else it was reverie

I was seventeen, and indomitably smitten.

It was a scene straight out of a cheap, high school rom-com: in a large room that a bunch of fluorescents attempt to light up, a handsome, crimped-haired young man uncovers from a crowd of hundreds. As this sea parts soundlessly, he steps forward to utter the words “Good evening, brothers, sisters.” 

And there I had been, reckoning—correctly, I am sure—myself to be but one with the assembly of girls who had hopelessly fallen under the lightning of a spell that is you. Yours was an unmistakable charm made all the more endearing because of your grounded, unassuming nature, and your goodness was unmatched by any other integrity I had known before.

The note with which you punctuated your exhortation sent everybody, young and old, flocking all over you to give you some sort of affirmation. Surrounded by many, swimming through jokes and well wishes, you spoke with such humility and benevolence, and did, too, to strangers you refused to name as such. It was undeniable that there was a quirk in you in the form of awkwardness (a somber herald to the Michael Cera stereotype, if you will) yet you remained to be gracious to all. It was in watching you with so much amazement that I was first made to believe that such goodness was possible. You became a first hero, and I wanted to consume you, completely.

And gaze upon you I did from afar. That night ended with us not really knowing of the other, and it was to be expected because no introduction of me would have been worth your time. My eyes’ encounter of you was no more than a mere moment, and it is false to say that at that sight I was in love. And yet, there was so much about you that had enchanted me wholly; your coming seemed a portent that sung of purpose and promise.

I was seventeen, and long before a violent history of love, there you were. 

“Love one another, Fathers,” said Father Zossima, as far as Alyosha could remember afterwards. “Love God’s people. Because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth… And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly he must recognize this fact. Else he would have had no reason to come here. When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then can the aim of our seclusion be attained. For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man. This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man. For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears… Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess your sins to yourself unceasingly. Be not afraid of your sins, even when perceiving them, if only there be penitence, but make no conditions with God. Again I say: Be not proud. Be proud neither to the little nor to the great. Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists—and I mean not only the good ones—for there are many good ones among them, especially in our day—hate not even the wicked ones. Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all those who have none to pray for them. Save too all those who will not pray. And add: It is not pride that I make this prayer, O Lord, for I am lower than all men… Love God’s people. Let not strangers draw away from the flock, for if you slumber in your slothfulness and disdainful pride, or worse still, in covetousness, they will come from all sides and draw away your flock. Expound the Gospel to the people unceasingly… Be not mercenary… Do not love gold and silver; do not hoard them…. Have faith. Cling to the banner and raise it on high.”

“For I do not believe God means us to divide life into two halves — to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as mention Him on a week-day. Do you think He cares to see only kneeling figures, and to hear only tones of prayer — and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children, as they roll among the hay? Surely their innocent laughter is as sweet in His ears as the grandest anthem that ever rolled up from the ‘dim, religious light’ of some cathedral?”

- Lewis Carroll

I was in the fifth grade when the first Harry Potter movie came out. Daniel Radcliffe stood at five feet and six inches then, and I knew this because I had loved him with the frenzy of a Muggle-born discovering Hogwarts or even just Diagon Alley for the first time and I had overdosed on sleeping and all other height-enhancing rituals, just so I didn’t have to tiptoe when we kissed. Dan—that was what I called him inside the tiny heart of my mind—and I were fated to meet and fall wildly in love with each other, and damn anyone who didn’t believe in the destiny that I made the stars tell me. And damn, most especially, that big-haired girl who played Hermione Granger whom I cursed never to be attractive to my Daniel. 

I never reached five feet, and after the fifth movie, my uncultured, almost beastly affection shifted from the boy-who-lived to the heir of Malfoy manor who rode broomsticks and caught Snitches almost as well as that wizard in red and golden Quidditch robes. Tom Felton ignited waves of embers in my figurative (and maybe even actual, I am too old to call today) loins, and it was not only because he was as promising as Radcliffe for the position of international teenage sensation in terms of looks and talent, but because there was something bewitching about him who played the bad boy.

At 22—though I never quite loss my soft spot for the Chosen One— I discover that Tom is the closer mate to my soul than Dan, and this is where McGonagall transfigures this blog entry to become something else other than a visitation to fantasies of my childhood infatuation. 

The clamor for the villainous-seeming has been a universal conundrum for all in the world of love and dating, especially for girls. In my observations, I have come to surmise that the challenge of turning a Draco into a member of Dumbledore’s Army is simply too seductive to pass up. I have yet to encounter a true human being genuinely gravitated towards the bad or the evil in a person. Nobody (I hope) has ever meant and said “I love him because he’s rude to his parents,” “I love him because his breath smells bad,” or “I love him because he has this bizarre habit of murdering stray neighborhood cats.” If she did, that’s probably because the subtexts of the aforementioned utterances are as follows: “I love him because I know that he has yet to realize the importance of family and once he does, he’s going to be a great son,” “I love him because he can overcome this halitosis,” or “I love him because his tendencies for taking lives are just a manifestation of some deep-seated struggle inside of him that I will help him deal with through proper care and counselling” or you know, whatever.

It’s in the very nature of our humanity, I realized.

It’s a way of the world, that we initially develop a proclivity to Harry, to Prince Charming, to the goody-two-shoes hero of the story, and only notice and take a liking to Draco in our more developed years. There will be a point, though, where we’d outgrow this attraction to the villain when we get significantly older (personally, my life is contemplating whether I have reached this) and revert back to our preference for the true old good. Perhaps because this is what the loves in our lives should be about: to see the Harry in every Draco. Because there is a Harry in every Draco.

There’s something magical about the way we are given the freedom to love a person not only because of what or who she or he really is, but beyond that: for what or whom that person can be, which is the best version of himself or herself. We are all witches and wizards for this quality, though unfortunately, just like how our good folks from the wizarding world have it, not all of us know this about us. If we do, it takes a great deal of effort to work on. Some of us might even be Squibs at it.

But it’s there. The power to believe in the good in people is gratuitously trickier to handle than expecto patronum, but a much more rewarding, more necessary spell in our world (Ask Albus about the whole Gellert Grindewald situation). 

We should really strive for a Hogwarts, then.

:)

During the rare moments when my father articulates the feelings he holds for my mother—however awkwardly stated—it is his heart that I hear speak. 

One day, my kids, too, will find themselves eavesdropping from the second floor of the house during their parents’ CFC household meeting (or maybe any casual conversation, if we’re too blessed), hearing the affirmation of the love that overpowers their father.

I stake this claim for I believe I deserve nothing less. :) 

“There is, as I stated at first, no absolute right and wrong in love, but everything depends upon the circumstances; to yield to a bad man in a bad way is wrong, but to yield to a worthy man in a right way is right. The bad man is the common or vulgar love, who is in love with the body rather than the soul; he is not constant because what he loves is not constant; as soon as the flower of physical beauty, which is what he loves, begins to fade, he is gone “even as a dream”, and all his professions and promises are as nothing. But the lover of a noble nature remains its lover for life, because the thing to which he cleaves is constant. The object of our custom then is to subject lovers through a thorough test; it encourages the lover to pursue and the beloved to flee, in order that the right kind of lover may in the end be gratified and the wrong kind eluded; it sets up a kind of competition to determine to which kind of lover and beloved respectively belong.” (Pausanias)

And it’s not on the basis of its undeniable sinfulness that I want to stop, but because I know I am so much more than what my weaknesses have compelled me to become.

I know it is genuine love that pursues the great, but it is tiring, and everyday I find myself not of strength enough to love.

I am lost. 

Even my own mother doubts my conviction by insisting that one day, I will go home with the news of her unplanned grandchild ready to erupt from in between my legs in months. She seems to have come to believe in the omnipresence and inevitability of sex in today’s seemingly desire-driven world, something that has prompted the whole world to think of virgins as unicorns: rare and ridiculous to the point of non-existence.

People do not normally doubt the integrity of my hymen because I’m too adorable to ever be questioned on the subject of sex and sensuality, and I am proud of that because the thing is, I do hide nothing. This, however, has not prevented me from articulating why I want to stay a unicorn instead of evolving into some reasonably magnificent Andalusian horse or something (this is where I say that non-virgins share the same “horse-ness” with unicorns albeit the apparent difference in number, and are not necessarily demeaned by their non-virginity, unless “horse” is actually, “whores,” of course), and here is why:

Sex is painful.

Science and a few experienced friends have informed me that a girl’s first time is excruciating, and I don’t need to do it to be convinced. The very words entailed in having sex for the first time sound painful (and not to mention, evocative of war): penetration, destruction (of the girl’s hymen), and bloodshed. Despite my supernatural faculty for emotional pain, I detest physical hurts in any form or shape (even needle pricks overwhelm me), and so sex is not something I’m exactly rushing to experience, no matter its “subsequent rewards.” 

Sex is dirty.

And I do not mean the “dirty” in “Dirty Dancing.” Sex is filthy: bodies collide and rub against each other, acrobatics and physical pyrotechnics ensue, and stuff come out from weird places. The number of showers and cleansing rituals performed prior to the act of sexual intercourse is irrelevant. If the thought of my mother poking my ear canal with a clean cotton bud is absurd, then nothing would compare to my indignation towards the idea of someone else’s very foreign, very unsanitary, and very un-cotton bud-like entity making its way inside the most private of my being. 

Sex makes girls look different.

Uglier, to be exact.  People have used words like “tigang,” (barren) “tuyot,” (dry) “nagalaw,” (touched) and “mukhang tumanda” (looking old) to pertain to girls whose hymens no longer exist, and the involuntarily offensive remark “mukha na siyang hindi virgin” always signifies an unpleasant (and disgraceful) transformation of the human physique and aura. I personally take intense pride in not looking “tuyot” and in not attracting articulations of the “hindi ka na mukhang virgin” persuasion. I am aware of my profound cuteness and I have no intentions of changing that.

I do not plan to have any kids.

The idea of bearing and raising children scare the living daylight out of me and its possibility is, sadly but truthfully speaking, not something I can entertain at this point in my I’m-currently-taking-my-Masters-and-I-plan-to-pursue-another-one-abroad-and-hell-I-want-to-live-freely life. I do not want to become a mother just yet. Though it might be antediluvian of me to still be making the connection between sex and childbearing in the time of so many ridiculously effective birth control methods, this fact stands: sex is the gateway to bringing more people to the world. I am not one to do something which essentially promises so much of what I do not wish.

I’m demanding.

I am known to be of immense awkwardness, and to the dismay of my future better half, I do not think my performance in bed will reflect otherwise. Come the time of reckoning, I will, regrettably, not turn into a sultry temptress with the appetite of a deprived lioness. I cannot and will not deliver “practice enhancing” techniques and pleasurable moves of earthshaking proportions. If anything, my already disgraceful motor skills will be made viciously useless, giving my partner every reason for regretting having anything to do with me, and with that, doing me. 

The person I will have sex with someday would know this all, and would not only accept but take pleasure from the very unpleasing reality of my failure to please. He would know that during our first time, we would be clumsily pawing our way around each other, laughing ourselves silly in the process and exclaiming, “What are we doing?!” When the horrible bed-bouncing ordeal is finally over, he’d have the guts and the foolishness to believe that he enjoyed the experience with me and would see himself undergoing this torment for as long as he shall exist. The person I will have sex with, therefore, would be stupid, and this stupid person is the only one I’d ever want to have sex with for the rest of my life.

I want to make love.

The act of sex is more than the friction of groins. It’s about becoming vulnerable and making an offering of that vulnerability to another person. It is surrender, an affirmation that the person has captured you mind, body and heart. To have sex is to articulate a love — and not lust — that possesses and is possessed. I believe that it is with this that the human act of sexual intercourse is made entirely different from those of dogs, monkeys, or rabbits. Animals, with their instincts, have sex. We, with what should be beyond heightened urgencies of our flesh, make love. 

I choose the latter because it’s only with love that I can ever find myself able to penetrate through and destroy my fears of pain, filth, appearing different, and a future I know nothing about. It’s only with love that I can be of strength and courage, not only for sex but more importantly, for the things which sex is only a prelude to. 

Besides, I am meant for nothing less.

That is not to say that I want to die a unicorn; I don’t, but I don’t mind taking all the time in the world. I have so many things I want to do before I can decide whether I’m ready for the “fun” and “delight” that sex brings, like bask in the joy of earning a Master of Arts degree, going to Disneyland, treating my nephew to a live Ateneo-La Salle game, getting married, and eating expensive pizza. 

I choose to wait because I am worth it, so sex better do as well. The perfect moment will get there and when it does, it will happen so naturally and so blissfully that there will be no room for dread and second thoughts. This is the sex I know I will one day be strong enough for; after all, true love is not for the weak and faint of heart.

Honestly, there is so much beauty in the waiting. I can only imagine the glory that would arrive with the coming.