Chimes

Two

Wednesday, 3:40PM

I got there early. I couldn't help the excitement takeover my schedule (and my life).

I felt I was flying on my way to our meeting place and the butterflies kept flocking to my belly. I thought to myself, so, this is how love is. It changes the way you see everything. Because the road to the restaurant looked more colorful than how I remembered it. The confetti of early fall leaves felt like the first snowfall. The gusting winds spoke poetry. The restaurant's chimes stopped being infuriating. And the smell of coffee was more amorous than roses and gardenias combined.

All of a sudden, the sun resigned from being the center of the universe I've always known, and SinB took its place. I gravitated around her sweltering warmth. I was prepared to go blind; I was ready to get burned. Because I wanted SinB, and I wanted to melt in her so bad.

The weather that day however, was a travesty of love. It was humid and gloomy with fifty percent chance of thunderous heartache and scattered showers of dejection. It was just all-out supportive of my mood when I was at the restaurant, because SinB didn't show up that day.

We weren't a couple in a clear-cut commitment, I convinced myself. But in the unspoken rules of dating, it wasn't wrong to expect her to not stand me up like that. She knew I would be waiting there for her, the whole night if I had to, and it pained me that she didn't have the decency to tell me that she changed her mind.

I found myself in one corner with tears blotching my favorite light blue dress. I thought it would be good luck to wear it, since it was our first day to be in one table as dates of each other. If it wasn't for the fact that it started crowding inside the place, I would have stayed until it closed and ordered everything in their menu just so I won't feel embarrassed waiting alone.

I was strong, but not strong enough to take SinB's behavior nonchalantly. She was cruel like her smile that day when she said she liked me. She was unkind like the condescending air she always sucked into the restaurant when she came. Her heartlessness was as enormous as her sweaters.

For three hours, I hated her until I didn't. I kept convincing myself that she might have caught something and fell severely ill. Or that she was punished by her parents, who seemed strict, and grounded her home. Or that she met an accident. It made me guilty, hating her without thinking of unselfish reasons that prevented her from coming. And so, after the hate was inconsolable concern.

I was crumbling inside as I shambled out of the place. I thought to myself, so this is how love is. It was so strong that it drove me to feeling so many things that ranged from great joy to great sorrow. It caused my mood to swing from magical elation to horrible despair.

I walked home bothered by my knees that were weak from the rejection. It was worse than when I skinned them in a high school when I was forced by my teacher to join a relay. I twisted an ankle a few feet away from the finish line but I continued running and plunged my way to the end. I won the race and I was still holding that white sash from the end of the track when they brought me out on a stretcher. I wasn't competitive; I was just determined, like how determined I was to not give up on SinB.

That night, my heart burned from worry and sadness. It's funny how it burned from the absence of my sun. SinB never missed Wednesday visits like how she never missed the Mondays and Fridays. Something was terribly wrong.

Friday, 4:15PM

I didn't want to drop by the restaurant because for a day and a half I was battling with my disappointment that eventually turned to apprehension just to return to greater depths of distress. It was a tormenting push and pull of uncertainty.