The Silence Got Too Cold

At 27, Italy Chicago Alvarez has spent half his life loving the same person in the same province.

Iskra Rivera was his lab partner at Holy Angel University when they were sixteen. She became his best friend, his home, his first love. Her parents in San Fernando became his when his own family in Mexico, Pampanga fell apart. Their lives tangled so completely that their barkada was the same, their and their Sunday lunches at her Lola's house in Angeles were the same. Their future was supposed to be the same.

But people change.

Just like the seasons, you can't stop the way.

Ten years later, they're living in an apartment in Balibago, Angeles City. Same bed. Same roof. Different worlds. They stopped fighting months ago. Not because they're okay. Because they both know.

Faye stopped reaching. Ichigo stopped asking.

You can't make somebody you love feel the same if they don't. It doesn't matter the words that you say.

Ichigo would drive through the night down MacArthur Highway. Walk a thousand miles past the sugarcane fields of Magalang. Give anything to feel her head on his chest again. But she won't even reach across the bed. The space between them has become wider than NLEX at 3 a.m., and he's run out of exits to take.

The question he's terrified to ask finally breaks him in the middle of a silent dinner, with only the sound of rain on their roof.

"Just for once, what do you want? Baby, tell me the truth. Do you only love me 'cause you have to?"

What follows is a year of un-saying "I love you" in a place where everyone knows them as a pair. Of watching someone you built your whole world around become a ghost in your house in Pampanga. Of choosing between begging someone to stay, or setting them free even if it breaks you.

"I'd rather let you go than make you feel like you've gotta stay."