The Wedding
The Wedding
Chapter One
Summary: A love story about two men from a small town, and the other beings who mess with them. Contains vague mentions of Philippine folklore and pop culture, true stories from exclusive highschools (word-of-mouth), and misconduct regarding starfish.
Concrit will be greatly appreciated because I wrote this at some ungodly hour and I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing.
How do you know if you’re in love? How does anyone know? They say your palms sweat and your knees start shaking, and that your heart is leaping out of your chest. It’s like you’re scared; like every inch of your body is poised to run and scream for help, but you can’t actually talk because invisible fingers are viciously pinching your throat. In America they say you fall, as if there’s one big gaping hole that appears out of nowhere and you can’t crawl out, but here we speak of love as if we’ve turned into millionaires overnight, which is not the case at all. Love means wealth in our language, something precious. This is laughable. Everyone knows loving someone makes you poor. There’s the issue of holidays made for couples, living quarters and sugar daddies, and these days it’s normal to be unemployed and forever scamming off your parents and your relatives and hell, everyone’s related in here. We’re like parasites.
But that’s the problem of straight people. Is love the same for us? For everybody? Sometimes I think we all love the same, but everyone else insists that love is different. There are loves that are okay, and loves that don’t lead to sex, and loves that aren’t meant to exist. Ours is that kind of love. I don’t know when I thought of myself as a rich man, and the exact time I wanted to share my riches with Patrick. We’ve been friends since forever, and romance isn’t supposed to start out like that - when you’ve seen each other stark naked before - but it did. And that makes people fucked up, in general.
In our hometown, true love is between a man and a woman, a mayor and his money, a fisherman with his boat, and an old woman and her insane backlog of scary stories. If Patrick had his way, he would describe love as magic deeply rooted before time. If I had my way, I would tell him to fuck off for being a drama queen. Which I did, I assure you. But I’m in love with him, and even during the times when I hate him so much I only need to remember what happened between the time we first met and the time the Woman gave us her blessings.
*
Patrick and I didn’t love each other at first sight. In fact, Patrick and I were so flamboyantly gay that the mere thought of having sex with each other didn’t cross our minds - it would have been incestuous and immoral. We have our rules, and one of them is that you don’t fuck a girl because they are different creatures. Patrick had the longest eyelashes, so I considered him a girl, and I was never turned on by him at all. But we were friends since high school, and we had the same friends and blew the same men. Patrick was always different however, because he was as tall as I was, only slender, and he would always stare off into space during class, as if he wasn’t living in our world. And he liked to talk about little creatures, spirits, and other morbid stuff he would hear from their househelp, an old woman with infinite knowledge of the past war and its ghosts. For a beautiful gay man he really wasn’t into beautiful things.
We were close neighbors. I lived with my maternal grandparents because both my parents were OFWS, while Patrick lived with his aunt (who had different boyfriends for each day of the week, all customers of their booming sari-sari store) and their creepy househelp Linda. Our place back then advertised itself as an authentic fishing village with beautiful beaches though the houses were large and made of concrete, and though there was a lot of space between houses they were generally open to the public. People were more trusting then. I would casually amble in Patrick’s house and we would watch Del Tiero and Recuerdo de Amor in their living room and nick junk food from the store, while Patrick and the rest of the gang would crash in my house and teach each other how to apply make-up. After caking our faces, styling our hair, and putting on Patrick’s aunt’s clothes, we would frolic around in the dark-sanded beach, hurling poor, dried starfish at each other. Dong (who preferred to be called Tamara because we all adopted female nicknames back then) and Jefferson (Layla) also joined our gang of effeminacy afterwards. (Patrick was Catalina, and I was Morgana). We were known as the gay celebrities of our town, too young to be women or men; just enjoying the feeling that we were loud and proud.
Our gang was almost bullied at our all-boy’s school owned by the local church, but we were bitches so they were soon afraid of us. I received a black eye once, but not without me giving the attacker five dead fingernails. All because I joked that he liked me, and he knew I was gay and gay people apparently wants to have sex with anything that has testicles. I was big gay guy and I reveled in it, and they left me alone soon enough. If you’re 5’9” at the age of fifteen and have the shoulders of Hulk Hogan, people leave you alone. Also, there’s something terrifying about a huge gay man who can style everyone’s hair with ribbons with the most delicate of techniques. Tamara was the biggest bitch and could fling stinging insults when necessary to protect himself, while Jefferson, though the shyest, was also the most kindhearted, and everyone loved him.
Patrick, on the other hand, claimed that he was protected from bullying by his anting-anting. “It really works,” he said gravely, the night after he was almost raped by three underclassmen. He owns an unevenly shaped stone carved with symbols that he wraps around his neck with silk. Personally I thought the object was disgusting, but he miraculously managed to scare them off even if they were flanking him from all corners. Patrick looked very serious but calm, and I embraced him, afraid for his life, the small charm trapped between our chests.
“You’re not even an action star,” I said lightly, to diffuse the tension, and Patrick chuckled.
*
Life was interesting. I was treated as if I was everyone’s friend, and they would ask me about fashion or relationship advice, but other times they were scared. Our principal, Father Jeremy, was a balding priest, and whenever he talked to me his voice became very soft and gentle, as if I were a wild animal and I would attack him at any moment. I was not scared, but I was wild. Everyone in the whole school knew we had a Cold War going on between us, and the faculty and the students eagerly waited for our daily verbal spats. There was this time when Father Jeremy visited our Religion class and took over for fifteen minutes, and he asked us to open our Good Manners and Right Conduct textbook and answer the most obvious of questions especially for the most pathological of liars; questions like ‘Why should you love one another’, ‘How should you show your love to your family, friends, and God?’ and so on and so forth. I was bored and feeling a bit mutinous, so I raised my hand. As expected, everyone looked at me fervently; even the Religion teacher had to hide a smile behind her hand.
“Does God love me?” I asked.
“But of course,” The answer came silkily, within a heartbeat. Not to be deterred, I shot my hand back up again. “Does God still love me even though I don’t like girls?” Snorts and giggles everywhere.
“God thinks it’s wrong, and he doesn’t want you to go to Hell because he loves you, so he will show you to the right path someday.” His voice sounded tired.
“But if I don’t ever change, if I don’t ever repent for my sins, if I continue not liking girls, will he still love me?”
Father Jeremy gave me a look that said Go to Hell but before he could answer, Patrick shot his hand up and pointed out a grammatical error in page 72 of our textbook. The rest of the class almost broke into laughter, but no one really hated Father Jeremy so they kept their silence, and I felt a bit guilty after my surge of overconfidence. Father Jeremy asked to speak to me before class, voice all soft again as if he’s walking on eggshells. Patrick insisted to stay behind as well, quietly fingering his charm underneath his shirt. “I don’t think God hates your kind,” Father said, trying and failing to act like a benevolent old preacher, “but as long as you do not act upon it, then you are loved.”
“What do you mean, act upon it?” I asked innocently. I was a cheeky bastard, I know.
Father Jeremy gave me a stern look. “Being gay is alright, as long as you do not commit homosexual acts.”
Patrick finally stopped fidgeting, and looked at him straight in the eye. “Might as well cut off my arm.”
We were suspended for a week, but everyone was used to it. While we were suspended, we would organize the books in the library, and Patrick tugged my arm. “I know a place where it’s okay for guys to have sex.”
“You mean the men’s bathroom?” I replied absently, dusting off a particularly large bible. He tugged at my arm impatiently again. “I mean, have you ever wondered where we came from? How we were made? They’re never in the fantastic stories that the books tell us, but my Lola Linda knew someone who told her the story. Did you know we used to have both a penis and a vagina?”
I wrinkled my nose at that. I never actually thought of having a vagina. I liked dressing up as a woman, but having a girl’s parts was complicated. “That’s kind of scary.”
“Not my point,” Patrick said, although I never got to hear what his point was exactly because the librarian walked by, and I didn’t want to deal with Father Jeremy again so I kept my mouth shut.
*
I had an ego the size of a mountain, so I instigated an unofficial gay beauty pageant to celebrate my last quarter of highschool. I wore make-up, wrapped a pink feather boa around my neck and wore hooker stilettos. Tamara put on a sparkly dress inspired from the latest Sharon Cuneta movie, while Patrick and Jefferson wore matching Baro’t Saya. We proudly marched along the hallways, chins held up amidst hoots and catcalls, and by the time we neared the church doors Father Jeremy, Albert, and Antonio magically appeared and tried to shoo us away. Father Albert went ballistic; he ended up having to drag a very violent Tamara away, while Jefferson clung on his neck, howling in pain because Father Albert swiftly whacked his head with a cane. Father Jeremy and I simply glared daggers at each other. He was the first one to give in, and he sighed. “Gabriel,” he said, “please take Patrick to the clinic.” I looked beside me and noticed Patrick had a missing front tooth, and his polo shirt was drenched in blood, while Father Antonio fretted over him (though he was the one who hit him). Cursing myself, Patrick, and God, I rushed him to the clinic where the school nurse attempted to patch him up. Soon all our guardians arrived and there was shouting and screaming and Jefferson cried noisily throughout the whole thing. Patrick (minus one tooth) and I sat stunned, holding hands, while he nervously fingered his charm again and again as if in prayer.
We became the talk of the town, as if we weren’t already: FOUR LITTLE DEVILS UPSET THE LOCAL CHURCH - AND THEY LOVE PENIS. Strangely enough, none of our classmates gave a shit. The lower batches tried to make fun of us, but I was bigger than the rest of them combined, so they did it behind our backs. We were all suspended for at least two weeks for staging our own coup d’etat, but everything went back to normal after that. We were still called the Spice Girls (minus a Sporty Spice, because we hated sports), our classmates still came up to us for girl advice, we still gave blowjobs to people who needed a quick release. The controversies never left, however, and before graduation Tamara and our classmate Luke were expelled for having sex in one of the abandoned janitor’s closets. Apparently they went too far. I blew, but I never bent over for anyone, so I was still respected and everyone kept it hush-hush. It became painfully obvious that Tamara had it up the ass because he was tottering to the lab during Physics, and the idiots didn’t use any condoms.
High school was quickly coming to an end. My parents had already decided that I study and live abroad with them in San Francisco, while Patrick passed the entrance exam for the top university in the country. I avoided Father Jeremy’s eyes all throughout my last week, until I was forced to look at him again while he handed me my diploma. “You know,” he said, almost conversationally, “I enjoyed fighting with you.” I looked back into the old geezer’s eyes and I realized I would miss the bastard, and my heart twisted with the joy that our rivalry had, at last, reached its eye-opening conclusion.
There were no melodramatic partings, even if we loved watching the dramas on TV. Some things don't translate to reality. Jefferson handed me a letter gently and I knew, right then and there, that he would break many people’s hearts in the future. Tamara gave me tight hugs and wet kisses on my cheek and told me of his plans of opening a local parlor because the old one was crap, and that I absolutely had to have my haircut there someday. Patrick and I kissed each other’s cheeks, after which he gave me a bag of candy from the store. It was only when I was in the plane did I realize that his anting-anting was hidden inside one of the candy wrappers. I took the ugly thing out, slightly moved despite its poor appearance, and I placed it around my neck.
It was ten years before I decided to come back to the Philippines and before I returned the charm to Patrick again, and when I saw him he was seated on the dark-skinned shores. His hair was tied into a bun and his cheeks were powdered red, a full-grown man watching the far-away islands as they slept still.
Chapter One
Summary: A love story about two men from a small town, and the other beings who mess with them. Contains vague mentions of Philippine folklore and pop culture, true stories from exclusive highschools (word-of-mouth), and misconduct regarding starfish.
Concrit will be greatly appreciated because I wrote this at some ungodly hour and I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing.
How do you know if you’re in love? How does anyone know? They say your palms sweat and your knees start shaking, and that your heart is leaping out of your chest. It’s like you’re scared; like every inch of your body is poised to run and scream for help, but you can’t actually talk because invisible fingers are viciously pinching your throat. In America they say you fall, as if there’s one big gaping hole that appears out of nowhere and you can’t crawl out, but here we speak of love as if we’ve turned into millionaires overnight, which is not the case at all. Love means wealth in our language, something precious. This is laughable. Everyone knows loving someone makes you poor. There’s the issue of holidays made for couples, living quarters and sugar daddies, and these days it’s normal to be unemployed and forever scamming off your parents and your relatives and hell, everyone’s related in here. We’re like parasites.
But that’s the problem of straight people. Is love the same for us? For everybody? Sometimes I think we all love the same, but everyone else insists that love is different. There are loves that are okay, and loves that don’t lead to sex, and loves that aren’t meant to exist. Ours is that kind of love. I don’t know when I thought of myself as a rich man, and the exact time I wanted to share my riches with Patrick. We’ve been friends since forever, and romance isn’t supposed to start out like that - when you’ve seen each other stark naked before - but it did. And that makes people fucked up, in general.
In our hometown, true love is between a man and a woman, a mayor and his money, a fisherman with his boat, and an old woman and her insane backlog of scary stories. If Patrick had his way, he would describe love as magic deeply rooted before time. If I had my way, I would tell him to fuck off for being a drama queen. Which I did, I assure you. But I’m in love with him, and even during the times when I hate him so much I only need to remember what happened between the time we first met and the time the Woman gave us her blessings.
*
Patrick and I didn’t love each other at first sight. In fact, Patrick and I were so flamboyantly gay that the mere thought of having sex with each other didn’t cross our minds - it would have been incestuous and immoral. We have our rules, and one of them is that you don’t fuck a girl because they are different creatures. Patrick had the longest eyelashes, so I considered him a girl, and I was never turned on by him at all. But we were friends since high school, and we had the same friends and blew the same men. Patrick was always different however, because he was as tall as I was, only slender, and he would always stare off into space during class, as if he wasn’t living in our world. And he liked to talk about little creatures, spirits, and other morbid stuff he would hear from their househelp, an old woman with infinite knowledge of the past war and its ghosts. For a beautiful gay man he really wasn’t into beautiful things.
We were close neighbors. I lived with my maternal grandparents because both my parents were OFWS, while Patrick lived with his aunt (who had different boyfriends for each day of the week, all customers of their booming sari-sari store) and their creepy househelp Linda. Our place back then advertised itself as an authentic fishing village with beautiful beaches though the houses were large and made of concrete, and though there was a lot of space between houses they were generally open to the public. People were more trusting then. I would casually amble in Patrick’s house and we would watch Del Tiero and Recuerdo de Amor in their living room and nick junk food from the store, while Patrick and the rest of the gang would crash in my house and teach each other how to apply make-up. After caking our faces, styling our hair, and putting on Patrick’s aunt’s clothes, we would frolic around in the dark-sanded beach, hurling poor, dried starfish at each other. Dong (who preferred to be called Tamara because we all adopted female nicknames back then) and Jefferson (Layla) also joined our gang of effeminacy afterwards. (Patrick was Catalina, and I was Morgana). We were known as the gay celebrities of our town, too young to be women or men; just enjoying the feeling that we were loud and proud.
Our gang was almost bullied at our all-boy’s school owned by the local church, but we were bitches so they were soon afraid of us. I received a black eye once, but not without me giving the attacker five dead fingernails. All because I joked that he liked me, and he knew I was gay and gay people apparently wants to have sex with anything that has testicles. I was big gay guy and I reveled in it, and they left me alone soon enough. If you’re 5’9” at the age of fifteen and have the shoulders of Hulk Hogan, people leave you alone. Also, there’s something terrifying about a huge gay man who can style everyone’s hair with ribbons with the most delicate of techniques. Tamara was the biggest bitch and could fling stinging insults when necessary to protect himself, while Jefferson, though the shyest, was also the most kindhearted, and everyone loved him.
Patrick, on the other hand, claimed that he was protected from bullying by his anting-anting. “It really works,” he said gravely, the night after he was almost raped by three underclassmen. He owns an unevenly shaped stone carved with symbols that he wraps around his neck with silk. Personally I thought the object was disgusting, but he miraculously managed to scare them off even if they were flanking him from all corners. Patrick looked very serious but calm, and I embraced him, afraid for his life, the small charm trapped between our chests.
“You’re not even an action star,” I said lightly, to diffuse the tension, and Patrick chuckled.
*
Life was interesting. I was treated as if I was everyone’s friend, and they would ask me about fashion or relationship advice, but other times they were scared. Our principal, Father Jeremy, was a balding priest, and whenever he talked to me his voice became very soft and gentle, as if I were a wild animal and I would attack him at any moment. I was not scared, but I was wild. Everyone in the whole school knew we had a Cold War going on between us, and the faculty and the students eagerly waited for our daily verbal spats. There was this time when Father Jeremy visited our Religion class and took over for fifteen minutes, and he asked us to open our Good Manners and Right Conduct textbook and answer the most obvious of questions especially for the most pathological of liars; questions like ‘Why should you love one another’, ‘How should you show your love to your family, friends, and God?’ and so on and so forth. I was bored and feeling a bit mutinous, so I raised my hand. As expected, everyone looked at me fervently; even the Religion teacher had to hide a smile behind her hand.
“Does God love me?” I asked.
“But of course,” The answer came silkily, within a heartbeat. Not to be deterred, I shot my hand back up again. “Does God still love me even though I don’t like girls?” Snorts and giggles everywhere.
“God thinks it’s wrong, and he doesn’t want you to go to Hell because he loves you, so he will show you to the right path someday.” His voice sounded tired.
“But if I don’t ever change, if I don’t ever repent for my sins, if I continue not liking girls, will he still love me?”
Father Jeremy gave me a look that said Go to Hell but before he could answer, Patrick shot his hand up and pointed out a grammatical error in page 72 of our textbook. The rest of the class almost broke into laughter, but no one really hated Father Jeremy so they kept their silence, and I felt a bit guilty after my surge of overconfidence. Father Jeremy asked to speak to me before class, voice all soft again as if he’s walking on eggshells. Patrick insisted to stay behind as well, quietly fingering his charm underneath his shirt. “I don’t think God hates your kind,” Father said, trying and failing to act like a benevolent old preacher, “but as long as you do not act upon it, then you are loved.”
“What do you mean, act upon it?” I asked innocently. I was a cheeky bastard, I know.
Father Jeremy gave me a stern look. “Being gay is alright, as long as you do not commit homosexual acts.”
Patrick finally stopped fidgeting, and looked at him straight in the eye. “Might as well cut off my arm.”
We were suspended for a week, but everyone was used to it. While we were suspended, we would organize the books in the library, and Patrick tugged my arm. “I know a place where it’s okay for guys to have sex.”
“You mean the men’s bathroom?” I replied absently, dusting off a particularly large bible. He tugged at my arm impatiently again. “I mean, have you ever wondered where we came from? How we were made? They’re never in the fantastic stories that the books tell us, but my Lola Linda knew someone who told her the story. Did you know we used to have both a penis and a vagina?”
I wrinkled my nose at that. I never actually thought of having a vagina. I liked dressing up as a woman, but having a girl’s parts was complicated. “That’s kind of scary.”
“Not my point,” Patrick said, although I never got to hear what his point was exactly because the librarian walked by, and I didn’t want to deal with Father Jeremy again so I kept my mouth shut.
*
I had an ego the size of a mountain, so I instigated an unofficial gay beauty pageant to celebrate my last quarter of highschool. I wore make-up, wrapped a pink feather boa around my neck and wore hooker stilettos. Tamara put on a sparkly dress inspired from the latest Sharon Cuneta movie, while Patrick and Jefferson wore matching Baro’t Saya. We proudly marched along the hallways, chins held up amidst hoots and catcalls, and by the time we neared the church doors Father Jeremy, Albert, and Antonio magically appeared and tried to shoo us away. Father Albert went ballistic; he ended up having to drag a very violent Tamara away, while Jefferson clung on his neck, howling in pain because Father Albert swiftly whacked his head with a cane. Father Jeremy and I simply glared daggers at each other. He was the first one to give in, and he sighed. “Gabriel,” he said, “please take Patrick to the clinic.” I looked beside me and noticed Patrick had a missing front tooth, and his polo shirt was drenched in blood, while Father Antonio fretted over him (though he was the one who hit him). Cursing myself, Patrick, and God, I rushed him to the clinic where the school nurse attempted to patch him up. Soon all our guardians arrived and there was shouting and screaming and Jefferson cried noisily throughout the whole thing. Patrick (minus one tooth) and I sat stunned, holding hands, while he nervously fingered his charm again and again as if in prayer.
We became the talk of the town, as if we weren’t already: FOUR LITTLE DEVILS UPSET THE LOCAL CHURCH - AND THEY LOVE PENIS. Strangely enough, none of our classmates gave a shit. The lower batches tried to make fun of us, but I was bigger than the rest of them combined, so they did it behind our backs. We were all suspended for at least two weeks for staging our own coup d’etat, but everything went back to normal after that. We were still called the Spice Girls (minus a Sporty Spice, because we hated sports), our classmates still came up to us for girl advice, we still gave blowjobs to people who needed a quick release. The controversies never left, however, and before graduation Tamara and our classmate Luke were expelled for having sex in one of the abandoned janitor’s closets. Apparently they went too far. I blew, but I never bent over for anyone, so I was still respected and everyone kept it hush-hush. It became painfully obvious that Tamara had it up the ass because he was tottering to the lab during Physics, and the idiots didn’t use any condoms.
High school was quickly coming to an end. My parents had already decided that I study and live abroad with them in San Francisco, while Patrick passed the entrance exam for the top university in the country. I avoided Father Jeremy’s eyes all throughout my last week, until I was forced to look at him again while he handed me my diploma. “You know,” he said, almost conversationally, “I enjoyed fighting with you.” I looked back into the old geezer’s eyes and I realized I would miss the bastard, and my heart twisted with the joy that our rivalry had, at last, reached its eye-opening conclusion.
There were no melodramatic partings, even if we loved watching the dramas on TV. Some things don't translate to reality. Jefferson handed me a letter gently and I knew, right then and there, that he would break many people’s hearts in the future. Tamara gave me tight hugs and wet kisses on my cheek and told me of his plans of opening a local parlor because the old one was crap, and that I absolutely had to have my haircut there someday. Patrick and I kissed each other’s cheeks, after which he gave me a bag of candy from the store. It was only when I was in the plane did I realize that his anting-anting was hidden inside one of the candy wrappers. I took the ugly thing out, slightly moved despite its poor appearance, and I placed it around my neck.
It was ten years before I decided to come back to the Philippines and before I returned the charm to Patrick again, and when I saw him he was seated on the dark-skinned shores. His hair was tied into a bun and his cheeks were powdered red, a full-grown man watching the far-away islands as they slept still.