Sitting across him at the cafe, I could start
from the very beginning: how my first crush
went to the swim meet at Palarong Pambansa

and came back with a medal and another crush.
How I met my first boyfriend on a bus at a debate
tournament, the year of the Manila bus hostage crisis.

How at prom, I never got to dance with the teacher
who said post-abortion care was a right, which somehow
convinced me I loved him. I crossed our names in FLAMES,

hid them behind the folds of a paper fortune
teller. Pick a number (hopefully, mine). Press
the blinking tarsier, apologizing for authoritarian

parents. Select every audible, every distinctive Yahoo!
Messenger ID, every chat history lost to the binary
wind. I put my wide-eyed trust in the worldwide

web, in the wake of the Arab Spring: tell me
what he’s doing, who he’d vote for, if he knows
his history. I breeze through my calendar of dates

like a slam book: the one with a walkthrough of a walled city
with an activist before his exile. The one where in some freedom
fighter’s forlorn house, he says, what keeps Manila alive

is precisely its decay. That one blind date with a guy
named Aladdin, my friends roaring, were you taken
for a ride? Some days were quiet and forgettable,

others a tempest. I bid my ex-boyfriend goodbye
a week before a war broke out. I etched September
on the back of a bathroom stall to mark the anniversary

of my sorrow. On the way home from a party
a classmate groped me in the back of a car.
That first time I was wordless. There was no hashtag,

no language for it then. My first hook-up, interrupted
by a temporary restraining order on contraceptives.
I went to three drugstores, and they were all out

of pills. I’ve trudged through days when all the roads
seemed impassable. Like when I checked into a motel
during Manila’s worst storm in years. Like when I stood

stranded on an island of a train station with a thousand
strangers. Like when my sadness threatens a flood,
I’ll put on my raincoat, always out to prove love

in a time of typhoons. Like I’m hung high and dry
on the rooftop of longing. Like I can’t wait for you
to rain on me. Like I’m already made of water.

I’ll catch you like a basin or a flu. I could make it alone
but I don’t want to. My bombed heart reassembles
for another explosion. I’ll cover you like a blanket

or a report. I could blow you like a pinwheel or a plastic
balloon. You can draw me like a French girl or a secret
Santa, sweet surprise or sprawled and naked going down

with this ship. One People Power anniversary, I sang freedom
with a boy I loved for years. Seven months later, I returned
to the memorial, protesting a dictator’s burial with a man

who loved me. It was the most uncertainty I’d felt
since a stutter at a spelling bee. Like the word
was changing as I pronounced it. Like history

was being upheaved. The only thing I could hold to be true
was my own muscle memory, diseases I could no longer catch,
archived Internet searches, playbacks of my races, the speed dating

history. At the cafe, I confess to the smallness of my heartbreak:
I’ve lost no husband. I’ve never been catfished, or had an IUD
yanked from between my legs. But I’d like to take a break

from this climate, into a burrito or a cocoon, be the little
spoon. The truth is, I want to be relevant. I can’t get over
myself. I’d watch my life like a movie, but I don’t want to—

so I watch the news. I’ve got all this history I can’t bury.
A girl like me can’t love halfway through. I’m a royal
flush. Will I ever find somebody who can handle me?

My opposite says he’s been that moth before, and he’s done
with fluorescence. He says love’s laborious, that he can’t
be tricked. But he listens to me wrap my midnight

press conferences. He dodges what we can’t speak
into existence. He tells me things he’s never told
anyone before. At my door, he says, there’s always

somebody. Just like that, he reached over and turned the page
of a book I had been struggling to finish. I saw our future
history together: all the museums we’d visit, headlines

we’d edit, aquariums we’d dive in. Lighting candles, shouting
matches, driving lessons. I knew he’d break my heart
like the news or a bank. And oh, how I missed him already.

For one flap under a yellow pad chatterbox, I was ready
to fling myself off the ledge. Like I could let him peek
into my private insanities. Like, mister bedspacer

of my mind, sublime crush, retired romantic, I dare you
to hang out with me. Like I could pull him into a rainsoaked
medley of arms. Perturbed and laughing into my hair, he’d whisper,

how could we go dancing at a time like this?
I’d say, there’s nothing much left to do but dance.
And he would dance with me. I know he would.