In my other dreams, I slipped off a cliff somewhere and fell. My fingers scratched through the dirt and bits of rock trying to grasp anything solid, or really just trying to create friction to slow my fall, but my hands were all too weak at holding anything, let alone trying to hold on. My hands felt as if it weren’t mine, as if all my blood has ceased flowing from them.
Gravity continued embracing me like a newborn child. When I look down, I see nothing. I look above, and the place where I fell from has disappeared.
I couldn’t hold on to anything.
And then I’d wake up.
“Are you all right?” a voice from beside me said. It was Anna.
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” I muttered, half-awake.
“You were talking, do you know that?”
“What was I saying?”
“Bombs. You’re saying that on and on.”
“Bombs?”
“Yeah. And ‘kill the samurai’. What were you dreaming about?”
“Bombs and kill the samurai?” I repeated. I tried thinking about it but it didn’t have any connection to the dream where I was falling.
“My parents told me I talk in my sleep too,” she said. “But it’s mostly moans and screams.”
“And do you that a lot too even when you’re awake?” I teased.
Anna sat on top of me with her feet on my sides. She put her hand on my cock and stroked it until it was hard. “I do…and in fact I love doing it again and again.”
She inched her way to my abdomen and finally her lips touched my hard-on.
We made love and I came inside her.
“That felt good?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure that’s okay?”
“If it feels good, why mustn’t it be okay?”
“No I mean, you might—”
“I’ve done the math, all right? And it’s not like that this is the first time I’ve done this.”
“All right, all right,” I surrendered. She laughed. I sat up and stared at her naked body: the explored terrain, with all fog of war cleared.
“Listen, I’m gonna tell you something honestly, and well, this is actually a first for me.”
“Okay.”
She sat and rested her head on the headboard. She looked at me, blinked for a few seconds, opened her mouth, but while on the act of speaking when she suddenly broke off, trying to hold her laughter.
“Why?” I asked. “Is there dirt on my nose?”
“No,” suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “It’s just that, fuck. Why is this so hard? I feel so silly.”
“Just say the words.”
“Can we go on like this forever?” she finally said.
“Like this?”
“No, I meant, of course, just the two of us. I mean, I would want to. Won’t you?”
“I would love it, of course,” I assured her.
I embraced her. The apartment was silent, and my heart was beating fast.
Now that I have reached some form of denouement or at least, a conclusion, then allow me to clarify a few things.
Kristelle and I never reunited. We did see each other in a common friend’s birthday party, but he was with some other guy while I was with Anna. Good thing, I don’t need any more dream interpretations from her for I have ceased dreaming about the garden. In a snap of a finger, the dream abandoned me, and I could say I have moved on to other things.
I never saw LRT girl again. I tried searching for her in various forms of social media, but to no avail. I asked some of our common friends regarding her whereabouts, but they too haven’t heard any news from her. I hope she lives quiet and well, somewhere.
I barely scraped through my last years in college, mostly because of one thing I called sympathetic disinterest. I finished my undergraduate thesis with Anna’s help, and when I graduated my mother came home from the States for the ceremony and my wedding.
Yes, my wedding. Anna proposed and maybe I took it as a sign. What it signified, I wasn’t entirely sure. I’ve still got years to find out, though.
When it’s my day off and Anna’s got to work, I do the laundry. I put water in the machine, put detergent, make it spin for a few minutes until the bubbles form what looked like the foundations of the tower of Babel, before putting the dirty clothes one by one. I stare at the mixture of white foam and water spinning on and on, sucking the dirty clothes in its whirlpool. On and on it spun.
Sometimes, I’d go for walks along the streets of Manila with Anna’s dog with me. We’d stroll along Legarda, Hidalgo, stopping at the coffee shops I frequented with all those other people in the past, smoking stick after stick of cigarettes. Was I hoping to bump into them, hoping they were also thinking about the past? Maybe. Or maybe, by doing so, I wouldn’t forget. The act of remembering, after all, is the fear of forgetting. Even though everything is always in the process of fading away.
Sometimes, I’d even go so far as go to her apartment, remembering the first time the LRT girl asked me to go there. Everything was in the distant past, and as I move endlessly forward, the distance becomes greater.
I can’t say if I’m really happy about it, but it’s one truth in this life: there’s really no such thing as perfect happiness. But I’m glad I have told this story the way I know it has to be told. I highly doubt it that if I changed the details, it will end differently. But that’s how it is with this story: no matter how many details I manipulate just so the story can lean to my favor, it’ll end the same, much like the people in it. It’s not the world that made our choices, after all. The world simply moved on and took us with it.