The Show

ACT I.

SETTING: The neighbor’s garage, a few feet away from the backyard where the rustle of leaves characteristic of the arrival of sunset can be heard from. Late afternoon.

Six. Probably. You’re not tall enough—you’re supposed to start growing with the arrival of your next birthday—so you’re still a year away from cowering from comments on how you’re all bones and too little fat. For now you are a petite kid with a curiosity unbridled by hesitation.

You skid down the slope leading to your neighbor’s tall iron gates. You stop yourself just before it gets dangerous. Your ninang is cleaning in the backyard, the bristles of her broom sending the dry leaves to their rightful place. You keep your feet planted safely on the flatter part of the ground. A loud expression of pain leaves your mouth, and you tell her that you hurt yourself when your body collided with the gates.

NINANG

Be careful!

A feeling of exhilaration knocks from beneath your chest. You resist the urge to tell her you were only kidding. Instead you let the satisfaction seal your lips, even if you have no idea why you did what you did in the first place.

ACT II.

SETTING: An old auditorium. The slightest of sounds bounce off the walls due to the bareness of the place. Day.

Ten. Two digits in your age puts you on the brink of maturity, but not quite. You’ve come to accept that English is your favorite subject.

The fourth-grade spelling bee takes place in the old auditorium, three fifth-graders and your English teacher sitting behind the two long tables covered with white sheets. There are two microphone stands on the stage, and behind them is where you stand alongside your opponent: the first-honor student of your batch since first grade.

The teacher, Miss Mary, traces her finger on the paper in front of her. When she stops at a certain point in the sheet, you feel your breath catching in your throat. 

MISS MARY

The next word is epoch. 

Your mind is already going through the alphabet while she gives the definition.

YOU

E-P-O-C…

You make sure to keep your voice from shaking.

YOU

…K.

No one reacts with disappointment. 

MISS MARY
(smiles)

E-P-O-C-H. Correct.

You end up in second place after five or more rounds, but no one knows you could have lost to your opponent earlier. You plaster on a humble smile as you pose for the picture.

ACT III.

SETTING: Your yard. Instead of your uncle’s large black car, tables adorned with silverware and Filipino dishes are laid out outside your front door. Early afternoon. 

Thirteen. Happy birthday.

All those months pretending to be a year older as you reach the end of queues at cinemas are over. You’re finally a teenager.

Your friends are gathered around the dining table in your yard, trying their best to ignore the heat spiking through the yero above your heads. The one sitting to your right, Elio (the same boy who stood next to you on the stage during your fourth-grade spelling bee) asks who the man in front of the stove is. You sneak a glance at the pot-bellied man, not surprised that he’s not wearing a shirt.

ELIO

Your father?

You give him no answer.

ELIO

Your uncle? Ninong?

With a shrug, you revert your attention to the rest of your visitors. Your friend drops the question as you begin talking about school projects and basketball team crushes.

Whether he heard you or not, your father leaves after shutting the stove off.

ACT IV.

SETTING: A room in your high school building, its size often too average for you to take notice of. Now you’re painfully aware of how small it really is. Noon.

Fourteen. Still an age too young to grapple with grief.

MISS CAROL

Were you close to your father?

Your eighth-grade adviser throws that question at you in the middle of the class from behind her desk. All of your classmates turn to look at you, their eyes automatically finding you in your designated seat by the window. You swear you can hear their necks snapping in sync. 

YOU
(shrug)

Not quite.

Some of the necks turn away from you, some turning back to their seatmates and others absentmindedly shifting to your homeroom teacher as she drones on about her lack of closeness with her late father. She says she did not cry at her father’s deathbed and that she understands how you feel.

Your legs tremble from under your armchair. A sickening feeling forms in the pit of your stomach, and you desperately wish no one approaches you to ask about the revelation. But not a second later some of your friends whisper their condolences, and you wish you didn’t see the sympathy linger in their eyes even as you accepted their well wishes.

Did they figure it out?

ACT V.

SETTING: A quaint fast food restaurant ten minutes away from your house. Afternoon.

Seventeen. This certain age makes you think of spring and beauty and mutual feelings blooming, but you can’t have all of that. You finally look like how girls your age are expected to look, but today the sun’s too harsh and you’re on your way to shut a confession down.

Senior high school cannot be any slower. The weather outside makes it more unbearable. You check the time before you brave the scorching temperature outside, convincing yourself that maybe the remaining hours of the day will whiz by.

You arrive at the restaurant. You have been dreading this day, but he’s too persistent. He tells you the thing you’ve known for a year. Tears unknowingly escape your eyes, and you find yourself unraveling a traumatic incident from years back while enveloped in the artificial cold tinged with cooking oil and preservatives.

Before you choke on your sobs and people suspect the boy of hurting your feelings—very characteristic of the commercial that same fast food chain just released on their cheeseburger (to a melancholic rendition of Neocolours’ most popular song)—you rush to the bathroom. One look at the mirror allows you to regain your composure. Your skin itches from within, your feet begging to begin the walk home.

You scoff at your reflection. As soon as you return to your seat, you whisper an apology. You barely manage to keep the grimace off your face as he wholeheartedly accepts that your rejection is nothing personal. As he talks, you let your eyes flit some inches away from his face. You imagine a slightly taller boy taking his place, skin closer to coffee than milk, the lilt in his voice impossible to ignore and his eyes bringing you comfort rather than unease.

But you remain silent. You don’t want to destroy years of their friendship, and months of yours, with the truth.

The artificial cold penetrates your skin, and you do not expect the sudden craving you have for the intense heat outside.

ACT VI.

SETTING: A rooftop bar situated above the stretch of establishments lighting up at one of the very few places your city is known for. Night.

Eighteen. A coming-of-age playlist would be nice.

The wind is cold tonight, but still not enough to bite at your skin while you sip the bitter alcohol for her to drink the sweeter one. That was your favorite alcoholic beverage in her hand. She winces after every taste.

This night is marked with a lot of firsts for you: first time drinking with your best friend, first time spending the night on a rooftop bar, and your first time being this nervous to open up to someone you expect to know you too well. You’ve been stuck like glue to each other for more than five years – will tonight be any different?

The long walk leading to the bar was marked with stories of her dilemma with her boyfriend. You let yourself listen to her, slipping in an advice when you felt the need to, so now that you are comfortably seated several feet above light traffic you decide it’s time to tell her your story.

Clearing your throat, you tell her something you’ve been denying for years. You were barely a teenager when you watched Jennifer’s Body and felt an exhilaration you thought was illegal to feel. It was odd when the dreams of your friends in junior high were about curly boy band members while a female character from your favorite teen show showed up in yours every night.

You only realize you’ve been holding your breath nearly a minute later when you release it upon seeing the expression on her face. She does not meet your eye.

ANA

Oh, like Val.

She is referring to your high school classmate who nonchalantly slipped into your conversation in class one day that she liked men and women.

The lukewarm expression on her face does not fade for a while, so you plaster a wide smile and talk about your experience as a college freshman away from home.

It’s probably because you took off your jacket that the night breeze turned hostile. You blame the alcohol for the twinge in your chest.

ACT VII. – FINAL

SETTING: One of the three parks on your campus, a place fifty-something kilometers away from your hometown. You’re gradually getting used to this place the other students call home. Night.

Eighteen approaching nineteen. Not even a month later and you’ll reach that silent age – sitting between what most consider the age of liberation and the age of newness. This period of anticipation feels like a safe place.

Some people start their final acts at the last part. No wonder it’s called final. But you – you’ve been living most of your life perfecting your final act. When did it begin?

BEGIN FLASHBACK:

It was probably one of your crushes in first grade (which did not last long, by the way, since he produced a generous amount of doodles on the magazine you brought to class in hopes of impressing your classmates). You were supposed to write your parents’ occupations on a large index card. Peeking into his progress, you caught the word “housewife” on the index card nestled in his short hands.

YOU

What does that mean?

It was your first time encountering a job called housewife.

He explained that his mother stayed at home, doing chores around the house, while his father worked elsewhere.

Close enough, you thought.

You overheard another classmate saying that her father was an employee, and you caught the word office. Delight danced on your skin as you picked up your pencil to give your parents new jobs.

For a decade and a few years, you have been refining this act. It was halfway through that period that you gave your father an unfinished degree in college and your mother an incomplete high school education. When your father died years after, you were relieved to find that no one dared to ask where your jobless mother got the money to continue providing for you. Then again, if ever the occasion did arise, you could simply point out that you did not want to talk about such a sensitive topic.

END FLASHBACK.

Come university life. You wonder about the kind of life you’re going to rebuild in the presence of the tall trees and the mountain shrouded with myths. Tonight, after the first of your many spontaneous long walks on campus, you sit on a bench in one of your university’s parks. Your friend takes the spot beside you. The both of you can’t help the giggles from coming out of your mouth as you look at the members of the university police force patrolling the area, giving you a look that probably means “you have to leave this place soon”.

But “soon” will come much later, when you both make the run for your dormitories before the curfew strikes. For now, your friend is telling you about their fresh heartbreak. Your heart warms to them, to how easily you earned their trust. Something gnaws at your stomach. You’ve been earning the trust of people all your life, but for all the wrong reasons.

End it.

You tell your friend everything. You tell them your mother does the same things a housewife does except she gets paid for it and she doesn’t really have a hold over her time, that there is no such thing as a rest day for her. You tell them your father is not someone who wears a tie and works a nine-to-five job surrounded by computers and paperwork but holds a butcher’s knife in the early morning and is in the company of faulty yellow jeepneys with his name painted on the back in the afternoon. You know you have to tell them that you rejected a boy not because you were not ready for a relationship but because he simply was not your type and it was his friend you liked, and that you experienced your first heartbreak when the one person you once took pride in as your best friend was far from excited about you embracing your sexuality as you were—but you also know that you cannot fit more than a decade’s worth of pretense in one night.

Your friend takes your hand, tears threatening to spill from their eyes. You think this is the expression you have been dreading all those years of building that act to perfection. But as you study their face, you find that there is no pity in those bright irises but something else you’ve been yearning for; something you know would have made you stop your deception early on. 

Warmth.

The show’s over.

END.

---

Photo taken from Pinterest.

About the Author