By FRANCESCA AYALA

There’s a place I’d like to go somewhere out west,
It’s not specific and the pictures show it best.
I know there’s trees, I know there’s sand, I know there’s grass,
I know it’s somewhere in the past.

It’s been months since you pulled off what was possibly the world’s greatest disappearing act.

You immediately heralded your acceptance into grad school by purchasing, with the very last of your resources, the first plane ticket out of town. You briefed your friends and family about your decision to take off early and spent each of those last days in Manila with a smile on your face. Every day you woke up with a different way to say goodbye to what, at face value, seemed to be a fabulous life—long boarding with buddies down the hills and over the humps of Makati’s posh subdivisions, teaching your younger siblings how to paint so they could learn more productive ways to pass time than playing with a Wii, singing your heart out of tune while backed by a live band in front of strangers that were starting to feel like friends, nighttiming with your Thursday family of fellow dance fiends who have no problems dancing the Techtonik with you to Dramarama and M.I.A., frequenting the occasional runway show with fellow fashion renegades to feed your addictions to local couture—it was by no means an exemplary existence but certainly one you were comfortable calling your own.

Nonetheless, you air-kissed your adieu to that life with a cool, detached composure one would use to tell a lover they never want to see again that they would call tomorrow. You packed your bags the way you opened presents on Christmas morning as a child and waved goodbye to it all as if in the opening scene to an Audrey Hepburn movie. You didn’t miss a beat. The only time you came close is when you embraced your mother goodbye. She cried so hard she didn’t notice your own tears muddle with hers as you pressed your face against her cheek.

You left in the flicker of an eyelid, faster than you could internalize the emotions that drove you to transition to a new beginning four months ahead of schedule. Not a single word that left your lips betrayed the silent panic you kept inside. You felt it rattle your heart all throughout the car ride on the way to the airport. By the time you boarded the plane and took your seat, its beats felt like thunderclaps and you wanted to rip it right out of your chest and shove it in your back pocket. Rightly so, you thought to yourself, this charge towards America is all because of that damn heart. The elaborate justifications you made before leaving suddenly crumbled in the face of the plain and simple truth: You left because you wanted to be with him.

There’s a girl out there who’s looking for it too,

She’s not sure when she’ll go or exactly what she’ll do.

If I am doomed, am I the first on or the last?

Am I just someone from the past?

You arrived in Los Angeles, disoriented by the gravity of your decision and giddy as the butterflies you thought had died in your once-cynical stomach started to shake the dust from their wings. This would be your new home. This notorious city that greets many strangers with a Klieg light smile, beaming through ruby-slipper lips that whisper movie-script happy endings in your ear while playing footsie with your dreams under the table, ready to crush them at any moment like cigarette butts under Jimmy Choo. You were warned about this Botox Babylon. The words didn’t even come close enough to slip in one ear and out the next. Your lack of certainty was compensated with determination. For someone whose life had fallen short of celluloid-worthy romances and had, on several occasions, run out on what could have been fairytale endings, you felt perhaps it was time you finally got your own, now that you had found someone you’d be willing to share it with.

The last time you saw him was in that exact same airport. The eager embrace you shared upon your reunion masked the emotional shortcomings you both brandished like caution tape wrapped tightly around your hearts during your initial encounters. Reunited, those first awkward moments marked the culmination of an affair that was never meant to last. You met on a whim and in the process of alleviating a loneliness neither of you cared to admit, discovered you had feelings for each other. The strange thing was that, instead of sprinting at light speed away from each other and towards the next casual encounter, the two of you—with no logical explanation to defend yourselves with—decided to try your luck at this happy ending myth that countless couples had attempted (and failed at) before. If it wasn’t meant to be, you justified to each other, you’d at least know sooner than later. And what better place for a most unconventional romance to unfold than the city that Hollywood calls home? Drunk on infatuation and despite your doubts, you both decided to move in together.

Fast forward to a month and a half later. Your palms are sweating as you line your eyes with dark violet shadows and kohl streaks. Maybe if you wear enough makeup, no one will notice how much you’ve been crying. You can’t even remember what your throat feels like without that razor-sharp knot of tears you just can’t seem to hold back. You bite your tongue and dab at your tear ducts with a Kleenex. The honeymoon is officially over. You fell in love. You kicked off all caution like stilettos after a night of clubbing and sprinted barefoot, towards the horizon, as if the sun wouldn’t dare set on your dream. Along the way, you lost steam. The gusto you initially had was epic; it was the stuff that made tales of impossible romance. Lately though, it seems as if your relationship has no romance. It is simply impossible.

He is the most beautiful person you will ever know in your life. You knew it the first time you ever saw him. It’s almost as if a heart breaks every time he blinks. Regardless of the mutual decision to live together, you feel like a guest when it comes to his life. An intruder, even. His is the kind of life fiction novelists wish they had. One weekend, the two of you turn your phones off and decide to run away to Santa Barbara. The next, you’re cruising to Vegas in a midnight blue Audi while the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” plays on repeat. His is also the kind of life that many women desperately want to be part of. So much so that ex-girlfriends will call to pick fights, just to maintain their place in his memories and stalkers will break into his parking garage to leave deranged love notes on his car. It all makes you wildly insecure, more so than you already were. He cannot bring himself to stand up to them, thus he cannot shut them out of his life. You wish you could force him to do so, and forever erase the threat that some evil, crazed harpy will sink her talons into your potential future. No such luck. He doesn’t trust anyone. He especially does not trust his feelings for you.

You tried to win his trust. When you realized your words were not enough to assure him how much you love him, you decided that sacrifice was a better way to show it. The fun snapshots of life in Manila, which you thought would translate to your ventures in Los Angeles were bolted into a trunk and buried beneath the only dream you allowed yourself to continue having. You wanted your fairytale ending. You wanted your relationship to work, at any cost. From then on, your days were compartmentalized, as if in the novel Franny and Zooey, into different ways for you to tell him how you felt. Everyday actions became deliberate declarations of love. You wrote Post-its to remind him of his appointments with the methodical deliberation a calligraphy artist would put into writing a love letter. When he was out late, you did his laundry and banished your fears to the seams and creases of his clean clothes. You even decided to take your cooking skills to gourmet levels, hoping that if you seduced his palette that he would finally cough up those three words. Yes, they are the same words you choked back for ages until you blurted them out by accident. He reciprocated a week later by scribbling, “I think I love you too” on a Post-It and sticking it to your forehead.

The weeks continued toward the end of summer and you grew restless spending them barefoot in the kitchen. The fights started to escalate. The ghosts of your past haunted him at all times and made him sick to his stomach. He couldn’t bear to love a woman with a laundry list of ex lovers. You began to resent him. More so, you began to resent yourself.

“No one has to hear the sound of people laughing at their fears

And the ocean and sun are there to make you happy if you’re feeling scared of the darkness…”

Cat Power blares from the stereo. Her voice sounds like it’s soaked in tears and vodka as she croons, “I will love this love forever…” You muster up the strength to stop weeping and start packing. This is how I should leave, you command yourself. You fold your clothes with limp hands and far less precision than you ever did with his. You feel another tear roll down your cheek and wipe it away instantly, determined not to let another one fall. This is how you should leave, as if it isn’t the saddest day of your life. As if the stabbing pain, throbbing from the core of your chest, makes you wish you could will your heart to simply stop beating. This is how you want to leave, because admitting that you feel anything at all will only validate how much it hurts to lose him. Too much has happened now. You had set the scene and had barely begun to write the script, but this love story is already over.

Over the last few weeks, you tried to talk about them. That was the hard part. Living in the aftermath of his transgressions is what hurts much more than discovering your supposed prince charming had secretly rewritten your fairytale to include other princesses. Now you are always looking over your shoulder, worried that he is breaking eye contact to look at someone else. You cannot sleep at night. You have nightmares about those women pulling him away from you in your sleep. He complains that you never let him hold you anymore. You don’t say so, but it’s because every time he touches you it makes you imagine how he held them. He also complains that you never look at him like you used to. It’s because you see their faces every time you do. The two of you never talk anymore, there is only shouting and these long, painful silences. He doesn’t know, but the reason you don’t say anything is because you don’t want him to know just how much he’s hurt you.

“I just want you to be that cool, fun girl I fell in love with, the one who power slides on dance floors and laughs like a little kid,” he once told you.

As usual, you said nothing. It was as if he was talking about a stranger.

You hear the jingle of his keys in the door. The sounds that whisper through the wood are slow and deliberate, because he wants to delay the inevitable interaction with you as much as possible. You run in front of the mirror to compose yourself wipe the mascara-stained tears from your cheeks. There’s a girl staring at you. You don’t know who she is anymore, or what will become of her.

His eyes are blue today. They’re blue and sad. You remember how they used to be green, back when you always made him happy. Now you wish you could swim in them, where all the other women should have drowned. The time it takes for him to walk from the doorway to the bed, where you are sitting, feels like you are watching flashbacks to all the most painful parts of your relationship. He touches you like you might break, but to you, his fingertips feel like kisses. When his hands trail down to your thigh, he feels the cuts. They are three thin, red lines, slightly raised as if your pain is now forever embossed on your body. He runs his fingers along them, wincing as if each line is a pinprick to his heart.

“What have you done?” he asks.

You do not speak. Not because you don’t want to, but because every time you part your lips to say the things you want, a sob escapes instead.

He takes you in his arms and pulls you close so you can rest your head on his chest. He begs you to talk to him. Even now that you have the chance to say all the things you need to, you cannot say a word. You wrap your arms around him the way a drowning person would cling to a lifesaver. His heartbeat is drowned out by your whimpers. He strokes your hair and tells you that everything will be alright, that he’s here for you and he isn’t leaving any time soon. It takes all your strength to stop crying and nod your head. The realization hits you as if someone just gave away the ending to a film you’ve been waiting to see for months. He’s right. He isn’t leaving.

You are.

Ayala has a degree in visual and communication arts from Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland. In her spare time, she likes to paint and has exhibited her work in the Philippines. She also enjoys skateboarding and dancing, even if she does both quite terribly… Mavericks aren’t perfect. Ayala has a Master’s degree in online journalism from the University of Southern California. She is totally obsessed with mustache-shaped accessories, traveling to new places and shoes.