I’ve never seen someone stoic be this tender before.
When you narrated Kalahating Bahaghari, you looked like you bared your soul. The story was heartfelt, earnest, and moving — a lifelong pining and devotion over someone.
But deep down, I knew that kind of devotion only looks romantic when it’s far from reality.
Fiction is full of gorgeous things.
Midnight drives. Passionate rain kisses. Dramatic love confessions. Tragic yearning.
Fiction is beautiful. But the same rawness is ruinous in real life. I learned that the hard way. We start to equate instability with romance. Love, for many, looks like intense shouting matches and sex afterwards to soften the edges. Or self-abandonment that manifests in staying, lingering in spaces that drain you.
These story arcs make sense on film. Off-screen, they destroy you.
That wasn’t our reality. It was stable, much safer. It lingers and does not rush. No high highs, no low lows. It was not like the movies.
That was a good thing, I thought. Until you wanted to end things. You were still tethered to your past like a widow clutching their lover’s ashes. And once the specter returned in even the smallest flicker, you were enlivened — much more alive than we could ever be.
You’re presented with a fork in the road: do you choose the past “what if” that hauntingly exhilarates you? Or do you choose the safe option that guarantees growth?
We both know which life made sense. One was a loop of turmoil you kept crawling back to. The other was the kind that quietly builds a future. Yet logic has no jurisdiction there.
You reached for cinema. You reached for drama. You reached for a decision that might move people in fiction but might wreck everyone involved.
And therein lies the tragedy — the fatal flaw of a character, making a fatal mistake.
Honestly, I get it. I understand the allure of shattering the mundanity of reality. I, too, once flirted with the idea of suspending logic to get a taste of intoxicating bliss and despair. Fuck sustainability if we can’t feel intensely, right?
But if you can hurl yourself into a story, why can’t I? Why can’t I give myself the same permission to be fiercely human? To fiercely love? To fiercely be?
I’m tempted by the same madness, Carl. What if, just for one night, I let myself be irrational too? What if, just for a brief moment, I live with the same intensity as the most poignantly heartbreaking films?
What if I show up at your door in the soaking rain? With a book you tried so hard to look for? What if I grab your hand, spontaneously pull you to the nearest train stop, just to get to Escolta? What if we momentarily stop time with a kiss? In front of the Pasig River?
See? I can live fiercely, too. Always have been.
I don’t know if I’d ever live out the fantasy the way you’re living yours right now. This is the ache that exists in stories. Good thing I’m a writer. I might not live it but I can bring life to it.
And that’s my tragedy: Always the artist, never the art.
