Monday, January 11, 2010

Twelve

Tick tock.
Tick Tock.

Ten seconds after 11:30. Officially, someone’s going to get a lot of telling off today, Mimi said. She sighed and went out through the revolving door. Several minutes later, she checked her phone and found that Andy was still on the way, trying to defy the traffic along the roads of EDSA. She laughed in spite of herself. She suddenly remembered the joke that she heard from two jocks of a local radio station.

Girlfriend: San ka na? (Where are you now?)
Boyfriend: EDSA.

It’s a lie of course, as he was still at home; and with the traffic in EDSA, she never would have doubted her sweetheart’s lie.


It was 12 noon. Some people who stayed outside Starbucks for nearly an hour had already left, and she was getting a little cranky. She took out her phone and typed:

“Damn it. You’re late.”

She was about to send it, when he appeared in front of her, stood there as if he were a dog seeking for apologies and favors. She just smiled.

How long was it since they last saw each other? They both had no idea. It started with a simple virus from her computer.

Me: Fuck you!
Him: WTF?!
Me: It wasn’t me, I swear. I’m sorry I didn’t type it. It just appeared.
Him: I trust you enough to believe you.

Later she realized it was a virus from her USB that did the damage. Out of humiliation she explained everything and he shrugged it off, saying that he had seen it happen before.

The conversation went on until they both decided to see each other, as if it were an invitation from the virus that they should go out and catch up on a lot of things they missed; and the series of emotions (or lack thereof) that they never thought had been existent in them.

Guy de Maupassant once quoted from one of his short stories:

“Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe air, and we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.”

Yes, nothing more existed for her, there and then. She wasn’t sure with his thoughts, but it didn’t matter. She asked herself: Is this love? No, there’s no love; it is more than that, to an extent that it's even hard to define. Love couldn't suffice. The only apparent emotion was lust. Through the rolling lights that gave life to thousands of scenes in that dark room, they created a patchwork of sensations which became more consequential, more revolting than the lights and sounds that he paid for. In the darkness, they sighed for, perspired for and held on to each other, until it was time for both of them to leave. Even until leaving, she knew she wanted something that ironically, she was afraid to have. As to why, she didn't know.

Complexity sometimes, turns out to be very difficult to define. The dozens of definitions that have been offered all fall short in one respect or another. Classifying something as complex which we intuitively would see as simple, or denying an obviously complex phenomenon the label of complexity, makes everything as ambiguous as this statement sounds. Moreover, these definitions are either only applicable to a very restricted domain, such as computer algorithms or genomes, or so vague as to be almost meaningless. This barely explains why she dared not seek for answers, for even the answers confused her, making her feel lost all the more.

They arrived a few minutes before word had started. He met a lot of old friends, caught up with people he knew, who she rarely even mingled with and went to her room. Before he left, he hugged her and said:

“I want to see you tomorrow.”

She smiled.

Yes, tomorrow.

She went home, lay onto her bed and thoughts about what happened.

“The bed comprehends our whole life, for we were born in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it.” -Guy de Maupassant

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