The aircon in this cubicle of an apartment unit died two weeks after you left.
Coincidence, maybe. A fucking metaphor, definitely.
Now it’s just the fan, groaning on its axis, pushing the thick heat from one side of the room to the other. It doesn’t cool anything. Just stirs the soup. Your smell... that particular mix of your sweat, the fabric conditioner your mom used, and that cheap cologne, it’s baked into the walls. I can’t air it out. It’s in the fucking concrete.
I stay because it’s impossible to leave. Where do I go? Back to my parents? To a boarding house with cockroaches in the sink?
Here, at least, the ghost is a ghost I know.
The cafe downstairs still has the shitty coffee you liked. The jeepney route outside still blares the same route number. The world kept turning. It just… ejected you. And left me spinning in the vacuum.
I keep your toothbrush. It’s in the holder. Mine, yours, and an empty slot. A little family of plastic.
Sometimes I pick it up. The bristles are splayed, worn down on one side from the way you’d scrub, hard, like you were trying to clean more than just teeth. I put it back. I can’t throw it away. It feels like a violence.
But using it? That’s a violence too. So it just… exists. A tiny, stupid monument.
The hope is the worst part. It’s not hope. It’s a sickness.
It’s 2 AM and the tricycles have stopped and I hear a key fumble at the lock. My heart doesn’t soar. It cringes. It shrivels. I think, shit, shit, SHIT, are you back? Are we going to have to do this again? The talking, the crying, the lying in the dark not touching.
I hope you don’t come in. I hope it’s just the neighbor, drunk.
And it always is.
And then the hope curdles into this… relief. And the relief is so much worse than sadness. It’s an admission. That it’s over. And I am relieved.
And I hate myself for it.
We stopped. We stopped everything. Talking. Touching. Trying. Months before you packed your duffel bag. We’d lie in bed, backs turned, a canyon of sheet between us, both staring at our phones. The blue light glowing on our faces in the dark. Two strangers, marooned.
The love didn’t leave in a dramatic fire. It choked to death on the silence.
Now? Now it’s just the same feeling. Familiar. It’s knowing which floorboard creaks by the door. It’s the way the last of your sinigang mix is still in the cupboard, next to my coffee. I see it every morning. I never move it. It’s a landmark.
This is what’s left. Not love. A map of a country that doesn’t exist anymore.
And the feeling… it’s not even sad. It’s heavy. It’s a himas. A weight sitting right here, in the center of my chest. A physical thing. I want to cry. I should cry. Everyone says it helps.
But when I try, it’s like my body forgot how. My face screws up. My throat gets tight. But my eyes are just… dry. Hot. Empty. It’s all stuck inside, this solid, aching lump of meh. Of nothing. Of everything, crushed into nothing.
Sometimes I go to the mall. Just to be around people. I see couples. Boys, holding hands, looking at phones. I feel nothing. Not jealousy. Not longing. Just a hollow observation. Oh. That was us.
And then I go home. To the heat. To the fan’s groan. To your toothbrush.
I’ll order food. I’ll eat it in front of the computer. I’ll watch something. Laugh at a joke. And then it’ll hit me, in the silence between the laugh and the next line of dialogue: This is it. This is the rest of it.
One empty moment after another. No big tragedy. No dramatic ending. Just the slow, suffocating grind of a life that’s become a waiting room. And I’m not even waiting for anything.
I just.
I just stay.
Because the dent on your side of the bed is still there. And if I roll into it, and close my eyes, and don’t think, in that one half-asleep second before dawn when the jeepneys start their racket…
I can almost pretend the heat beside me is yours.