She’s Not My Girlfriend. She’s Just a Friend.
TheDancer and I were hanging out at the mall together after I had asked him to go to the big city for a date with me. After watching a movie I had paid for (Did I mention that TheDancer can be such a cheapskate sometimes?), we were having dinner at the food court and catching up on each other’s life.
“So, what reason did you tell your Mom as to why you had to go to the big city?”
He shrugged. “I told her I needed to get something from ClosetKing.”
“She believed that?”
“Well, she didn’t really mind. She was kind of busy since my uncle just arrived from Saudi and was asking the relatives to drop by their house.”
“Oh.”
We proceeded finishing our dinner, in between talks of other more mundane things. After an hour or so, we decided to leave since he still had to catch a bus for the long ride back to his town. As we passed by a couple of tables, someone called him.
“TheDancer!”
He turned towards the sound of the person calling his name and mumbled under his breath, “S**t! It’s my uncle.”
I turned to look at the group of people walking towards us. “Who are all those people with him?”
“My cousins.”
Hmmm… so I was finally meeting the relatives, I thought. Because TheDancer lived quite a distance from the big city, I never had the opportunity to meet anyone in his family. We had been dating for five months and the most connection to his family that I got was occasionally talking to his mother on the phone and asking her if I could talk to his son.
As was the custom for most Filipino families, he took his uncle’s hand and lifted it to his forehead as a sign of respect.
“Uncle.”
“What are you doing here?” his uncle asked, looking at me, and then at TheDancer, and then me, again. His uncle looked like the typical rich OFW, with the unbuttoned shirt halfway through his chest and a huge gold medallion on his neck. Add the carrier suitcase with wheels and the airport cart and he could be the poster child for Duty Free.
“We watched a movie and had dinner.”
“Who are you with?” he asked. I could feel his cousins staring at me from head to foot, sizing me up.
He pointed to me. “My friend.”
It was as if a thousand daggers miraculously came out of nowhere and flew straight into my chest. I ignored it and smiled at his uncle, albeit, a little uncomfortably.
“How’s your mom?” he asked.
“She’s at home. She said she was going to drop by your house today.”
“We must not have been able to catch her arrival.”
“Yeah, maybe… Listen, uncle, we’ll go ahead,” said TheDancer to his uncle, briefly patting his uncle’s arm.
His uncle nodded. “Oh, okay. You guys take care.”
One of his cousins decided to choose that moment to tease TheDancer. “Hey, bro. Is she your girlfriend?” he asked, as he nodded towards my direction.
TheDancer looked at me briefly and then turned to me. “No, she’s just a friend.”
I felt like another thousand daggers had stabbed my chest.
“Oh, come on. She’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?” his cousin taunted, grinning at TheDancer mischievously.
“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s just a friend.”
Another thousand daggers pierced through my chest.
TheDancer patted his cousin’s arm. “Hey, we have to go. I’ll see you guys later.”
I smiled briefly at his uncle and his cousins as I followed behind TheDancer. As we finally left them, walking away from the food court, I slowly tried to remove the three thousand daggers sticking out of my chest and cursed him in my mind.
It was a given that he definitely didn’t get any from me that night.
Still Searching for TheDancer
Because everybody I know has a Friendster account, one of the first persons I tried to search through Friendster’s search engine was an ex-boyfriend of mine from college whom I haven’t seen eversince I broke up with him during the last time I was at the big city.
TheDancer. The guy I broke up with before I started dating Rockstar.
I think he’s the only person I know who probably doesn’t own a Friendster account.
All my attempts to search for him through Friendster have failed. I even tried searching for him through Multiply and nothing. I figured, he wasn’t much of a computer savvy in college anyway – seeing as I had to frequently help him out with encoding his case presentations in simple Microsoft Word – but come on! It doesn’t take computer savvy to make a Friendster account, for God’s sake! I even came so far as to Google him but the only significant result I got was a list from the Professional Regulation Commission of those who passed the licensure exam for our old college course about a year after he graduated.
At least, now I know he’s finally passed his board exams.
Unfortunately, it only confirms that he has totally disappeared off my life and does not wish to be found.
I missed TheDancer. He was the first of the many players who traipsed in and out of my life. He was the first of the not-so-serious boyfriends I ever had. He was the first of the guys who treated me like crap but I continued seeing because there was nobody else around. He was the first of the guys I dated but knew I would never actually end up marrying.
He was also my first.
But that’s another story. LOL…
TheDancer and I met during my last month of internship at some rehabilitation center in Novaliches. He hailed from a private college just some distance from my own university. He was short, well-built, very masculine and cute when he grinned in that boyish mischievous way of his. It wasn’t love at first sight really. He frequently hung out with this other co-intern, ClosetKing, and one of my other co-interns, Fruity, had a crush on TheDancer. She displayed this in the most childish way possible: by constantly picking arguments with him. This did not do well with him, of course, as he ended up being frequently annoyed with her.
Our last day of rotation at the said rehabilitation, all the interns agreed on catching a movie together. TheDancer and I ended up sitting together, our elbows sharing one armchair. Sometime in the middle of the movie, our hands, which were initially hanging loosely an inch away from each other, brushed.
I ignored it. I figured it was an accident. A couple seconds later, I felt his pinkie brush against mine again. Still, I ignored it. But I didn’t move my hand away from his. And then he repeated it again.
I briefly looked at him from the corner of my eye. He was intently watching the movie.
So this time, I brushed my pinkie against his.
His expression never changed. But he brushed his pinkie against mine in return, this time a little longer than he’s supposed to.
I think I smiled.
Somehow, he ended up holding my hand during the rest of the movie. And we did all this with none of our friends ever noticing. There would definitely be a lot of teasing if anybody actually noticed it and we both did not want that. Plus I did not want to have Fruity thinking I was an Anaconda and stole her man. We separated as soon as the movie ended and the lights came on.
That same night, he texted me and told me he liked me. I told him I liked him too. Ergo, kami na (we’re going steady). Because he apparently didn’t want ClosetKing asking him a lot of irritating questions, he told me we should keep it on the down low whenever ClosetKing was around.
Which turns out to be almost all of the time as ClosetKing and TheDancer seemed to be practically joined at the hip.
At one time, ClosetKing, TheDancer and I practically got engaged in this severely complicated game of walking through the various streets and back alleys of Malate just to lose ClosetKing who was adamant in trying to join us. TheDancer it seems didn’t have the heart to tell him to bug off and he didn’t want to go off into a long explanation as to why he wanted to be with me alone, without ClosetKing’s company. ClosetKing must have noticed that I was spending a lot of time with TheDancer so he texted me if TheDancer was courting me. I told him no. He said that’s good because he was interested in me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him no so I just said I’m very flattered but I think we were better off as friends. I told TheDancer about the whole incident and he laughed his head off.
It seems that ClosetKing, who has been his bestfriend for the past few years, is infact inlove with him.
So, ClosetKing is gay.
Okay… that explained a lot.
So I played along with the entire charade between ClosetKing and TheDancer, letting ClosetKing think believe that I know he liked me too, being okay with TheDancer and I not letting ClosetKing know that we were dating. Often times, I would meet him after his duty at the hospital and we would avoid not being seen by ClosetKing together.
It was a really weird time of my life but ClosetKing was fun and flirty and was not complicated to be with so I stayed. He wasn’t as affectionate as I would’ve wanted to. He preferred being held by the elbow rather than by the hands. He was arrogant, a little bossy and was occasionally moody. We talked a lot on the phone and because I didn’t own one and he did, I frequently can be seen heading to a nearby public pay phone with my purse of P5 coins just to chat with him about his studies and making him answer hypothetical questions about our relationship. Because I owned a cellphone and he didn’t, I frequently had to be content with him sending me text messages from various unregistered numbers telling me to meet him somewhere and even waiting for him once for three hours at a McDonalds’ because he never actually got my reply at all. Because he lived one bus ride away from the big city, we didn’t see each other as often as I would’ve wanted and often times I had to entice him to head to the big city by telling him I was treating him for a movie and dinner which of course, I ended up paying for (Darn cheapskate that TheDancer!). Despite the fact that he had a temper, we rarely fought because whenever I would try to open up about certain incident that had made me annoyed with him, he had this way of making me laugh and forget about it before I even started telling him why I was angry in the first place.
He wasn’t the love of my life but I loved him, in one of those crazy I-don’t-know why ways.
When I finally told him that I was leaving the big city to finally go back home, he surprised me by saying the sweetest words I have ever heard come out of his mouth:
“If things were different and we were at an age when we could be more independent to make our own decisions, you [mistress] could have been the woman I would’ve thought of wanting to spend the rest of my life with.”
Such perfect timing. And he decides to tell me this just as I was about to leave the big city and return back at an indefinite period of time.
In all the seven months that we were together, he couldn’t even find the courage to tell me he loved me.
Arghhh, damn men! You all want what you can no longer have.
