This Feels Right

This Feels Right

for Marben

Last year, around this time, I was in Manila with butterflies trapped in my stomach from a twitter-patted night in Bacolod chatting with this boy I adored since college throwing wit at each other while the mango leaves shivered at my apartment and the shadows played with his imagination at his house in Pag-ibig. At the same date, only a year older, I was eager for Davao to be part of the DWW where panels took surgery of my short stories and I, wishful after the session to see this boy whose movement from peripheral to clear view was postponed for the next months.

How fun memories are when desires during the past are met. May the butterflies take residence in my heart forever.

Before Fireworks were the only sound I heard in Manila and the only air I breathed was the debris of holiday explosion, I was back in Davao. Old enough to start a home is our age when half of our playmates have taken the name “daddy” and have gone posting pictures of their children’s first walk on social networks, we finally met at that point where majority of our kind find comfort in conversations over beer. There, we learned food and alcohol are unnecessary for two snowed under creatures. Our hands slowly led their way to each other; and after those fingers mastered senses, I uttered “This feels right”, although he would argue that it was he who said so. While others already tied the knot, we were amateurs starting the culture of certainty however swift the introduction was.

Seven years ago, ready to take the challenge of the university, I took those index cards for a term paper and recorded the references of previous research to find groundwork on simple stories perhaps like ours; he shyly asked how notes are done that way. And knowing how clever this boy was base on his stance and the graceful way he moves and curves his fingers on the desk, I gave him a stunned reply, of course, in a way that admirers generally are – eating beats from the heart with faces apple colored. Finally, time allowed him to admit that he wasn't asking just to ask how index cards are used. Still, he said he could have asked someone else but he chose to ask me like inquiring the possibility of having me seven years after when we would be matured enough to learn together, teach the other this and that or stay in concert which is enough to keep the pieces of fragile things intact and forget how it feels to break.

Years will come with amusing recollections for retrospect. There are enough words to describe us the way homes accommodate people undaunted by their numbers and difference in characters. So, let further poems be made, short stories be written, or messages be said, whispered or shouted through words or words through hugs or an unembellished embrace, pure like how feelings are for us and this way, forever I will say, may the butterflies take residence in my heart.