Richard

Twenty years later, I don’t know if it was real or if I had dreamed it up, or created an elaborate fantasy. K was the first woman I knew to have her own flat; unshared, unmarried, in the heart of the central business district of Metro Manila. It was a studio, though I don’t know for sure because all I remember of it is the sitting room, which had a couch overlooking a big bay window. Part of why I think I dreamed this whole thing up is because I don’t remember anything else about the flat, the way that in dreams what you can “see” is limited by the realm of your existence. Everything else is a blur that your mind hasn’t caught up on processing yet.

Anyway in this dream (let’s assume this for now for the purposes of continuation) me and the crew I run with at that time hang out here a lot, because we’re all still stuck at home, living with our parents in our early adulthood. So we have house parties, or we come back to K’s stumbling drunk, having spent our first few paychecks on stupid cocktails in snooty CBD bars. At least, I think that was the intent (of K’s, to have a flat; of us, to have her as a friend; of the dream, to create that space). Like I said, I don’t know for sure.

Into this universe an old high school classmate was suckered in. It feels to me like one day he just appeared, but I’m sure like most company we keep in our early twenties his assimilation was gradual, the result of one too many daytime drinking sessions that alternated between pool halls, beer gardens with outdoor grills, and someone’s house where the parents were away (the parents were always of the Peanuts variety in this story). He didn’t work; he was still “finding his way”. His name was Richard and, though he and I were never really friends in high school, that didn’t seem to be a problem. In school he has a jock and a rich kid, wearing the latest Jordans and Tommy jeans. I was more a grungy weirdo who wore second hand clothes. But teenage loyalties are fickle and random; we were transitioning to a phase when friendships could be formed from actual conversation.

So, the part about Richard being somewhat crew-adjacent is real; I have memories of that which take place in other real places. But the point of this story is what happened between Richard and K, which is that they began fucking, all the more conveniently because K had her own place. It was an open secret, an unsaid thing. It was only made evident because Richard was always there at her house. K would go off to her white collar job, we would barge in with hard liquor after our night shifts and he would answer the door. She would come home after work and he would prep her a thoughtful drink while the rest of us lollied around on the carpet, smoking endless menthols.

It all collapsed in the end of course; K went off to have other lovers, and Richard was left with a broken heart. Anyone could have seen that coming; a girl doesn’t rent a fancy, centrally located flat on her own, to suddenly have it occupied by a housemate, or a relationship. It would be a few years yet before herbs on the windowsill and whiskey debriefs in the kitchen. Anyone could see it, it seemed, except Richard. Somehow he ended up with me on the roof of my university building where I was doing a Master’s I’d never get to finish. We sat on a pair of outdoor chairs by the far corner, chairs that had been brought there by one of my professors, the one I had an affair with. In another life this professor and I would sit on the same chairs, smoking imported cigarettes, and then make out torridly before going to his office to fuck. By the time Richard and I sat on the same chairs, that affair was fizzling out, though in my stubbornness I hadn’t quite accepted it yet.

In my hand I had a sheath of notes, written on post-its and scrap paper, full of a secret language that only I and the professor knew. They were notes filled with nothing, but I didn’t know that at that time. To me they were still currency, proof of a thing; if there were notes it must have been true. Except that they were mostly about times and places to meet: in his car, on campus, on my body. I knew I had to declare them worthless, currency from a defunct state. And I didn’t want to be alone; I wanted a witness.

Richard sat across from me, talking about that Counting Crows song, Anna Begins; how that reminded him of K. “Wrap her up in a package of lies; send her off to a coconut island”, I said. He looked into the distance then, fingers clamouring for a guitar, and I remembered that he was good at that; he was part of a garage band that actually wasn’t too bad for a bunch of kids. While he hummed songs I didn’t know we both knew, I lit the notes one by one. Otherwise we never said a word. There we were, the jock and the weirdo, looking up at the stars, high on the aroma of matches, watching our hearts burn and blacken and lift up in the air.