It is so quiet, and I don’t know how to contend with the silence. Lately, I’ve been chasing noise wherever I can find it — whatever form, as long as it is something loud enough outside to drown out the noise inside that only I can hear, when I find myself alone.

It is Valentine’s Day, and I am heartbroken again. I don’t think my newly minted ex-boyfriend quite understands why I am all over the emotional spectrum, and to be honest, neither do I. At least not completely. Sometimes I feel like it is not in the nature of emotions to ever be fully understood, or perhaps not as they occur. They are merely experienced, lived through, ridden out until you stagger waterlogged onto the shores of reason and sanity, on your hands and knees coughing the sea out of your lungs, amazed that you are no longer drowning. The emotions I feel are borderline tidal. Meanwhile, his life in Berlin continues. Meaningless sex (which is what began us and ultimately ended us), partying, fun, fun, fun. I can’t imagine he is much changed by all this, or tormented like I am. He possesses that glorious male capability to compartmentalize — to tuck things away into little boxes and forget about them when they are inconvenient. (I suppose I was one of those inconvenient things, in the end.)

Meanwhile, in Manila, I try to put myself back together. I am treading water, weary. I exist in a constant tumult; one thing flowing into the next at the most inopportune and unexpected moments, like a riptide. I am beyond my own control.

I do not know where to begin. I just know that I need to write this out, because writing has always helped me process my thoughts better than days of self-flagellation in bed ever have. (I have spent many days in bed torturing myself over the last few weeks; I need to try something new.)

Normally, I would already have written a hefty and emotional narrative of some fragment of our brief history together — I mean, the last boy who broke my heart got both a story published in a collection (Thermodynamics), and a monologue performed in a play and subsequently published in a script book (Intimacy), and he wasn’t even my boyfriend. He was just a guy literally everyone warned me not to date. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t listen. I’ve paid for that.) I’ve immortalized that lucky bastard.

This, this boy, my first real love since my last relationship ended in 2013, must surely deserve something on a Palanca Award-winning scale, then. (My version of Carrie Fisher’s ‘Take your broken heart, make it into art’ is: ‘Today’s heartbreak is tomorrow’s Palanca Award.’) But I’ve come to realize that I didn’t write about him as much as I probably would have because he so fiercely guarded his privacy. He barely had a social media footprint. He disdained Instagram, which I found novel. He didn’t put himself out there, which is something I wanted to respect. Oh, I would post about him — all of those posts gone now, of course, when I went all scorched earth on my Instagram account — but I kept it cryptic when I did. Unless you were my Facebook friend, you wouldn’t even know his surname. I longed to scream him from the rooftops, but only whispered the barest minimum of him.

I guess I wanted to guard him as zealously as I could, because he was mine. He isn’t any longer. All he is now is fair game.

(That’s what happens when you date a writer.)

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