Excerpt
Torture
Every day it was the same. I woke up late, the eleven am sun burning a hole through my eyelids. I rolled over groggily to stare at my old friend, the floor. The first thought that entered my mind—as it was every morning for the past months— was Andrea. I remembered how she would smile at me with her gentle smile, how she would laugh, her whole face alight. I remembered how she left me. Until lunch—sometimes I would even skip lunch altogether—I would just think of Andrea and all the joy and pain we had shared.
Spider, my best buddy, told me that I tortured myself too much. And this was torture, there was no mistaking it. My brain was a computer with broadband and video on demand. I played back all my memories of Andrea: all our conversations that would last late into the night, the way she would look at me when I would talk, the way silence would creep between us when our eyes met, an invisible force drawing us closer and closer till our lips and tongues met as well. I saved all these memories like they were my most precious belongings. I had nothing else.
Cruelly, I clung on to hope. I invented an impossible fantasy where Andrea would suddenly return to me. She would come back home to the Philippines one day—today was as good as any—and she would appear at my door—my bedroom door no less—and I would open the door to find her standing there. “Surprise,” she would say in her coy way, and we would melt together in a tangle of arms, and lips, and long brown hair.
She was gone, and in my solitude I knew that hope was of no use. Every day it was the same.
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