Fac ut Vivas

in the beginning there was silence.

then she looks at the night sky and asks: why do stars twinkle and planets don’t?

it was another attempt to provoke me: i told her an hour ago that i was taking up physics in grad school. she’s been at it since.  she points at something all too familiar — The big dipper — and tries hard in vain to make out mars or jupiter (if they are visible to the untrained eye, at all — how the heck was i supposed to know?).

she thinks it’s cute. if the past had been different i would find it cute too. chicks and astronomy. what a combination. i shuddered at the thought: maybe she’d ask me whether or not astrology had anything going for it.

i wish i shared her enthusiasm and asked her a couple of questions myself like how the P/E ratio is calculated or whether or not the law of supply and demand is in fact beyond refutation or why the foreign exchange is not a predictable time series.

maybe i should ask her if taking up business management meant that she believed it’s the surest path to the greens.

something foolish prevented me from doing the obvious thing: saying something cute about her or otherwise — the kind that probably gives them that warm fuzzy feeling — that you actually cared.

"i left that part of physics out of my plans — i didn’t think it was cool to know", i said finally.

whether or not it’s the classic female reaction, nobody knows for sure:  she was silent. unbearable. you’d almost wish that she walks away and say ‘you’re such a bore — well bore yourself to death!’ to fill the void in time.

"sorry to disappoint you, uhm, it’s just that my field is not ‘cool’, i mean, i play around with mirrors, lenses, lasers, detectors — toys i get to mount on a lego-block table with enough holes — it looks like a silver waffle. i don’t get to see the sky much, even at night"

i didn’t make eye contact. it would be a fatal mistake. i didn’t want to salvage anything — the moment or the chance to rebound at another opportunity. i ended up looking at the sky just to avoid her gaze. somebody gives you that look — it aint pretty.

"it’s alright" she says.

is it, really?

and then, silence enters for the nth time.

over the dark horizon, the traces of taal faded from view. it must be cold up there tonight.

her silence felt the same.

"Listen, I know somebody who’s the president of the astronomical society back at UP — maybe I could, well, I could take you there another time. we’ll see the stars together and …". sheesh i was against the whole idea of beign sappy. yet, nothing seems to come out of me except the sappiest lines. if i told my friends, they’d laugh so hard — hopefully they won’t believe it.

but it happened, just the same.

"of course. that would be great."

she puts out a winsome smile. i give her mine — it pales in comparison.

we had a few more rounds of that.

then she says goodnight and she walks back to her tent.

i walked towards the bus. i couldn’t find the spot where they pitched our tent. It was lost in the 50 or so, scattered across the camp that night.

As i was making the final adjustments to the seat where i’d spend the night (or early morning), i had to ask myself the reasons for not telling her why the stars twinkle and planets don’t.

funny because i knew the answer.

i didn’t regret not telling her though. there were many things that could have been if i did the obvious thing, i.e. to "make her feel good", "show her you are interested", "give her your full attention".

there were many reasons why — weeks later, i don’t remember any of it.

it was lost like that enigmatic volcano — drowning at the heart of an immense darkness.