when you are looking down towards me, hesitating in the moment when you should be leaning in, i find myself smirking. i am eight inches smaller and yet, i will never tire of standing on my tiptoes to kiss you and whisper coward against your lips.

if i sit on the fourth step of our staircase, i can look through the window and watch the street outside. this waiting game has always frustrated me; my knees buckle underneath me every time someone walks past our rust-encrusted gate. i can feel the anticipation weighing heavy on my chest with every glimpse of a shoe or a shirt only to have my nerves unravel once i realize they look absolutely nothing like you;

every stranger that walks by is just another soul that wasn't yours.

i use numbers as my ultimatums. this is the third person who has walked by that isn't you; two more, and i swear, i'll go back to my room and write and chat with other people and watch youtube videos and try not to think of you even though my fingers are itching to pull at my door **** (just one more look). i count ten vehicles that pass before stalking back in to my room, only to peek out of my door to check the streets again minutes later;

every jeepney that doesn't stop is just another car that you weren't in.

i welcome distractions that send me moving around the house. to wash the dishes, get my dad snacks, fake going to the bathroom, check on my brother, nibble on some leftovers in the refrigerator. as long as i have my little disturbances i feel like time's moving faster, but then i find myself pausing by my front door and wondering when you might come knocking or if you'll even come knocking at all;

every minute that you're not here is just another sixty seconds to spend thinking of you.

funny, isn't it? how facebook displays how long it's been since a person was last active. they remind me that i was a mere three hundred seconds from catching you online, but that's okay; no, really!, it is;

because my fingers are hovering over my keyboard and the blinker's just blinking in its white little space, this Type a message... glaring at me accusingly. wait, give me a second. what do i tell you? what should i say?

hi is safe. so is hello. hey seems a little too casual, doesn't it? should i put an emoji? a heart? no, no. a smiley face. but just the normal smiley face, not the one with closed eyes and everything. or maybe i should use that instead?

but /then what/?

i guess i could ask you how your day went. that sounds well enough. i can ask you about the weather. no, ******, it's always hot. nothing interesting there. i'll just branch out after you tell me what you've done today, where you've gone. oh, you went to the movies? that's great. last movie i watched was Captain America: Civil War. are you team cap or team iron man? peachy. just peachy. perfect. i've got this. i am s--

*******, you're online. why are you online? the green circle is just staring at me and oh my god, you're typing, you're typing in to our chat box. oh my god. i liked it better when you were inactive. when you were offline. now i just wait, maybe pretend i wasn't this loser waiting for you to talk to me, this loser who had you on my mind, this loser overthinking what i should say to y--

You (12:39 PM)
Hey. I was just thinking about you. :)

rachel rostad said that "when a mother names her daughter, it's a prayer for everything she wants her to be."

my first name translates to beautiful in italian; and my second is the female version for saint michael the archangel, so we can assume that she quite literally named me beautiful angel.

i'm sorry, mom, if i turned out to be neither.

recount the votes, they demand, as they stand on the ground where god-knows-how-many innocents have been buried; all our people that we lost, all the burdens we have refused to carry,

no one has ever called out to count how many were taken and never seen again.

we want justice, they cry, the irony heavy in its circumstances;

wanting equity and honesty for the man whose father murdered millions; a man wretched in his father's absence; our voices have grown hoarse pleading for righteousness for our victims.

when will we get our *amen?

a hero, they proclaim with their blue and yellow banners. how dare they say that word and wave our flag as they stand on the bones of the defenseless, on the bones of the silenced, on the bones of their grandparents, on the bones of their relatives,

on the bones of our countrymen.

this is not a "thing" we can get over with. not a war we can just stop fighting. we have barely found our voices, and yet they want to kick the wind out of us once more; i refuse to submit to silence. refuse to let them win. i will scream until i'm hoarse and rebel until i'm sore.

because if not i, then who? if not now, then when?

threading the thin line of uncertainty,

you had told my closest guy friend ****, i think i'm falling for her.

and later you would pinpoint that one moment, that one moment we realize we adore a person,

as the slightest second you were staring at your lock screen, which was my photo.

it had been a collage of me doing wacky poses in eighth grade,

a photograph i had posted on twitter as some sort of throwback thursday.

unbeknownst to me, you had saved it to your phone,

setting it as your lock screen and showing it to me the next day mainly to spite me.

over the next few weeks, you would save the photos i'd post or send you,

and set it as your wallpapers,

and come up with some witty one-liner to annoy me with.

and you'd tell me months on about that time you went to unlock your phone, stopping to smile at my old photo in all its chubby cheeks and corny poses glory,

only to realize,

****.

i have never been more thankful for throwback thursdays.

i am a man of science—
something like that.

i was never one to put things up to faith or religion; no, i am a firm believer of all things formulated out of reason;

until you came along,

with galaxies in your eyes and star dust in your hair; (when i kiss you, i swear i see supernovas)

and who do you think you are, anyway?

to come barging in to my perfectly explained universe and re-arranging all my theorems,

to come waltzing into rooms, acutely unaware of how you send every ***** of mine in to overdrive;

dilated pupils, and an increased heartbeat, and a spike in some hormones, and a light going off somewhere in my brain— (diagnosis: love)

i despise the effect you have on me,

the churn in my stomach to have you smile at me, the thrill to hold your hand, the constant train of thoughts about you that has muddled the part of my head that can explain all this in a more scholar-ly way.

but no. all that i knew could not explain what i felt for you;

no, you had me denying newton's laws of motion— with every action there is an equal and opposite reaction— (you had me hoping my love would recieve, instead, an equal and similar reaction)

no, you were not just a lump of atoms born in to this world for the mere purpose of recreation and, inevitably, death— (to me, you are much more than a scientific construct)

no, all the chemicals boiled down in to nothingness and all the formulas were void of their values and all the terms were mere jargons that could not help me fully comprehend

why you are warmer than sunshine;
why you could take away the oxygen in my lungs faster than anything else;
why the planets seem to align in order to keep you here;
why gravity does not exist in the spaces you occupy;
why distance is my enemy;
and why i am in a love-hate relationship with the rotation of our earth (it depends on when i can see you again);

it was suddenly not just physics, or astronomy, or biology, or chemistry

when you came along.