Trouble in The Office

PR 731, 19 July 2006

I turned to my poetic self who was sitting on the window seat in the plane. (I chose the aisle because of the need to pee every hour.) “Are you thinking about Drew again?”

“Drew lingers like an unwelcome fog. Heavy like a blanket, but the chill and mist brings sickness instead of warmth.” Her voice was breathy and monotonous. Such a loser.

“Why obsess on a guy you can never have? Queers like him don’t go for straight girls. Get over it,” I told her for the nth time. I was picking clean the remnants of shrimp and vermicelli salad on the food tray. Spotting hers still untouched, I asked, “Are you eating that?”

She handed it to me and forced to smile. The effort was breaking the marble-like skin on her face. “I wanted to stay on when he said goodbye to me…”

“He said goodbye to *me*,” I corrected her.

“We are one and the same, my friend,” she said. I shook my head and rolled my eyeballs. Where did I ever meet this girl?

She took a deep breath to calm her self and let out a steady stream of air. She started to emo on the view outside – white and fluffy cumulus clouds sitting on a veil of cirrus (or was it stratus?). The bright blue sky was searing my pupils that I had to turn away and concentrate on Antonio Banderas dancing tango on the in-flight movie. “I am a wreck,” poetic self said. “Am a car crash, and Drew is the lamppost I had wrapped my self around.
Curses! I should have obeyed my heart and stayed.”

“In Bangkok for three more days? Sira ka ba? I can’t even stand another minute in the office! It’s such a dreary place with all the vacant cubicles. And the language! Do you know that if we haven’t left today, we’d be bored ad infinitum at the marketing synergy meeting, which is all in Thai? You’d break your neck trying to hold your head up in the conference room.”

She wagged a finger at me. “But my muse will be there, and we’d confer in our own bubble. The other people would just be a panoramic blur of color and chatter.” Dreamy again.

She’s hopelessly in love. If it were me, I would deny it, strongly and violently. It’s so corny kasi, as corny as the limerick poetic self made up on the way to Terminal 2:

“There once was a guy named Drew,
Who was as gay as a bird was blue.
He came to Manila,
Left his boyfriend in Malaysia,
And now I am loving Drew, too.”

Ugh. See what I mean?

An hour later, while poetic self was chanting “Drew, Drew, my world is Drew,” strong turbulence rocked the plane. The carrier dipped a hundred feet down and leaned to its starboard side. I heard rain pelting against the plane’s exterior. In a panic, I prayed to God not to let me die in the Pacific. My stomach somersaulted and my head banged around the baggage compartment. I turned to poetic self and she was as calm as an idiot.

She laughed at my white-stricken face. How can she be so unfazed in an NDE (Near Death Experience)?

She said, “If I die, my final words shall be

'Take care, sweet love,
but burn no tea candles.
Light no incense.
I am flame itself dying away.
My embers shall turn black
but only after giving you warmth.’ ”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I reached for the paper bag and puked.

posted by Elyss @ 8:32 PM