Our shoes track mud as we walk through the football field behind the Ateneo building, having snuck past the silhouette of a security guard who spent a few too many minutes checking on his beat up motorcycle.

Her flats are probably ruined. While my sneakers are littered with earth which my parents will notice later, asking, “where on earth did you go?”, though in reply I know I will only be able to smile, still unpracticed as I am in white lies.

But I don’t worry. Worry is the last thing on my mind as we make that long stretch from the track and field oval to the clearing which overlooks the Marikina skyline. We could have taken the long way and skirted past the grass, but part of me is glad that we are here instead, footsteps sloshing through wet soil which reminds me of the downpour that arrived only hours ago.

There’s a thunderstorm nearby, and the clouds have formed a grey and lonely ring around the field. Out in the evening she points out a lightning strike, and I notice how those bursts of light bring out the features of a muddled sky. With every muted roar I note a previously unnoticed cloud, whose outlines become clear for short moments.

I point out a small **** in the soil, and make a cautious jump to the other side, ungraceful as I am. She’s nimbler and makes it across first, laughing as I fumble with my footsteps, more leftover rain seeping into my socks. And then, like that, we’ve made it to the football field’s far end; it’s quiet, save the occasional rumble of thunder, and I steal a glance at her, still taking it all in.

The Ateneo football field ends on an unfenced promontory, with brambles and crooked trees marking an entry into wilderness, the track and field oval a cautious boundary. This land, she says, is traced out by a faultline, the leap between the overlooking soil and skyscrapers below a memorial to a previous quake. The branches of trees frame our view with leaves that block out dim stars.

Out of her sling bag, she pulls out a towel, and stretches it onto the damp asphalt. We sit down on the cloth and stare over the cliff, wondering at how we arrived here. My reason is still catching up to my heartbeat, and all these spare and separate details seem to come together in sharp clarity — the aftermath of monsoon rains, the low glow of a night sky, the clouds which gather around us in smoky pillars and open up into the crescent moon, her voice.

Wreathed as it is in shadows I can still catch the small shape of her smile.

When I was a kid, I thought falling in love would change things completely.
I thought that it would fix me,
turn me inside out and make me new,
cast miracles in me.
I thought love would do that -
close up scars,
and fix up broken hearts,
and make things hurt less
than they did before.

So I remember when I met her how it
seemed like a movie
with the camera panning out from the screen.
Fix the frame.
Remember on the bookstore floor a strewn copy
of a teenage romance novel then
the curve of her fingers.
Her pale skin.
All those details crystallized:

That first sunset with her.
An old ship docked by the bay which stayed unmoving as
the fog crept in through the windows.
Eight in the evening and the lights in the shipyards flicker on in fits and starts.
Then a rosy edge to the horizon. The early hues of sunset.
A hotel by the skyline with a yellow, blinking sign seen from across the water,
And the bands of light lining a ferris wheel, neon green.
The deep dark of the tide as it rises up, lapping at the boulders with a soft, stumbling sound.
Then the fading out as the clouds come in and I wonder whether I should kiss her.

But I don’t.

When I was a kid, I thought falling in love would make me happy.
For two weeks, it did —
I remember the Saturday I told her,
the Sunday we held hands,
and then the days of the week blurring in their detail -
a clock whose arms were ticking always towards her —

Those were two weeks of color,
Until the clouds came rolling in again
from over the bay,
fogging up the last view of a
grey Manila sunset.

I remember behind the bookshelf,
by the young adults’ section,
how she picks off a paperback spine,
rests her finger on a half-forgotten name,
holds the edge against her skin and feels out a page.

we read the backs of books that day. run through twenty different blurbs,
let plotlines curl up into the air and swirl into the scent of musty paper reams,
wander past secondhand copies of Murakami novels and pick up pseudoscience theories,
flick through encyclopedias and chemistry theses while our voices entangle into
first-person points of view.

in the afternoon, we wonder at syntax. fix misplaced alphabets and authors left out of order.
on the eighth aisle she spots the old sci-fi series I read back when I was twelve,
and we laugh at the blurbs, at words like warp drive and plutonium capacitor which
would’ve thrilled our younger selves
until tired, we lie down on carpets and pretend to stargaze,
with old paperbacks as pillows -
ink rushes through our breaths.

There,
underneath the bookstore’s cheap fluorescent lights,
her hand reaches for a half-opened book
at the same time as mine;
a soft brush of fingertips on fingertips.

I look up and find words on her lips,
lifted from my synonyms and grafted onto her skin,
think - poetry.
think - all the punctuation running in disarray skipping syntax in the spaces of my synapses relapses and sonnet turns pentameter heartbeats run in free verse feel my chest grow too light and too heavy like all the voices that they kept measured in their stanzas were let loose into her smile,

until the hours grow long into closing time.