longer affordable for the blue collared worker, and why Japan cannot keep up with the need for ceremonial matcha. I have a lot of alternative friends that would label random people as “TikTok Alt” implying that their style was curated by Shein, and that they didn’t carry along the politics it requires of them as alts.

People have become posers. It is never really done intentionally of course, but when someone moves from being an e-girl, then a clean girl, and then a swagapino. You can start to wonder what the fuck is wrong with everyone around you. Me and my friend used to laugh at people who are so obviously wearing something that is fast fashion (Shein), until people had called us elitist and we ceased to make further opinions. But I fully believe that a lot of individuals just don’t want the burden of creating their own identity and their own style. They refuse to keep their own sense to themselves. When your tastes are defined by your algorithm and so are your beliefs. How many disinformation, misinformation, and dumbed down political ideas do we see in one single scroll of Twitter? That each like we contribute without affirming if we do actually agree with it, has meant to set us up for life. Like in a Filipino family, how can you even begin to hate Palestinians? If not for the stupid propagandas force fed unto us for decades?

When in such a short time, we had taught people to be so sensitive, and so… woke. To push us into another side of the spectrum of acceptance, it becomes derogatory. That instead of helping people to be better it had become the face of dishonest social justice. A wokeness that has stemmed from white people and their performative activism. But it turns out what they are really good at doing is merely leeching off of everyone’s purposes and struggles. The White Savior Complex is alive and well, but perhaps it is more appropriate now to say that it is the American Savior Complex, and this includes everyone that has become so westernized that they are inclined to follow the American news more than their own country’s.

Everyone has said that everyone has become so sensitive now. This laughter is now sacred. Like when you call yourself fat you have to double check if anyone’s offended. Or when you misgender your friend that had transitioned a month ago and you want to kill yourself. People often think they are in their own spotlight, that these little offenses can be taken against them, but this is the truth. We are constantly monitored. We lose our jobs and university acceptance letters over stupid decisions we make that have found themselves on the internet. Our presence has become infinite, and our time and identity have become community property. We can also delve into the offenses of rapists, sexual harassers, offenders, assaulters, and how these are so interchangeably used that it just becomes a world of threat. That a pedophile can accidentally be on the same level of wrongdoing with a married boss and his consenting secretary to the listening ear. Yet, the cases have never gone down. Like how are all these so offensive and yet nothing’s happening? This again circles back to the fact that people are merely afraid of a label. That as long as faux feminism is on trend everyone subscribes to it. As long as men pay for women, the divine feminine TikToker gurus accedes to it, and so will thousands of their impressionable audiences. And as long as people mourn over George Floyd, everyone has the hashtag on their Instagram bio, until he becomes an Instagram brainrot reel.

The birth of the 4B movement in the feminist circles of South Korea is one of the most notable consequences of the modern suffocating misogyny. While Korean feminists who actively participate in no sex with men, no birth, no dating men, and no marriage with men are just marginal, this still serves as a foundation in knowing the current state of misogyny in their country. There is a prevalent state of transphobia, homophobia, and misandry in the spaces of these movements in Korea, but these types of spaces emerged from fear. Once again, we focus on the body and biological essentialism, and this of course reinforces the binarism that the West feminists like Moi intends to break with the reason that this dictatorship of the genders will merely boil itself down to essentialism. Chang Kyung-sup also talks about the idea of compressed modernity wherein Koreans modernized all in 30 years, when it took the West 200 years. This then explains how their economic freedom is mostly free, but their gender dynamics are stuck in archaic and feudal gender roles. And here we can distinguish a very similar framework that I am talking about, wherein principles are deemed to have in more than one ways been better for the advantage of equality, but people’s own belief and certainty of themselves remain unrealized and ambiguous. Now, people do not know what to do with themselves.

All of this of course will always go back to Marxism. We will tackle the idea of fluidity, Marx was right when he said that in a capitalist society, the economy was guaranteed to work to be more fluid, as seen as in the mode of productions too. The first real problem started with the “McDonaldization” of society wherein we are tricked to be more productive in able to let go of more staffs (see the giant screens in Mcdonalds and mostly one or two cashiers or the famous CLAYGO to get rid of more janitors.) But then we also see this fluidity in gender, and I go back to the trend of microlabels in today’s society, wherein unique individual experiences and identity are poured on over as a better understanding of themselves. I’m sorry for my wording but, people think too much of themselves. I would argue that there is a lack of being in today’s world and a lot more “I am.” This is why capitalism thrives, corporate rainbow washing remains efficient because we had thought that identity can be consumed or that it is something that we can merely learn about in labels. This binary of gender and of sexuality appears to be more fluid when identity is put in labels but instead it merely categorizes itself once more polytomously, adding even more into the binary constriction. What is homosexuality that is understood under the umbrella of capitalism? Homonormative.

Using Chang’s framework it is now easier to realize why everything seems so artificial, and why everything seems to be an imitation of something else. Like how our trends have ceased to be new trends and are stuck in a cycle of nostalgia. When society collapses upon itself because of its compact principles of what justice meant were all fast-forwarded in less than a span of a decade, a new thing grows: the nostalgia for a time where everyone is offensive. The rise of the r-word is back again, and fatphobia is back, the use of cocaine is back, the violence against women is unspeakable. Trump is president again, the son of a dictator presides over my country, edgy humor is popular in standup crowd work again, and everyone just wants to be normal. But what is normal? It is so hard to tell what the current state of anything is anymore because people have ceased to truly know themselves. More than the rise of conservatism once more, there is an ongoing larger scale of the prevalence of the rise of conscious ignorance.

People yearn to be offensive not because most of them are actual bigots. They yearn to be so because when certain ideas, thoughts, and words are suddenly put to an abrupt stop they can often feel like dictatorship. This sudden change of the sphere has also reduced people’s capacity to have thoughts. This is the thing with censorship, like Orwell’s Newspeak in his novel 1984, it forbids an idea to form and so we rely again on algorithms and trending words—and yet porn is a thriving industry. This perceived itch to be offensive is only brought about by it being forbidden, like Eve’s apple, and now because everyone cannot stand to perform anymore, they go back to what they think is “normal.” The other extreme: conservatism (even if they think they are unaware of it).

References:

Amin, Kadji. “Trans Materialist Critique as Feminist Practice: Lessons from a Polemic Against Nonbinary Identities.” Frontiers in Sociology, vol. 10, 2025.

Andronic, Mihaela. ‘Life is to Protest’: Evolution of Korean Women’s Performance and Contentious Resistance. 2025. Thesis. hdl.handle.net/20.500.12608/74419.

Bengi-Sue. “PORN IS EVERYWHERE. EROTICISM IS NOT.” Bengi-Sue’s Substack, 3 Jan. 2026, bengisuedotcom.substack.com/p/porn-is-everywhere-eroticism-is-not?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer&triedRedirect=true.

Chang, Kyungsup. “Compressed Modernity and Its Discontents: South Korean Society in Transtion.” Economy and Society, vol. 28, no. 1, Feb. 1999, pp. 30–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085149900000023.

Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003.

Fisher, Mark. “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” The North Star, 22 Nov. 2013.

Hawkins, Stephen, et al. Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. More in Common, 2018.

Kipnis, Laura. "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 Feb. 2015, www.chronicle.com/article/sexual-paranoia-strikes-academe.

Marx, Karl. “The Poverty of Philosophy.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, International Publishers, 1976, p. 166 (chap. 2).

McWhorter, John. Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Portfolio, 2021.

Moi, Toril. “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, edited by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, Blackwell, 1989, pp. 117-32.

Nurse, Julia. “Milkmaids and the Image of Purity.” Wellcome Collection, 4 May 2023, wellcomecollection.org/stories/milkmaids-and-the-image-of-purity.

Ritzer, George. “The ‘McDonaldization’ of Society.” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 1983, pp. 100–107.

Sebastian, Michael. “The Lost Art of Surviving a Hangover.” Esquire, 14 Aug. 2025, www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a65657781/surviving-a-hangover.

“The American White Savior Complex.” Tablet Magazine, 6 June 2019, www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-white-saviors.

This is because Song was able to portray such an honest head-on depiction of the modern dating scene—which I will in turn assume to be the modern romance perspective—with such restraint that it feels like a film that is not fleshed out enough. But when the general audience talks about romance as a genre, what is it that is expected of it? Does it have to concern itself with a pregeneric plot structure as Frye suggests? Jameson suggests that romance as a genre serves an (1) unwritten contract for the author to propose a story that allows the reader to break away from the principle of reality. He also points out that romance struggles to portray a story outside of the (2) Manichean binary of having a hero and a villain. That romance is at its core a (3) wish-fulfillment, historically he also discovers that romance tends to (4) reemerge as a different form in periods of major social transitions.

Most of the informal opinions in regards to Materialists is often grounded in the belief that it is a “broke-man propaganda.” Wherein viewers find it hard to empathize with the story as it is inconceivable to be relatable to modern day society. There is also a binary of opinion on whether Song’s film serves to cater to traditional ideas of the Romance or if it does not. On one hand, the film presents a romance that presents love over capitalistic ideals as the easy choice to be made, wherein the hero is the broke boy with all the love in his heart for Lucy and the villain is the rich boy who cannot figure out what it means to love, and that it fulfills such wishes of heterosexual women who wishes that economic preposition is something that we should disregard from categories. But one thing that convinces me that Song’s Materialists establishes itself as a subversive is that it is a film that does not cater to the forms of palatable romance that we have grown accustomed to, it refuses to change along with time. Such that it no longer fulfills anyone’s wishes because it remains inconceivable.

When Lucy matches her couples her go-to sentence would be “[...] checked a lot of our boxes.” There are many instances in the film where romance is talked about like a business proposal using phrases like “Competitive in the mainstream market”, “Marriage is a business deal”, “investing in me”, “position in the marketplace”, and especially when a client of Lucy ends up assaulted, her boss tells her that it is a “known risk” in dating. This is reflective of the way that modern dating has already become. People are put into categories, self-identities are merely numbers, and our personal experiences are business decisions.

Following Jameson’s logic, we are technically still in the postmodernism era where we are defined by the economics of late stage capitalism. What makes it as such that it does not remain identifiable anymore is because of the fact that it has become so normalized–reaching the stage’s totality. He begins the case that art during the 80s is utilized as a commodity, but now it has seeped into our identities (Jameson 1770-71). In light of this, with the constant bombardment of curated personality, aesthetics, vibes, and with emphasis on having taste in this present time of social media ultra-personalized algorithms. People and their bodies have become a site of commodity fetishism.

People have constantly pointed out how Lucy cannot possibly be living on merely $80,000 before taxes in New York City with a one bedroom apartment, and even an Yves Saint Laurent tote bag. From the very beginning, Harry’s character tells Lucy that her job is the fact that she markets herself as a luxury good, that those women who wanted to hire her opt to do so not because it’s more effective than dating apps or meeting someone through a friend but because if they’re lucky enough to, they can afford her. Just like their luxury bags, accessories, and furniture. Lucy also confesses on their first date that she has debts. If Lucy was not well-dressed and seen to be someone who can afford luxuries, then how will she be a luxury good? Her body and what she wears around it allows her to be a display of excess, and for this commodity to be evaluated. Her body is a site where class, morality, and worth shows up. Value attached on appearances and consumption (Marx 47-53).

“The Spotlight Effect” is the term of this phenomenon, wherein people perceive themselves to be constantly reviewed and judged much more than they actually are. They are constantly under an illusion of transparency as such that we have internalized surveillance within ourselves (Gilovich et al. 219-21). This is especially true all throughout the film. When Lucy confronts her bride about what made her want to marry the groom, the bride in deep shame utters that “He makes my sister jealous […] like I’ve won.” The bride recognizes that she has no real reason to believe that her sister really is jealous but she knows that her sister accepts that the groom is taller, makes more money, and is more handsome than her own husband. It is baseless and yet the bride’s romance and feeling of being valuable is entrenched in this fact. In Lucy and John’s first scene together, Lucy says that people are better matched with people who had the same families as them. John says his family ‘Voted for Bernie, poor, and shitty [...] Are we soulmates? Lucy answers, “Probably.”

In contrast to her dinner with Harry, where she asks if his parents ever fought in front of him, Harry says that “No […] I don’t understand it.” Lucy turns towards him “I’m the type to fight in the middle of the street.” On their second date, Lucy once again makes a point of their position in the marketplace, with Harry being a unicorn, and her being a dropout and of no dowry whatsoever—she was not the girl that someone like Harry marries. What I think most people fail to recognize in Song’s film is that all these characters have merely put themselves in an imaginary chart of who is above who and who isn’t. What happens when all of your characters are under such a Spotlight Effect is that they in turn view people around them in the same way. That men are reduced to their height and financial ability, and women are reduced to their age and their body. Even Harry who we see to be a man of such worthiness shrivels under the spotlight, making himself get a 6-inches height surgery, and making himself believe that this secret makes him any less to be loved—that if he was not 6’2 he would’ve never had the courage.

Another scene in the film where Lucy and Harry come back to his huge $12 million apartment, Françoise Hardy’s “Le Temps de l’amour.”:

C’est le temps de l’amour

Le temps des copains et de l’aventure

Quand le temps va et vient

On ne pense à rien malgré ses blessures

(It is the time of love / The time for friends and adventure /

When time comes and goes / We think of nothing despite our wounds)

Portraying time as fluid in principle. A break in the realities of a world grounded in the economics of late capitalism that is characterized by endless production time. In Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, he introduces the idea of a spectacular time wherein time is seen as consumable and geared to be viable to make profit for decreasing lived time for ourselves wherein we are in complete control of our time: where we own it (Debord 78-79). “Le Temps de l’amour.” Subjects the concept of time in this idea as being meant to live. After a few seconds it cuts to Harry Nilson’s “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City”:

I’ll say goodbye to all my sorrow

And by tomorrow I’ll be on my way

I guess the Lord must be in New York City

I’m so tired of gettin’ nowhere

Seein’ my prayers goin’ unanswered

I guess the Lord must be in New York City

Here we see John in his dirty and cramped apartment with three other people who annoys him first thing in the morning. John is stuck in a space and time constricted life, he is stuck in his cycle of hustle culture—in trying to make it as a theater actor by picking up shifts on a catering job. In the scene near the end, Lucy and John end up kissing each other and this gets a reaction from John, he confesses that it’s been years since they’ve been together and yet “I still can’t afford to be with you.” That in those years he has gotten nowhere at all.

Here lies why most people are avid to call it a “broke boy propaganda” because he does not change at all. But even then, what promises did John make to Lucy when they agreed to get back together? Picking up double shifts and commercial jobs. The public seems to be desensitized to the actual difficulty of navigating the economic world, that the norm that has risen is to hustle, and that if following our dreams requires us to be something we do not identify with, we must always sacrifice. The bare minimum that is expected of our financial state is to sacrifice which time we own for ourselves, enslaved to the idea of a better future. Late capitalism has warped society’s mind to default consumption and the guilt of not being able to consume, to be its own moral standard.

Another thing that Debord delves into is that we have internalized the spectator, similar to the spotlight effect. What we have to show becomes a performance, that even when you are not being watched you still are being evaluated by yourself (Debord 131). Lucy imagines her own social market, she puts herself above John and below Harry. She accuses John that a relationship is not worth having just because he cannot afford it—that it is not more worthy just because it is more expensive. If Lucy had simply wanted to raise her imagined value, she would’ve chosen Harry. But is this not merely a repetition of an internalized misogyny in seemingly a “rational” choice hiding the patriarchal idea itself: a woman’s worth of choice being defined by the economic and social viability of her partner?

There is a reason why many formal film critics have said that Materialists is a quintessential film that depicts the modern dating scene. I’ll take it a step further and say that it is a modern romance. It has birthed it, that within such a simple framework, and honest dialogues, Song has managed to hide its layers of complexities like Hemingway’s iceberg, and its strength in being the romance is the reason itself for it being so divisive. It upsets a lot of people because they have not yet truly understood its meaning, but for Song’s Materialists to make sense it needs to be seen during a time where the general audience can distance themselves from it. For them to forget the realities of this present time, to go back to it as a nostalgia, as Jameson’s pastiche—and then when it is far removed from our reality then perhaps the film can fully embody what it wants to say. I said that Materialists refused to change along with time in regards to Jameson’s idea of romance reemerging as a different form in periods of major social transitions, I think it in itself is the different form that emerged in the pinnacle of the bursting capitalism bubble. That’s why it leaves a bitter taste in a lot of viewer’s mouths, why it’s so unfamiliar, and why people can’t decide if it’s romance or not. It is disruptive and yet strangely is so cliche in its form, and that is exactly why it is romance.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton UP, 2020.

Gilovich, Thomas, Victoria Husted Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky. “The spotlight effect in social judgment: an egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance.” Journal of personality and social psychology 78.2 (2000): 211.

Gleiberman, Owen. “Variety.” Variety, 11 June 2025, variety.com/2025/film/reviews/materialists-review-dakota-johnson-chris-evans-pedro-pascal-1236422873.

Hardy, Françoise. “Le Temps de l’amour.” Spotify, open.spotify.com/track/466oY8S56LpP2C9Okp6SIn.

Hassenger, Jesse. “Is ‘Materialists’ Actually a Horror Movie?” GQ, 17 June 2025, www.gq.com/story/is-materialists-actually-a-horror-movie.

Jameson, Fredric. “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre.” New Literary History, vol. 7, no. 1, Jan. 1975, p. 135. https://doi.org/10.2307/468283.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism and consumer society. na, 1988.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Policy. Vintage, 1867.

Nilsson, Harry. “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City.” Apple Music, music.apple.com/us/album/i-guess-the-lord-must-be-in-new-york-city/298413002?i=298413012.

Rosenberg, Josh. “I’ll Never Forgive ‘Materialists’ for Choosing the Wrong Guy.” Esquire, 16 June 2025, www.esquire.com/uk/culture/film/a65077663/materialists-pedro-pascal-ending-explained.

I know you are good. But what about that time? “That time I told you I tried to kill myself, and you told me that I should really just kill myself.” She asked me why I had attempted to make it about death, and that if that’s what I wanted—to kill myself and then punish them. Then let me be. I say, “Wow.” In this little space between us, and all these feelings in this room, all of it is attributed to me. Stuffing us with what sadness that is almost palpable. Whatever I am right now is just a fiction of my mind. I know I shouldn’t hate my mother this much, and I’m so sorry to her, to be the subject of all this hatred. I tell her, I write about you all the time, but I can’t even show you because it is so sad. She says I hate her. That all I do is push her away—”But no, you leave me in the middle of my sentences while I’m talking–you just leave.”—You never come back. All you do is leave. In my mind, how am I to blame that all I am equipped for is a life of leaving? That I want to leave my own life?

And I hate it especially when things that are trivial to us because they are so common of a knowledge prove themselves to be worthy of being so accepted. I hate it when a psychology student tells me that the most formidable part of my life that sets me up for all my innate characteristics, and all the ones that I try to hide, is rooted in my childhood. I know that I didn’t have a particularly depressing childhood, I won’t say too much but I know I wasn’t abused or any of the pity party stories they play for television. But all I remember is being so sad. And if this state of being is something that can be inherited—as science says, then why am I the only one suffering? For the longest time, I really wanted to be a mother and I know it is selfish, but sometimes I want to prove that I can be a mother that I had wanted for myself. I do not know if I can take it if my daughter inherits this sadness of mine, or even if it’s not in the genetics, I fear the time that she’ll learn how to live with a mother like me. What if she won’t even notice it, and then she grows up and it permeates her thoughts. The realization that her mother is so sad, because what if her mother decides to leave before she even has the chance to grow up?

What mother tells their own child to kill themselves? Before she leaves the room she asks me what attention is it that I wanted. I felt like a child begging and crawling on my knees to be liked. Yes, my mother did love me, but she does not like me. “Would it be enough?” I turn to her, “If what you want is to not have me as your mother so be it.” Of course, I hold a lot of biases here because the daughter is writing this, I know mothers have their own feelings that they are entitled to. I wish I liked my mother. I wish she wasn’t the type of mother who would tell their child to kill herself. Though maybe I really am an attention-seeker, plenty of people had mothers that didn’t even talk to them, plenty of people had mothers that put their hands on them, plenty of people had worse. But my god, I hate my mother, and I hope the lord forgives me for having this much hatred in my heart over a woman.

I’m so sorry, but how do you forgive the woman who first betrayed you? One that had forbidden you to talk too loud, too smart, too opinionated, one that had forbidden you to learn to be angry? How do you forgive that? You read Woolf, Cixous, Moi, de Beauvoir, Garcellano, etc. and then get so angry because your mother would never understand—she says it is my fault that when I speak she does not understand and that I make her seem stupid. She says she just allows me and swallows the embarrassment whenever I make her appear a laughing stock. But I know the tragedy: Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.

How dare she! It is not my fault you feel stupid! I say, I am so scared of ending up like you. Why is my inability to shut up about subjects that interests me, and god forbid they require good education or active reading, so discouraged? Why is it that to talk with my mother I even have to employ a good conversation between two strangers? How is the weather today? Which celebrity died today? Is the president merely scheming people? Let me talk about my works, let me talk about my life, let me talk about my works about my life. Please, this is the only way through. “I’m so scared that my siblings will grow up and they will foster these same emotions I have—these same thoughts. Because it is so hard, and everyone thinks I’m being normal and this is what adults do, adults just live. Living in itself is already difficult.” I always think of killing myself, I always think of it. It never shuts up. When I tried to kill myself, and then you told me to just go ahead and kill myself, I went ahead and tried to kill myself.

She leaves.

I started tying a noose and locked my door. I stare at it. I remember the influencer that died a month ago from hanging herself. She was full of life. Was. I wondered if I’m going to regret it in the middle of dying. She started knocking and I was so embarrassed to actually go through it. I did not want to be seen this way. But the times, I had allowed her to see—kill yourself. So instead I plopped faced down on my bed. She sits besides me.

I do not understand.

What do you mean I don’t listen to you?

In my memory,

You had been my baby

Since forever.

Even babies grow up to become full human beings, ones that aren’t constricted to what their hair looks like, and if their mother can see their scalp from it being so thin.

I love my mommy, I remember when I was a kid I would always cry before she leaves for work. She’d then hug me while I cry until I fell asleep and then leave. I wake up, my lolo sits beside me, I ask for my mom then but she isn’t there. So my lolo takes me to Jollibee. I remember when my mom and I would sit by the window and we would sing songs together. Or when she’d beg her officemates to take me to my swimming lessons via taxi when she had work. Sometimes I wish I’d get that again, and I know that the phone works both ways. But surely even if it was also her first time living and being a mother to a girl who feels too much—surely deep in her heart she still sees me as that baby who would eat blueberry cheesecakes with her. Surely she remembers me before I had gotten so sad.

The conversation has started, the fire is lit, and the blankets are too warm. But my mother and I will never actually talk about this. I’d stay talking about my sadness, and she’ll keep taking the blame. Both holding on to the dissipating memories that they both shared. I’ve come to terms with the fact that growing up sometimes does require this volatile need to be separated from your parents, I mean it is all Hollywood can come to conclusion on. No one ever mentions the grief.

I worry that no one would remember me when I was so pure, happy, and kind. Before I am tainted with the sour ability of handling life and what it’s got to offer. I still sleep with the blanket I’ve repeatedly tied to a noose, if I had died when my mother told me to kill myself. How would she grieve? Would she have been thinking that she killed her forever baby? Just past the threshold for adulthood? That she killed the baby she had at the age her baby died? I know it’s pathetic to plead, but I just want to be someone’s baby. I can’t get myself to believe in God. I can’t get off of kissing men. Please let my mom remain, she doesn’t even call me by my nickname anymore. I do not want to punish my mother, but maybe if I died that night she would’ve thought that it was my last act of cruelty.

Would I still be her baby?

Her forever baby?

I asked my women friends if this was a natural occurrence, they said it should hurt a bit and then enter. But it wouldn’t enter, not at all. So I accepted at an early age that perhaps, I am really a virgin. Forever doomed to be one.

When David (he wasn’t really David but I write his name too much that the smallest thing I could do for myself is not write his name because all I can do is write about him.) When David and I first met I showed him a poem about frogs and how close they were to God. “Arlyn you are kind of like God.” I suppose when men meet a woman for the first time they just casually compare them to God.

Sometimes I blame God that I am able to meet someone so early, when I am still not made for it, when I was not at the state of mind and sanity to be able to comprehend it and nurture it and not let it die. We were walking and he asked me about my dream. I asked if it was a career thing or just in general. He said both. I told him I wanted to be a lawyer, and then I also just really wanted to have a long table dinner with lots of food and cheese and all my friends around me. David asked me, “Would I be invited to your long table dinner?”

I do not know if I see him in such a way because I look at him that way, but he looks at me and he looks forgiving. Like he’ll never learn to be angry with me, disappointed yes, but angry no.

“I’ll see if you’re deserving.”

“I’ll bring expensive wine.”

I was eighteen, I loved you since the day I first met you. And you don’t and that’s okay.

Recently, I saw the Juan Luna portraits in the National Museum. It took me so long to go there, I was supposed to go with another guy, but that ended too just before. I did not know what to do, I was going there because I had wanted to rid myself of anything that reminds me of you, David.

Do you remember the night I told you I favored Juan Luna and Spoliarium? So when we first met, you told me you had read all about him because you wanted to impress me. You told me he killed his wife and mother-in-law, and you lifted my cup on the table and you used tissues to wipe the cold water rings it left. I say what would prompt him to do that. You told me, “My art professor warned me about artists.”

“What do you mean?”

“That they feel too much.”

“You know I write right? That I am an artist.”

“I know.”

It’s like you condemned me into a life of feeling for you.

Then as the day went on, we sat side by side, and our knees were touching, our hands rested above it. And your knuckles were touching mine. It laid so still, and then a nudge, then a nudge, another nudge, until the knuckles were intertwined and the fingers would refuse to meet. I never knew you could foreplay hand-holding for 15 minutes.

David, do you remember when we were in Kikufuji, and the food burnt my tongue. I looked stupid because my mouth became immobile and you told me to open my mouth, and you blew air on the food in my mouth. In retrospect it was almost yucky. But I was so in love with you. Sometimes I see us in third person when I am with you. Like I am someone from the outside looking in. Or when you resorted to using a spoon with your nondominant hand because you couldn’t use the chopsticks if you were holding my hand. Or when we would thumb wrestle, and you would let yourself lose? Sometimes, I am almost convinced you loved doing it so that you’d have a reason hold my hand.

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Do you remember when you left? And the silence that ensued?

Or that when you came back, you said

“Arlyn, am I still invited to your long table dinner?”

You do know I love you. I gave it to you. When I gave you my virginity, the fact that I was even able to give it meant that it was meant to be given to you. Even my body welcomed you in. If some day I allow myself to be have even less self-respect, I would crawl my way to beg you to bring your expensive wine.

Do you remember when you were gone I wrote a poem about your snores and how I wish I am the only one who will ever get to hear it. And you read it, and you said you felt the sadness that my writing consists of, that you never snore. I insist that you do because I had hard nights from it. You asked your friends if you snored, they say you did not. I cried then, because then my selfish need came true—that I am the only one who gets to hear it. And then you asked me, what would make you snore when you are with me. I say I do not know.

On Lorde’s David, there was a lyric.

‘I made you God cause it was all that I knew how to do’

When you took my virginity, I said ‘Oh, God.’ Clearly I knew God isn’t real. That you are not God, but my God, my need of you exceeds my need for a God. Please never compare me to God again because what do you know? It is impossible that you know what you are talking about unless this importance you have in my life is reciprocated with mine in yours.

I guess, I should thank you and myself that we could never make it work. That I cannot love for the two of us, and yes, I did tell you that you were cruel to ask me how I am on Christmases because you had offered me a glimpse of how it would be like to have you in my long table dinner, where you will be beside me and kissing my cheek.

You’ll always find the life not yours appealing. So I thank you.

Because in that life I would’ve forgiven you in just about anything, you could choose to say you love me and have another woman behind my back and I would’ve forgiven. Your mother would’ve hated me and that would be okay, I would deform my bones to be the woman that is required of me. Or maybe, that would never be a problem and I would simply hate your snore. You’ll hate my irritability. But that’s okay, we will have our long table dinners with the people we love. In that life we loved each other without any complications.

When you are not with me, which seems to be this life and the rest of it, you are allowing me to keep the dream alive a little longer.

David, I sometimes hope you read this. You will forever be invited to my long table dinners. It does not matter if we are not in each other’s lives anymore nor if any ounce of care is left. It does not matter if I cease to have love for you nor if the realization that you will never love me that way again dawns upon me. The door will always be open.

So please bring your expensive wine, and after dinner when you begin to leave, please linger a little longer.

So, I sit there watching the female lead choose between a broke man and a multi-millionare. I was feeling neutral throughout the film until. “I don't want to hate you because you're poor,” I cried. I had not expect such a simple line to find its profound meaning within me. I have always thought I was someone who was more emotionally-driven in romances, but as I sit there I have come to realized that the men that I had come to love had come to me in the form of Pedro Pascal’s character. That in itself establishes that all the men I had come to care for in my big age, and those that had cared back had always been miles richer than me.

That who the Chris Evans broke man boy was to us as a viewer was probably me to those boys. But I supposed it doesn’t really matter, that man was supposed to pay for everything, no? That the cost of being with me is to serve a purpose in my life than just so-called romances, that these romances aren’t fruitful if it doesn’t require the man to make my life better.

One time, I was telling a guy that he hates me. I say, he doesn’t care. He furrows his brows and I sink lower into my seat, I can feel that I was going to be ashamed soon. He said, “I do not understand where this comes from, I spend our country’s monthly minimum wage on you in the three times we saw each other this week.” I say, if this was his basis of caring then he should’ve let me payed my half, that if I was going to lose over every argument over this then let me pay. He disregards it, and I loved him. We kissed a lot after that.

And I used to swear that I was the kind of woman who would pull her weight. But the cost of being in relationships where you never had to think about money—where they had very little bearing—is that you start to hate the others who care just because they cannot do the same. Just because they do not have the money.

A few months ago, I had to pick up my half of the bill on a date, and I got this bile rising up my gut thinking about how I had never had to look at a bill in dates since I started university, I called a friend and went on and on talking about how I was going to ghost him. Such a small thing can ruin an entire idea of companionship. A few months ago, a guy wanted me to talk about my exes, I supposed men get off on comparing themselves to other men because he wanted to talk to me about what they had. And I say everything, what they were, what their cars were, what the hobbies were, and he sits so still, and he said “Arlyn, I am not this.” I do not realize its importance then, I say “So what?”

When we broke up, I found myself complaining about his brokeness. My friend told me to take it easier with the guy, that this guy is middle class and he does not deserve to get compared to people who had come in contact with blood money. I know until this day the guilt eats me up, because often I feel like I have no choice but to be with these men. Blood money men. That perhaps I am a leech, but I supposed I just require the freedom that is immediate in them.

I do not know how to materialize it but there is a specific romance that is only felt within these types of men. I had only fallen in love twice. Once with the son who was in line to be the inheritor of the role of a haciendero, and the last one was with someone even richer than him. So I seek within myself, how come them? What is it that they both have that I get this gnawing ache in my chest when they kiss my shoulder.

Is it because they both play the same sports? Since that’s really the only similarity I found, or is it because they were both rich and I never really had an actual problem with them, that money makes everything surface level seem so big, because there is no other problem to think about. That there is no excuse when you can make time work for you. I beg my friends, to tell me what it is, they said that I know what it is, I just refuse to do it. That I should start dating within my financial league, but they don’t have that. That something that makes these types of boys so near to me.

There is something in me that only they seem to understand. Perhaps it is my sadness and the unsaid distance that is both thoroughly maintained. Or perhaps, I was just lucky that the only two boys who kissed me on my pisiform and then on the back of my neck were also just lucky enough to be born without having to be deprived of materials.

The last one, he said to me, that it is not wise for me to think that I want to be a mother, and to have a kid just because of that. I say, I’ve always seen myself as a mother and not as a wife. He asked why I would do that to my nonexistent kid. That they deserve a family, a happy one.

He asked me if I talk a lot to my parents.

I say “No.”

“Do you deserve that?”

Silencio.

“I’m just saying I think it would be better if they had talked to you more, wouldn’t you want that?”

So in Materialists (2025), Dakota Johnson’s character asks Pedro’s if his parents ever shout at each other, if he was also someone who is passionate about an argument in the middle of the NYC streets. Pedro’s character says, “No. I do not see the point.”

That being poor had put a strain on people’s lives that they are only suited to finding what they had been accustomed to. That they would not take anything different in the name of economy & familial reasons. I am not saying that it relies on money, but the perception of our happiness heavily relies on it.

That when you’re poor you become a nuisance. You become someone that they cannot understand. That you become someone who dislikes people because you are uncomfortable in your own poorness. That being poor you come with its habits, its way of thinking, and its way of being loved and loving. That romance is never the same in meaning between two people that does not have the same type of regard towards money and time.

Because sometimes I hate people for treating me a certain way, that it is not as how I’ve seen it done in films that are commercialized with love, and I fail to realize it is because they do not have the means to provide that. So when the Dakota’s character chose the broke boy, I supposed it is as romance that romance can get. Perhaps, she didn’t settle because she still believes she remains on that level. I tell my friend, “I am so scared. I have this fear that one day I'll be married to someone rich enough and I might not be loved that much.” He replies, “And you’re okay with that.”

But maybe I am lucky to be with someone who worships both the money and then me. Or have the capacity to change in to someone who’ll take their partner’s worship over whatever financially stable future that they will never get to have.

I do not know, but the only thing I am certain of is that the freedom I seek of within these men might just be available if I had what they have. Money.

He does not hate me. I sat there, and I told them that I was going to end it with him. That we both know it is a doomed romance and that I see it ending and I feel it even faster than my brain can process. Someone told me to think. All I write about is how rare it is to actually find someone, and I do not dare label it, but someone who knows. Yet the fastest thing I do is to discard it. The next Saturday I sit with my friends from high school, and I say I am being consumed. That I am stupid to put myself in that situation knowing I cannot handle it. I said I agreed because I knew how it was going to end. That it was ending the same way it does when I try to sabotage everything good. The way I did in October 2023, during my Tokyo trip in 2024, during Valentine’s and this. Then I said I cannot, I will not know what to do because this is much different, this is much more real—that he knows. Perhaps he doesn’t and he does not agree but he knows what is reserved for very little people to know. No, maybe he doesn’t know that he knows.

I hate him, I said he was too rigid. That he’s too much of a proper boy, that it forces me to be proper, but it is the one thing that I am not. I don’t know when I will ever be. Because people say that the right person will come, but then the realization dawned upon me. For I will never be anyone’s right person. I do not know how to fix myself. I tried going on medication, therapies, I tried to consult with my friends, I went on a year of celibacy, and still what is wrong with me resurfaces. So last night, I texted my friend. Why am I evil? He said that it’s because I was so short that all the evil is condensed. I hope it was just that, that there is nothing inherently unfixable of me that I was just short and that was just the reason.

I am plagued with hope. I love romance as much as the next girl does but I know it is not for me, for who I am. I hope the goodness and the kindness that I have for my friends will trickle down unto my lovers. That I treat them the same way my friends know me. That I am not difficult to like nor love, because it is all I am. I talk a lot, I say this must be the reason. That he cannot possibly like me in public because it is not allowed for he is Chinese, and I am not. That I do not have the rights over anything because you shouldn’t put someone in a difficult situation if you actually liked them. I say to my friends that it is mean. I blame it on family differences, that there are people who get to have parents who give them everything and there are those that are just happy they're there. I blame it on economic differences, attachment styles, on my mental illness, on our pasts. I blame it on everything rather than the fact that I was not equipped to be understood and known and loved romantically, because I cannot truly do the same.

Everyone’s saying to love thy friends and yourself instead. But I do, and there is no deep self-hatred found upon me because they only manifest in my romance. I do not know what to do, how can some people be so good with other people until it comes to the person that they want to be physically close with. Because I do want to feel hot from the way your arms wrap around me while I sleep, and I want to kiss your fingernails even if they are dirty, and I want to give as much as I can if it proves anything. But I hold the selfishness in wanting you to feel bad just to satiate whatever unrealized anger I have towards you. I hate you so much, that I let you get so close, too close and that I can never take it back. Perhaps, I hate that you remind me why it will never work out with you or anyone else.

I do not know if I love you, some part of me does because you know me more than other people do. But I do not know you well enough, I am so scared of knowing you, it was easier to hate you for all the things you weren’t than it was to like you for all the things you are because I didn’t want to. I know it is selfish but I think that the greatest thing I could do for you is being exactly who I am in romances, so that you realize that I am not worth taking your mind over. That my presence deprives you of your life, because it has become a chore. That the most selfless thing I can offer in romances is to be selfish and cruel.

My friend Faye would argue that I am not a real whore because I can still count how many times I get fucked in a year. By men’s definition of whores it is merely defined as women who give access to men; whether it is sex, conversation, or any acknowledgement that they exist. I cannot help it but be a whore. I know that I am better off without the constant need to be an unjust idea of a woman to a man that I will barely try to know. I cannot help it. I talk about wishing I was more human when these people look at me, but deep down I know that there is a deep flaw inside me that is reserved to manifest itself towards romantic partners who might have the idea that I am capable of being loved.

All the men talk about their first loves. Yes you loved them yes they are the first, what now? These people you claim to love, you talk about them as if they are an idea not a person. Idea labeled in “First love”, and it is lazy and unrealized, that when you tell me that she matters because she is your first—it is nonsensical only brought upon the idea that firsts should be special. “Well,” I ask “What is it that you like about her?” “She is smart.” I think there is a bigger worry in your idea that the average woman is dumb. When the average woman has a dormant rage over the deep sadness found in being not who they were promised to be. “She is my first love.” I hope you bury yourself in your own tongue.

Maybe I am envious because I am a whore, and I cannot really quantify what I feel. And I doubt that anyone had actually loved me, even less anyone who had actually had me as their first love. So if men only get one chance, I am royally fucked. So, I am now writing about it hoping that it would leave me some answers. That I am a whore and have fucked boys that I thought I loved, and if you only ever get two loves in your life like Sex and the City says. Then how fucked am I? And if men only get first loves then where will I find mine? If I am such a fucking whore, how come no one has ever gotten truly close? I like to think that being a whore who writes puts me on top of the emotional intellect of my fellow women. That the whore part is a cruelty that is allowed in men rather than the shame reserved for women, and the writer part singles me out from all the mindless fucks out there. Sometimes I feel like it defines my worth, that as long as I keep myself (and my sex) controlled—and not too emotional that I start to remind the men of other women, I have won.

They say that my ‘first love’ broke me. That I was too hurt and thus I inflict it upon myself and to others, as to be so unfeeling that I am able to forget romances as fast as it came. But this came before him. That despite the fact that I lost my virginity to that guy, I had always been a whore. That with all the love I have, it is not enough. I say I’m sorry I am a whore I am not deserving of you. That you are kind and good, a handsome man, but everyone is afraid of a woman who whores and writes about it.

Everyone reminds me of each other, that sometimes all that is left to do for me is make up some artificial category in my head and try to find someone that matches the description. They say, I do not talk. That I pull my tongue in as soon as I speak. That I speak, and even then it is never about me. Someone told me that when I talk to him, and I pretend that it is personal and deep—he says I talk about my aunt, my cousin, my lola, my favorite movie, a vacation, I talk about how I write and then I never do anything about it. He tells me that I say I write; “I write.” That I never talk about my dreams, my priorities, what I write about, what makes me happy—and I know then, that my sadness had translated without even having to say it. I say, I am sorry please forgive me sometimes I feel too much and the body that I have created for myself had been brought down by the cruelness of my thoughts. All day and night I perform, I have no idea when it ends.

The feminists say that the whore is a reclamation and the other feminists say that the whore is the farthest thing from it. That sex with a man in itself is a degradation because their little pornrot brains derive pleasure from the degradation of a woman–debauch. When I was having a little breakup moment last year from the person I trusted more than enough to pop the cherry, I asked him, “What do you think we should’ve done differently?”

“I wish we hadn’t had sex earlier.”

He apologized, he said that he did not see me as this, that it does not define me, he says that this always ruins things.

So perhaps I am not afraid of whores, I am afraid of having sex with men I care about, if it leads them to be so unfeeling.

That no matter how unfeeling I claim to be when it is about sex, it takes everything out of me.

Please, please do not let go of what little love you have for me after we have sex.

I know it is not about sex it is about finding a person, and my innate desire to have this person and be with him that when we reach out for each other and embrace and we would both silently wish we could melt like candles and just integrate that this way I could know what it feels like to be me, them, and what it meant to be us. And I know, this is not what anyone wants to hear, but I genuinely want someone, I want it. I don’t want anyone I want it. It. Singular. I want to love and cry and kiss their feet, I want it.

It is about finding them and fucking them and you become a person and it does not scare them.

It is so hard, and I thought perhaps it is that I am not in love enough with anything—that I am too indifferent and what had used to bother me so much have merely become a common feeling. That you cannot write about anything because it doesn’t really matter. In February, I wanted to prove to myself—I am lying, I was merely trying to impress a guy—so I wrote him a poem. I said, Wordsworth had been reported to have a failed quality of poems ever since he had been married, that this sedentary lifestyle of being content ruins the poet.

But I am far from content, happiness, or safety. I am merely dumb. I have become far too dumb for myself to even write poetries. I turn to confessionals, and it is all I could write about, like a diary entry for the world to see. Here lies the fact that in my honesty I try to hide my own weakness in being a writer. All I am equipped with are ramblings and thoughts that are made to sound as though it differs from all the other thoughts that came before it.

But confessionals do exist in poetry. The unravelling of the I of what it means to be I, and Zizek would say that this is our own undoing, that we aren’t finding ourselves by looking upon we must simply be and to do. Poetry, and its constricted form and endless manipulation of words that looks good when they are beside each other. It is almost narcissistic, how honest could one be if it has to go through a series of will this or will this not poem? That even when you write the way Bukowski write about whores and cheating it does not equate to the full thought of writing confessionals the way you would tell them to a priest in a Catholic church.

But you do not understand. That it exists in the poetry the worst thing about myself. The reiterations, the gnawing feeling of missing. Repeating. That certain words and lines doesn’t exist on its own, that my body has to tire itself to write, to see someone and really see and to see someone to really see yourself. Or to abuse what the romantics meant, to disprove them, to relate. To abstractify the thought of mundanity, to force an abstract to become mundane. That I compare love to dishes in the sink, that i write poetries about lighting your cigarette by the stovetop. I used to write so good; sex, sadness, adulting, rape, first dates.

And I try, to be miserable once more.

Once, I was so miserable that I birthed a string of poetry that I now cannot decipher how I ever wrote those.

That every day I am so miserable that I cannot turn into anything but my own mind that is trying to save itself from its own demise. People love to talk about heart and butterflies in the stomach. I love you. Goodbyes. Fucking comparing people to stars and eyes to galaxies.

But it is not true. If I remember correctly your eyes were black and the bone in your back seems to stick out a bit too much. That you feel so much like a person that it is the thing that I held unto. That if you were real then my words were. I do not dare reduce such presence in my life to compare it to a painting because paintings do not do this to me. The laughs aren’t like flowers in the wind—they are laughs and annoying and embarrassing and yet still, you talk about your teeth being too big.

I told him, I never noticed that your teeth were too big, and I kiss you a lot.

That sometimes that in itself can make you render all the logical meaning of incompatibility as something redeemable. That it is okay because it is only in this that you feel like your whole.

But if it does make me whole, then why is it that this makes me write poetry?

That maybe now when I am without it, because nothing serves as a reminder anymore, is the way that it should be. That the best thing that could happen to poets like I, is to lose their ability to write their poems.

Then I write my confessions, because in honesty exists memories that are now far too vague and the soul of what it had felt like had been too long gone to write poetries about anymore.

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So there I was, my heart racing, and I was trying not to puke. My eyes dim and I feel my own light go out. But I didn’t die, the pills worked but there weren't enough of them. I didn’t tell anyone that I had just tried to kill myself. I would rather publish it for hundreds to see than tell someone, because then it would be too intimate and the thought of that suffocates me, and it’s funny how I’m okay with dying as long as no one has to ever really know me. I am so sad. Sometimes I think that if I have to present myself and my life through pretentious Instagram stories and posts or mindless Twitter banter, then it would put off the suicide. Anyway, I was in a heated argument with a guy and he told me that I don’t talk about myself, how do you tell someone that the sadness is contagious and that it is all I am. I don’t mean it to be like some manic pixie thought that male directors write in their films. It’s just that I care about them, and I fear the sadness being shared as a personal testament of what I am–That it defines me–But it does. I'm afraid they’ll be sad because of the proximity to it, the way people avoid talking about cancer in that way, because the thought of that burden happening to a loved one is too great of a suffering on its own.

Anyways, I failed my suicide attempt. I’m so embarrassed. I don’t know if I’m relieved. I didn’t fear it or anything. But all I could think of is that maybe I really am selfish. And if I die, would the people I care about even look for me? Or would they just realize after some time has passed and I come across their mind and wonder why I haven’t posted a new photo on Instagram. Many times I turn to anger, because it seems more logical. Anger doesn’t manifest on its own. I’m constantly angry at my mom, friends whose flaws I nitpick, I’m always angry at men who never seem to care about me enough to even have anger towards me. Anger is a feeling and that is exactly what they do not have. I once asked my friend, why am I always angry? I know I do not mean it, but I woke up today and it is the only thing I feel. He told me that anger is in the opposite spectrum of love, the way we cry when we feel so happy. I told him I understood. I know that I’m angry and I say bad stuff to the people I care the most about, and it is not an excuse but sometimes it is the closest thing you could get them to feel the sadness. Because the next thing is to miss me, and to mourn me, which is probably why I tried to kill myself–which is exactly why I am selfish. That I suffer too great and I needed to pass the burden of being hurt to someone else, when I should have had the strength to contain it. But I hope I extinguish this anger inside of me, but the only way it subsides is when I’m too spent, and my body has run out of tears to save me. So after I failed to kill myself, I didn’t feel sad I merely went back to being angry. I am filled with a new sadness that is so foreign to me, it transcends any hurt I’ve felt all my life.

And you ask me, why? I cannot tell you, because there is no reason. And there is no way of knowing me but through my sadness. Knowing me is so painful, I do not dare to let it be known, it’s like giving you a boarding pass to a sinking boat and taking them along for a ride singing nursery rhymes. Sometimes I wish people in my life would leave me, so that I do not have to do it myself. Last week I tried to kill myself, and I still don’t know if I wished it had gone through.

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She is wrong. When I was 17, I had already started to live on my own, my own apartment in the busy streets of Ayala—not rented. I led the life that middle class adults envied. I am proud of it, but I am not happy. I do my grocery shopping, I go to my Sunday flea markets, I swim in four swimming pools with a lazy river, I take too many taxis like I had money to burn, I shoot in film rolls, I order my authentic sushi because I will not have it any less. Still I wanted to kill myself. I was 17, I was frustrated because why can I not be better? This is the most that my life can get at 17 and still I fall victim to a sadness that cannot even be explained.

I never cut my wrists or my thighs or any part of my skin, so my therapist wondered if I was really into self-harm. No, I do not wish to harm myself or feel pain or have ugly scars, I simply wish to cease to exist. So two months ago when I got into a car crash, I laughed. My mom was crying and so were my siblings. Mommy asked me if I was okay, I told her that I didn’t really mind. She got angry with me. She told me to never say words like that again. And I sat there wondering when had it become so ordinary for me to feel this way, that my sadness do not even feel like such anymore because it is the only thing I’ve been.

My sadness lies in the fact that I wish to kill myself, like it’s an unbearable burden weighing on my mind. Just kill yourself. And I cannot really tell you why I wish to do so, because it is not equipped with reasons, I wish to kill myself the way you think about which food to eat for breakfast. I do not wish to kill myself but I need to. When I was 16, I considered to slit my throat with a kitchen knife but I worried that my siblings would see me in my crime. I want to kill myself but I do not wish to be remembered as the woman who killed herself. I try to find my purpose in different political beliefs and different people I meet and different lips to kiss. In the midst of all that it still begins and ends when I fall asleep and wake up thinking of how I am not supposed to kill myself.

I turn to art, I turn to God, I turn to the people I believe in, I turn to my futures I am sure to live. I know that I will never actually kill myself, but tell me, how does one live to grow old with the daily thought of wanting to kill themselves. I might be a writer, a lawyer, a stylist, or a trophy wife, and in all those futures I am merely sad. I am merely empty, that no amount of accomplishments or adournments will ever match with the sadness that occupies her. I tried to go to therapy, everything I already knew. I tried to take medications. I found that it was easier to live with it, and let the sadness consume me until it becomes my entire being. My friends love me, they say I make them happy. I tell them, “You warm my heart.” And it is true, my heart is always warm, I like laughing, I like talking until my saliva dries, and I like living. Only I wish I was in a body that was made to equip these feelings. That the greatest accomplishment I have yet to retrieve is the one where I simply live for myself, where it is never a chore.

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Before reading the work, I must remind you to please not waste your pity on me, and if you must do so, grieve for all the women in your life. As this is not a tragedy but merely a normal girl’s diary entry.

I was on the bus on my way to Manila, the conductor had just turned off the lights so all we could see was an aisle illuminated by blue LED strip lights. I got to ponder about how I spent my year 2024. I began then by recounting my memories from December and November. I thought of it very fondly as it was my half a year of magical thinking. For the past two months, my mind had no longer remained a slave to faux burdens that are placed upon a teenager’s shoulders. When I turned 19 in 2023, I had this strong reaction to being a year older. I was talking to my friends and we all agreed that now, life truly starts. Now, the titas would actually care if you had a boyfriend or not. So when I used to log in on Tiktok I would unconsciously fill my feed with how to attract rich men, how to appear classy, how to be a woman, amongst other things. I was an avid hater of these kinds of topics even back then, sincerity had fallen off the trend, the recession was so bad that all people want to be is to appear well off.

I do not know why. I was so afraid of ending up poor. But mostly, I do not understand why this meant that I allowed myself to feel like this was only achievable by marrying someone worthy. It is in this elitism that I have gotten many critics. Such criticism that is visible when it is for someone that has a mind or two, my friends with the same sentiments would say it is princess treatment, “I would not accept any less.” But of course they haven’t read Marx or Lenin or anything really so they don’t get the same kind of retort in their manner of dating. However, I, who was remarkably supposed to be more educated and aware about class, was not allowed to have the same sentiments that women have caged themselves to for centuries. I am not allowed to only like rich boys.

I used to hate the double standards back then. When my friend was in a yacht on the border of Switzerland and Italy in Lake Como he sent me a photo. I texted him back, “Dude you're literally rich wtf.” He laughed at my message. We don’t really talk about our money like that. We talk about privileges, sure. But never about how it actually sets us apart from the peers we claim to relate to. I am not that rich. But only someone privileged enough would say that. So I was talking to my friend and he replied with “Well you are what you eat.” I told him, “But all I’ve been with are rich men that's not even real.” He told me to read what he said once more. You are what you eat. I am not even that rich, I own an iPhone from 2020 and I ride a commuter bus regularly. As I am writing this I realize it is very hard to truly be conscious of your own class when the people you surround yourself with always seem to be living better. Comparison is not only the thief of joy, it is the thief of class consciousness.

Not to insult Joan Didion but in my very little lived life this was already the pinnacle of my entire existence, so this was my half a year of magical thinking. Not to insult her once more but my lessons were merely: your life does not revolve in romance, save money, and don’t smoke cigarettes. But hey! I was becoming an adult. I had just turned twenty. I am twenty and I still do not know how to figure out my internalized classism in romance. I had been so used to what I define as good. That the little things just do not make me happy anymore. How fucked can romance be when the simple idea of just being together is not enough to save it. I haven’t figured it out yet so I just swore off of romance instead.

And then.

I thought about October. In October, I wrote my magnum opus. It was an 8-page story about a child and her father. I wrote it while I listened to House Song by Searows on repeat for 5 hours. 5 hours, eight magnificent pages. I truly believe I was possessed by the devil that night. In October, I also lost my phone. Someone fucking stole it. In the same month, I was talking to some guy that was pogi. I thought he looked a bit gay. He looks bisexual which is a good thing in my book, my gay friends thought he was gay. He said he wasn’t. He was asking about my past sexual shit. Here I confirmed that he really was a straight boy. I recounted back to February that night that the fake bisexual was talking to me. I told him of the second guy that had fucked me.

Arlyn, that’s rape.

I said “What?” He repeated, “It’s rape.”

So here I was on the bus on the way to Manila, remembering that I was raped. It was a moment of silence. Not really shock because I was remembering it, not really sadness either, but I pulled out my phone to text my friend, “I just realized, #### raped me.” It took her a while to reply back. But she eventually did, “We’ve talked about this before.” I cannot believe I forgot. I was raped and forgot and then remembered and then forgot and then remembered once more that I was raped. I told her, how come I cannot remember it? She said that’s exactly how a trauma response manifests.

I’d like to inform people that I am a feminist, if I wasn’t I wouldn’t be so disgusted by my dating preferences. The type of feminist that also does not believe in sex work. Rape is not a sensitive topic for me, I can talk about it, dissect it, analyze it all day. But to hear and read about rape experiences from other people takes so much out of me. I was reading Pornography by Dworkin during August, I was in the airport, I was crying while waiting for my flight. Because compared to my rape that had already taken so much out of me, I cannot bear to imagine what it must’ve been like for other people. During August I was aware that I was raped.

So going back to the fake bisexual that reminded me once more. I told him “I don’t think it’s rape, I think he was just a bit awkward.” He said, “Arlyn, kahit na it is still rape.” I am the perfect victim who internally believed that rapes have a hierarchy, my rape was not that much of a rape. Then, it must not be rape. It is rape, but I have a hard time convincing myself that, because if I look past it blindly then it’s like I’ve never been raped at all. If I forget about my own rape then I wouldn’t be a rape victim.

But how bad was the rape? Maybe it wasn’t even that bad, it wasn’t that bad for me. But who am I to say anything, I am the victim who forgets. Again and again and tomorrow I’ll soon be forgetting once more. Let me recount February.

It was February, the boy I was meeting had large hands. He wasn’t very ugly but he looked weird which made him uglier. Even before he had raped me I thought he was ugly. But whatever he was a wasian, truthfully, how ugly can wasians actually be, I say my rapist is ugly but he does still look better than an average boy in Manila. He told me that we were going to hangout.

I was there sitting politely in his bed, he was playing the piano for me. It was our first time meeting, maybe I was the fool who believed in hanging out in people’s rooms. He was playing Married Life on the piano, I thought I could live with that. That even if this isn’t exactly a hangout, I could live with being in a romantic situation with some wasian who played the piano.

He told me to lie down and make myself comfortable, he lied beside me. My mind blanked. I knew it was coming, so I talked to him about octopi—octopuses, as he would correct me. He said octopuses were the correct plural term, not octopi. You see, everyone thinks that but it’s actually octopuses. Where I was lying, I could see his octopus plushies that were sitting on his bedside table looking at me, taunting me with their tentacles and inanimate eyes.

He grabbed my upper arm and turned me to face him. I forced myself out of the grasp and he was met with my back. He did it once more and asked me why I was acting weird. I do not know. I merely say that I am shy. He laughs at this. And then he kissed me. I let go. He kissed me again. It was a bad kiss. He kisses so wet, so fucking wet I might as well be kissing the octopus itself. I say “Noooo.” It wasn’t a hard no. It was Noooo. Like I wasn’t sure. “But—“ and then he kissed me again and then lower and then I just had to give in, right?

So tell me how was that a real rape. I did give in.

He told me “Can you suck my dick?” I frowned at him, I told him I do not like to suck dicks. He told me that it would feel good and that I should just try it. Forbid me for not knowing how to say no. But you see, at that moment I do not know what made me obey him. I do not know. I felt like a bitch of a dog. Like I was merely there naked and meant to suck a fat cock. I gave him the blowjob, he said you’re so good, stop doing that, I don’t want to cum yet. So he tried to finger me. It was bad. It hurt. It didn’t feel good. I tried to stop his hands but he thought I was stopping myself from my own orgasm. So he fingered me harder. From all the moments that I cannot stop myself from speaking, why did I allow myself to be mute now? He dug in fast and hard. And I was so sure I was going to get a fever after our meeting. I was looking at the ceiling, and my lungs felt like it was going to give out. If I stop my breath every once in a while my body should be alarmed by the lack of oxygen instead of feeling how two fingers were inside of me and how much it hurt.

Then he positioned himself on top of me. I said, “I thought we were going to get food.” Then he pushed in. “Stop! It hurts.” I moaned in pain. Can you blame him? I moaned anyway. He covered my mouth and said don’t be loud because his mother might hear. He stopped for half a second and then pushed. I said “No! It hurts, I cannot. I feel like I am going to die.” I am going to die. I am going to die by sex. He made me go on all fours, he pushed my back so that my tummy met the mattress. He pushed. His octopuses laid their eyes on me and my pussy was going to tear, my nose had started running with snot. All the octopuses could do was watch. I said once more that it hurts. I told him he should ease into it. He pushed harder. And the octopuses stood as an audience to my becoming as a whore who fucks on the first date.

I thank the lord that he was not that much of a rapist. He pulled out when he realized he cannot really do much, he said I should suck his cock to finish him off. He did not finish me off. He said, “Arlyn, why do you look like that?” I stared at him looming over me as he stood and I was sitting on his bed. I asked him if I could use the bathroom. I stood in front of his water stained bathroom mirror. I do not know for how long, when I emerged from it he told me that I looked distraught. I really wonder why. He took me to Chili’s after.

In Chili’s I forgave him. He was trying to be funny and he did pay for our meal. Then he brought me back to his apartment once more and tried to fuck me “Again? But we just did it.” He told me we need to finish it because he wasn’t even able to actually put his dick all the way inside. It was my responsibility to give him pussy sex and I feel like I had just given birth because of how much it hurt, but that’s okay he did pay for Chili’s. You know, I’ve had sex before with bigger guys and I knew it wasn’t supposed to hurt that much. He told me, “But Arlyn you are so wet.” That must’ve meant I wanted him. He fucking rammed the whole thing inside. And I told him it hurt “Ouch! Nonono ouch, no be gentle no please.” He tried to fuck me and his mother started knocking on his door so he told me to suck on his dick instead to be fast about it. And I was so full from Chili’s and my throat wanted to tear along with my pussy, and all I could think about was how I am going to puke. I hated myself for not puking. Because at the very least I shouldn’t have given a good head. But my mouth was getting raped and I want it to get over with, and then he pushed my head down his cock and I wanted to fucking cry. I didn’t. He finished, made me go to the restroom to wash. He opened the door and introduced me to his mom.

His mother said it was nice to meet me. I couldn’t look at her, I reached for the door. He went out too because apparently his father was waiting downstairs to take him to his fencing practice. Yeah he fences and I met both his parents on the day he raped me. I don’t know, I am so sorry. Two weeks later he got a job as a model on some runway. I started to get crazy, I started blocking him and then unblocking and then he would follow back as always, and then blocking once more. I don’t know whatever it was but I had this ironic need for him to need me. Two months later I saw some girl with him on my Tiktok feed, apparently the whole time–before the rape and after–he had a girlfriend, and his parents know. I wanted to kill myself. I was on the 50th floor in Makati, every day and night I would take my coffee on the balcony. I just looked down. I tried to follow his girlfriend because she studies in the same university as I do. I wanted to message, at least something. She blocked me before I even did anything. My mother locked my balcony door. I never proceeded with killing myself.

I never recounted back to September or the months before. I had just remembered February through October, it had taken every will of me to even remember anything else. It wasn’t too bad of a rape anyway. All my friend could say was “Girl, fuck him.” I might as well forgive him. Even as I am writing this I do not feel it. The one who got fucked that day wasn’t really me. I distanced myself from her when I left his room. Right now, there are tears in my eyes, but not in a way that I am sad, it is as though someone inside me is feeling it to save me from feeling it myself. In the hierarchy of rapes, it wasn’t that bad of a rape anyway. Many of the women I know have been raped, I was a fool to think that I was going to be the outlier. I do realize now that there are bigger things than not dating someone rich; like hoping to not be raped.

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So here, my nose burrowed in the depression above his collarbone. I was thinking. What a pretty boy. His nose is so straight. What a kiss! I haven’t been kissed like this for so long. Then I thought of how hard I should kiss him back. Should I kiss him like I mean it? Tender, long, with an adequate force. What is adequate? I tried to French kiss him, tongue and all. It was a really good French kiss. He pulled apart for a while and said, “Wow.” Yes! I always mean to wow when I kiss. He smells slightly of coconut, and I immediately thought of bringing him to El Nido. I would be there and my super hot 6 '2 boy with abs, I would hold his hand everywhere, and kiss his cheeks. He is so funny and he is my boy and sometimes I catch myself in the midst of kissing all these men. Where the line between genuine and objectification blurs itself in my intentions. Lana del Rey said when you know, you know. What do I do if it often feels like the next person in my life is the one to know.

There is a machine somewhere producing whatever boy you think you’ll love. Whether it was a boy with abs whose favorite movie is Y tu mamá también, he surfs too. Or a skinny one who won’t get off Soundcloud and skates in the streets of Manila at 3 AM. Or someone good and tall and a literature major. Or if you want to refrain from woeful romances, you are choosing someone who loves Uniqlo and listens to Clairo. Maybe you like them boring, but I heard boring people are nicer, so that’s lovely. You can get any boy. Ever.

I constantly fall in love with men so often I started believing I must be lesbian because even I cannot like men this much. It must be overcompensation. But I like writing about them more than I enjoy being with them. Truthfully, making out can only do so much. Like this physical desire forces me to humble myself down and proclaim myself as easy as to be taken by it. This desire that very well leaves very little for women, I take birth control, condoms, calendars, and every month I dread it. Even in dry seasons, I fear. Maybe tomorrow I’m the new Mary, not in a virgin way, just in a way that I got pregnant by some entity. All this anxiety brought upon by the simple thought of, “Oh! But I cannot take it anymore. I must kiss.”

So when me and my pretty boy were kissing I wanted to have sex that night. But there lies a greater satisfaction in saying “No. I do not want to do it.” If I had sex with every boy I ever romantically loved I would’ve accepted all the derogatory terms that are synonyms with ‘whore.’ My friend once told me I was scared of commitment that was why I cannot be with any of the pretty men I’ve ever been with, then she thought, maybe you really are a lesbian. I am not. I am a writer. I live for first dates. Often, when you get to know someone, you see them so much, in every degree of their personality. In its complexity I won’t be able to write about love anymore. So I take it in bite sized pieces, merely lasting months if not a week.

That was why I cannot write about my first boyfriend. He knows I loved him. I really did, it was the kind of love that grows with knowing. It was not the love that you just know. I felt the love that ‘Margaret’ by Lana del Rey was talking about when I lost my virginity to the prettiest boy ever. He was on top of me and I was on the verge of crying and he went still. He was looking at me, his eyebrows wanting to meet. Sometimes when I want to orgasm on my own I think of that particular face, not him particularly, but that moment. Before I met him for the first time, I told my friends. “I am so scared.” I know I’ll love him in lengths even my romantic nature cannot expect. Its magnitude had pulled me down under and drowned whatever sense I had left before I had even met him. He was with me and his elbows were touching my upper arm, he compared me to God. I was an atheist. Bob Dylan said that everyone has a God. My God that night was the pretty boy on top of me. In the background of Ayala’s high rise building lights that seeped through the edges of his thick curtains, I thought how lucky I was that I gave it to the love of my life. But F. Sionil Jose was right when he wrote his female protagonists, Sex was not as good as they said it was.

I met the second love of my life when I was about to board a plane from Tokyo. He was so tall and pretty and smart. Some guy flooded my phone with missed calls, but all I could think about on the way home was that. You can have any guy ever. If you were to ask me about this guy, I would not have anything to say. I supposed it was so large that if I ever tried to quantify it, it would look cheap. He did not deserve to be written in that form. I write too poorly to ever capture the essence of what it felt like. Some day when I loved him a little less, I could write poetry about it.

With him, I knew when I was eating my brie cheese and crackers and he was making me look at a deer. I knew when I was awake at 7 am and he told me he had stayed up so that he could catch my morning greeting. I never liked pet names. But I cannot stop myself. All I wanted to do was to kiss him. I want to eat his cheek. I compare him to those white bread in China, bao.

When we left each other’s life I begged the guy who took my virginity to hold me close because the love of my life was gone. He was there. I felt like maybe he really is the person for me. He was the actual love of my life. The loves of my life were both too great. I cannot even compare nor tell you whom I had loved more. But know, when one left, I had forbidden myself to ever have sex with anyone I didn’t love. I was not one of those women who cannot handle sex without the emotions that it brings. Perhaps that is where I was wrong, I should not have sex without feelings. If I brought the emotion to sex, I would have romance, and I would be able to surely tell. Let’s hope so. I should kill whatever comfort I have in casual sex. Sometimes I love and it feels like it does not have any foundation at all, like all my loves were comparable to a fucking black hole. That it is so great, even the stars burst in its own enormity that it becomes obsolete. I like to believe I love so much that all I am is someone who deprives herself of what it actually is.

The guy I was with last night. I knew again. I seem to know so frequently, perhaps I have never felt it at all.

But he was in my bed, and he looked so dreamy. He fit all the marks in my checklist on my notes app. Sometimes I feel as though I am not experiencing any of my romances correctly. He stood so fucking tall looking at the streets of Ayala. I looked at the places he was pointing. The city of Makati, Pasay, and Manila spread out before us, we even saw the planes taking off. I see the streets lined with my memories of romances. I look at him, with this sure pity that whatever romance I felt last night will lie exactly like the ones that did in the ghosts of the streets before us. When you live on the 50th floor, you often feel like God. My friend sent me a bible verse that said “God is love.” I told him to lie down on the bed. I laid my whole weight there on his chest. His skin was so warm, he didn’t know where to put his hand. I told him to leave. He stayed there. In the darkness of my lid as my eyes closed, I could still smell coconut.

If it exists everywhere perhaps, you are the one that brings it everywhere. You love, therefore it exists. I'm afraid I'll see you and I'll have my eyes closed and I'll miss it. and then still, it is felt with everyone else. and that—too much love, is its own undoing. Love felt everywhere does not deny its own existence and yet it ruins it for the one who holds it. I love you and you and you and you. until no one is distinguishable. I'm saying I'd rather not have it at all if I get to have it the way they describe it in songs—where it is not fleeting, it is permanent, and it is singular.

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Siguro, ang kapwa ang dahilan kung bakit umiiral ang hiya sa kulturang Pilipino. Dulot ito ng matinding dalamhati mula sa mga dinaanang digmaan, na nag-ugat sa takot nating mawalan ng lugar sa ating komunidad. Sa ating kultura, mas maraming may pakialam, mas nagiging mahalaga ang papel ng bawat isa sa lipunan. Kaya, sa isang paraan, nagiging maximalist tayo sa ating pamumuhay sa kapwa—hindi lang sa mga materyal na bagay kundi pati sa ating mga ugnayan at pagpapahalaga.

Ang hiya (pagkakaroon ng tamang asal) ay bahagi ng mga mahalagang personal na pagpapahalaga na nagmumula sa ating malalim na koneksyon sa kapwa. Ang takot na makasira ng ugnayan o mawala sa kinabibilangang grupo ay nagiging natural na mekanismo upang panatilihin ang pakikisama (pagsunod sa kagustuhan ng nakararami), utang na loob (pagkilala ng utang na loob), at amor propio (pagiging sensitibo sa personal na kahihiyan). Sa aking pananaw, sa mas maraming ugnayan na nabubuo, mas nagiging mahalaga ang hiya bilang paraan ng pagpapanatili ng harmonyang ito. Sa ganitong diwa, ang kapwa ang nagsisilang sa ating hiya—isang ugaling tumutulong upang manatiling buo ang ating koneksyon, ngunit sabay rin nitong hinuhubog ang ating takot na mawala sa komunidad na ating kinabibilangan.

Ang konsepto ng kapwa ay palaging ginagamit ng mga politiko. Sino ba ang talagang nananalo? Ano ang nangingibabaw—ang hiya o ang (mabuting depinisyon) kapwa? Ang pagpapatawad sa kapwa ay bahagi pa rin ng ating pagkakaintindi sa salitang ito. Si Duterte, na gumagamit ng kolokyal na wika, ay mas malapit sa konsepto ng kapwa, mas nakaka-relate dahil nagmumura rin. Samantalang si Marcos, hindi tulad ng tatay niya, ay baka magbago, kaya’t napapatawad din. Kung totoo ang ideya ng kapwa bilang kabutihan, dapat pati ang mga tatay na nagnanakaw ng delatang sardinas ay pinapatawad. Dapat ang mga mangigisda na may malalang punto ng Katagalugan ay pinakikinggan din.

Kung totoo ang kapwa, bakit tila ito ay nakalaan lamang para sa mga taong itinuturing nating ka-lebel natin? Ayon sa Rappler, nananalo raw ang mga politiko dahil nagtatagumpay silang ipakita ang sarili bilang underdog. Nananalo sila dahil relatable sila, dahil iniisip ng mga Pilipino na sila mismo ay underdog. Sa gitna ng kahirapan at kasahulan ng buhay, ako ang bida—ang inaapi sa sarili kong kuwento. Hindi underdog ang taong nakikita mong ka-lebel mo. Nakikita natin sila bilang kapwa kaya naman nasa kapwa rin ang ating boto.

Sa konsepto ng kapwa, isang buong barangay ang nagtutulungan kapag ang isang nanay ay malapit nang magsilang ng anak. Naririto ang isang kalye ng pagsasalo dahil may bagong kasal, naririto ang karaoke sa mga gabing may lamay. At nakapaloob dito ang dahilan kung bakit wala tayong diborsyo, aborsyon, o same-sex marriage. Dahil… ano na lamang ang sasabihin ng iba? Ayon kay Lanaria (2014), nakapaloob daw sa Divine Image ang konsepto natin ng kapwa dahil nilikha ang Diyos sa ating wangis: “God did not create human beings for life in isolation, but for the formation of social unity.” Marahil, labis ang ating pagpapahalaga sa ating komunidad na umiikot sa Diyos, na dinala natin sa loob ng ating mga tahanan ang isang kultura ng pananahimik.

Sa kultura ng pananahimik, pinapanood natin araw-araw si Vice Ganda sa Showtime—nakakatawa, nakakaaliw. Okay lang ang bading, hindi naman nakakahiya, basta’t huwag lang ang anak ko. Dahil kung ang anak ko ay bading, nakakahiya. Sa Don Bosco, sa kwentuhan ng mga lalaki, laging may pinagtatawanang pari. "Minanyak daw sila." “Uy, ikaw din?” “Oo, nung umaga.” “Ayos si sir ah.” Huwag mong pagsabihan ang mga lalaking mali ang ginawa sa kanila—alam nila ito. Pero nakakahiya para sa pari, at mas lalo na para sa kanila. Siguro, bahagi rin ng pakikipagkapwa ang mga bote ng pamparegla sa Quiapo—nakahilera, walang humuhuli. Kasalanan na ng kapwang binentahan kung maperwisyo siya sa paglaglag ng anak. Okay lang ang ganitong aborsyon—basta’t huwag lang maging ligtas, huwag maging accessible, huwag maging walang paghusga. Ihilera natin ang mga pamparegla katabi ng simbahan ng Nazareno.

Ngunit nakapaloob sa kapwa ang kadahilanan kung bakit sobrang lapit ng loob natin sa isang kulturang natatangi sa ating mga puso’t utak. Bagaman oo, sa kapwa, halos ito ang ating kalaban buong buhay, dito tayo lumalago. Nakapaloob sa atin ang pagiging chismosa at Marites, ang pagbibigay ng chicharon sa katabi natin sa bus, sa pagsasabi ng “Uy Pilipino!” pagbibigay ngiti, sa pagiging matatag tuwing bagyo, sa pagkakaisa sa lahat ng paghihirap, Inday! Pagod na kami, pero dito sa kapwa, nananatili ang rason kung bakit kinakaya namin maging masaya. Mula sa mga lasinggero sa bawat baryo hanggang sa mga kilusan na umaabot ng Mendiola. Sa kaibuturan ng bawat mabuti at masamang depinisyon ng pagiging Pilipino, naroroon ang kapwa.

Whenever we tried to fit ourselves in a tiny tricycle she would ask, “Apo, have you been praying lately?” I say “Yes.” In this little space, our knees touching, and elbows knocking, she talks about her faith. This is the faith that brought me out of poverty, she says. This is the faith that gave me your mother and you. This is the faith that made me the illegitimate child of my father whose family maltreated me, she doesn’t say this. The faith that made my son go to jail five times. The faith that makes me cling to the hope that one day I’ll walk again. She says, “Apo, I’m always praying for your ears.” This is the faith that made my granddaughter deaf.

“In this faith.” “In God,” I hold my kindness, is what she means to say. I know she blindly turns to it with knees scathed because the only way to be good to a world that is cruel is to believe that it is meant for you. I wonder what it was that made her so sure of it. Are the preachers too good at their job? Did God ever appear before her eyes? Or are people who want to be good naturally predisposed to believing? I never believed.

One day, we were walking back towards her house, she was limping and her grip was so tight on my arm I felt all its pressure on the tips of my fingers. She says, “Arlyn, be careful with what boys want.” I knew she meant “Arlyn do not fuck anyone. Premarital sex is bad.” I laugh, I do not respond. Then I thought of you. I remember I was laughing and I cannot do anything about it, I just wanted to kiss you. It does not feel primal like a craving satisfied–it felt like it was just is. That I was put here on earth to kiss you, not because I needed to, but because I was meant to. My lola opens the gate, “Grabe have you seen what happened to your cousin? She was such a good kid but we never really know.” I nod at this. Three months ago I told her to get an abortion. She said, “But Arlyn, I love him.” She went to church every Sunday.

I hated my cousin. This single decision defies everything I ever learned about what feminism meant. “But I love him.” That it was enough. “But I love him.” (god… he wills it) So it must be enough. I remember you again, I said, I don’t want to be pregnant at this age. “I think we should make a baby, but we should get married first, then when I die you’ll get my life inheritance.” I laugh at you, when I do so, I have no choice but to kiss you. Haciendero. Before you laid your head on my breasts tonight, you spent my mom’s monthly wage on a jacket from Greenbelt. “We should elope.” You say. I collect the coins you put on your nightstand, you said you hate coins. So I stack the twenty pesos coins to make up for my week’s budget. I did not believe in sex, when I gave. I started believing that my lola was right. Virginity, it’s a social construct! DeargodIcannevertakeitback. I fear, if I talk about you more I could never take it back. Never take it back.

I think I prefer the tuna sashimi over salmon. It tastes clearer. All you talk about is Spanish colonization. I think we over ordered. Did they take note of the yaki soba? I think they forgot.

This ebi tempura sushi will haunt me for the rest of my life. I think they have a really huge profit margin in fast foods here, your sodas are not refillable. Your friend is our former president's grandson? Yes, he's really nice. His tuition came from our taxes. I really miss Mexican culture and California. I think we should bring Chick-fil-a to Makati. Nueva Ecija is like the Nebraska of the Philippines. I beat you in thumb wrestling three times in a row. You should make the hand motion when you ask for the bill. Tell her to refill my cold tea. You should try the New York Strip Steak. Barbecues should always be well done. You like your steaks well done? I like them medium. Well done is disgusting. Yes but barbecues should be well done to render the fat. I keep winning. Why do you have to torrent? Of course you wouldn't understand. My TV's browser plays the streams anyway. My Samsung won't do that. Buy an LG. Yeah Muslims were always a threat to Spain. And all l asked was if there's Ateneo in Davao. НАНАНАН. Can you ride a bike? I really think we over ordered. Check the bill if they have a service charge. How much should we tip? You haven't tried enoki? I really like you by the way.

Sometimes I think about you more than I see my face.

When you held my hand, I knew what God meant. My lola and her misfortunes did not mean that god was far, maybe it hides itself so well in the reservoirs of disappointments beneath her skin. I meant that she feels it so deeply, that when life turns futile it establishes that god is real. If he wasn’t, you wouldn’t feel your misfortune’s importance. Without faith she probably would not believe in herself. Once she told me, God is good, Arlyn, maybe you are deaf and you cannot really hear the words you say because God had meant for you to write them. That–believing is not a choice nor something forced upon people. Perhaps when my lola believes in God it is as though she was put on this earth to do so, the way I just have no choice but to kiss you.

I look at you and people say that when you look at someone you love it is complex, it means so much, it is layered–a compilation of everything that makes me feel this way. In love songs they talk about flaws and loving despite. I look at you and see. I see it the way I look at my dog that ate my birthday cake. When my dad forgets that I am allergic to dust. The girl you see in the club’s bathroom at 3 AM crying. To see it and know and just believe. I love you in that way, that you are someone who disappoints, and it is not loving despite–not when this is who you were in my life. When you took my virginity, it did not feel the way I had been led to believe. It was the first time you disappointed me, so, yes I can never take it back and it is a social construct but in the marrow of what it meant, I had always searched for your tenderness in anyone else.

It can be beautiful sometimes, for it to be so distant from tangibility, and still know it is real. There are people who do not believe in it, I believe. And they ask me, and I show them my poems and they say “Wow! You write so romantically, remember that he does not think about you this way.” As if this negates anything. Believing does not need to go both ways. My lola believes and all God does is punish her. I believe in you because if I am in despair then it must be real. The thing is when I call it love, it feels like cheating with all the saturated notion of what it feels like and what it means, and there is nothing I can write to justify how human it is. The way you cannot make me understand just how you love your mom. That even if you hate her, you just have no choice. She’s my mom! I love her, and that is enough. And everyone understands, you are as harsh as this, that all my friends can do is pity me the way I do so for myself.

When my cousin got pregnant she had only met the guy three times. She was a conservative Mormon but she wasn’t a virgin. She had believed in the brutality of God and love. She was talking about this boy who wasn’t in school and she said he’s poor but he’s the breadwinner of his family. “I believe in him.” So, when she told me she got pregnant at nineteen, I said, “I know abortion clinics.” She said she believes in what the guy believes in. I said, “This is too cruel.” I was reading Dworkin’s literature and I sit there realizing, that this–what I’m doing right now–grasping on emotions and believing that love excuses everything: my Lola and her whole life, me and my miserable one-sided romance, my cousin and the future that was so far-off the one she had planned with me a few months ago. As my cousin said, “I love him!....(god.. He wills it) And that is enough!” I say this is dumb, she is a dumb woman.

I was right, he left her and she started to bleed heavily. The whole family detested him, we were scared we'd lose the baby as well. When he came back, all she could say was that they should get married. My cousin was watching Duterte’s hearing, “Arlyn, I think we should elope.” My cousin reminded me of you so much that night. If my cousin loved him, maybe you loved me then. I think my cousin’s love for her husband exceeds the one she had for god. I do not dare underestimate this. But I am hoping that she’ll lean off of it, the way you did, the way I swear I’ll do after I write this piece.

I have no right to act as though I understand anything, when all I’ve done is forgiven myself. Love translates itself to belief, it is almost interchangeable. I cannot tell you why people believe in God that way I cannot tell you why I always write about love. (I try to see its reflection on me and everyone else but I am as unfamiliar with it the way I am about god despite constantly being in it.) Love is everything. It exists in all the cruxes of our existence.

I do not believe in god. I believe in You. So, when you left I thought that it was cruel to wish you were dead. But you’re here, you’re near and yet nowhere–cannot be found in any corners and hiding places of my life. A city can be so big sometimes. I wish you are dead. Be dead instead to alleviate myself that I cannot have you in this lifetime.

I do not believe in god. I believe in my lola. I believe in my cousin. They believe in god.

I say that god is none. But if this exists, then god isn’t so far off. Maybe some people have god. I have this. Which no amount of intellectual literature nor self-reflection can save me from. Perhaps we do not need saving. But I love him! And that is enough.