“Ganun talaga, Ina,” I told her, wearing false confidence disguised in condescension. I looked over to where she was sitting next to me, my eyes cladded in the perfect armor of social cues and age-old lessons, to meet hers—two infinite pools of self-pity and preemptive rejection. “We can only let ourselves experience the love we know.”

“Ha?” she blurted, a half-scoff escaping from . “What, like we accept the love we think we deserve, ganun?”

“See, even you had it memorized,” I pointed out.

“Nah,” she dismissed.

“That’s the thing.”

Tonight, she was so beautiful it made my chest physically hurt. A gust of wind disturbed fanned the smoke billowing from her cigarette; the light coming from the inside of the resto generating a halo effect that casted a shadow over her facial features. I sat leveled with the mystery of our friendship, a great deal of distance away: half a meter away from her chair, and a setlist of masquerade music from her heart—just a few more songs before midnight. There I was, good ol’ Cinderella waiting for the clock to strike 12.

“You know how you’re afraid of what could go wrong, you risk the possibility of things being right?” I asked Ina. She just stared. She held her gaze to my eyes, like she always did. But this was a game I mastered long ago. And I fixed my eyes at her left browbone as every feeling and every thought melted in the peripherals like soft butter on hot toast, the haze both saving me from overthinking and killing me as she became the focus of this still shot.

“I’m a coward,” she said as she broke eye contact. She looked down at her fingers fidgeting with her lit cigarette. The smoke rising up from the embers looked like the ghosts of all the prayers that found comfort in between her hands clasped together. When she said those words, it was as if truth took its own life and set itself free. Whatever free meant at the moment. Whatever felt like the closest thing to ‘not being where this was.’

“If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here,” I said with a snicker and a head shake for dramatic effect. 

She mimicked my actions and added, “True,” to what I just said.

The thi