Three Shades of Disposable Love

Or why there is no such thing as free lunch.



I.

I thought the world was round, or oblique spheroid. With an empty bottle of beer on one hand and her sweaty forehead on the other, the lady at the bar said that the world is flat contrary to popular belief, which is not always popular, unlike her, young and beautiful and sexy on stilettos and drunk as a thirsty Irish, her breasts magnanimous enough to bare half of their splendid bulk, the cleavage deep for professional spelunking, the perfect recipe for fame and all things worthy of television airtime on any given Thursday midnight after payday, like the murder of five high school virgins in an urban Catholic school, their cadavers by the creek, the relatives of the victims receiving justice neatly sealed in a white envelope with three checks inside and a written threat, beseeching their silence or forever they will bask in it;

or the incestuous affair between two promiscuous sisters who wish that an ordinary mortal take the stead of their senator father perennially absent at home, and whose only legacy in his entire career as an elected joke is having proposed a bill once and only once and still got rejected outright, much to his surprise and frustration, especially since it was his earnest desire to put an end to political dynasties even if it meant dragging the rest of the government down the dirt and muck;

and prostitutes galore in obscure and dark places where hands reach under the table if the price is right, the genitals seized without warning and practically anything that has a pulse, warm and sometimes moist like underarms left to bake into a crisp tangerine under the sun because it is normal to be close enough to being brown, or tan, in a country of brown people, even if the people themselves want to become whiter than snow with the aid of God and soap and lotion, or whiter than the pale ass of their president when placed suspended under the natural fluorescence of any decent lamp, like the lamp hanging above our heads, casting little dancing shadows beneath us as I smile and laugh at all the gibberish nonsense she was saying. So the world is flat, I agreed, thrice to make my point firmer and my disposition resolute as I battle a stiff cock in my jeans. I took her home by the end of the night, and I took her hard between the thighs.

By morning, she was gone, the light of dawn shining on the side of the bed where her naked and tired body should have been, and the world was flatter than before, my wallet most of all. I don’t even remember her name.



II.

“Just for old times’ sake, please?” I pleaded with a voice weak and trembling, as shameless and as desperate as my proposal. “I swear this will be our last and I’ll never bother you again, ever.”

Tanya moved away and stood by the window where the moonlight drew the silhouette of her body on her white satin dress. The ring on her finger briefly sparkled like a star in her room, that little space in the cosmos where the universe outside did not matter because she only needed four walls to feel alive even if it meant having to pay monthly rent, the veranda that jutted out ten floors above the earth the only sign that she was now above everyone who were less than ten floors closer to the sky.

I stepped closer, closer until I was right behind her, until I could smell the scent of her hair, until my chin could touch her shoulder, until my fingers could slide down her arms and plant themselves on her hips, until I could kiss her nape, my tongue dipping itself on her skin like smooth butter, and I undressed her like I have never undressed her before. She turned to face me and suddenly the bulging manhood in my pants wanted to break free, to push itself inside her, to force itself through her love tunnel with as much violence as she can handle, and explode inside her womb like a simultaneous big bang and supernova that waited for more than a billion years to elapse, the beginning and end in unchaste unity.

She gently pushed me aside, gestured that I sit on the bed, and she walked toward her dresser where she placed her ring. Now her fingers were immaculate again, like the first time my lips breached her innocence by suckling on her pinky ten years and twenty pounds ago, back when the professor was not looking and all of our classmates did not give a single fuck because a person’s life in college, the late onset of puberty above all, is just his own business.

She was looking at my eyes while she slowly walked closer to the edge of the bed. We didn’t say a word. And then she sat by my side, slid her right hand inside my pants, fondled my erection, and may God have mercy on my throbbing dick. “I want this,” she whispered.

“It’s all yours,” I said.

She unzipped my pants and in a moment I was all skin. She mounted herself on me, and all I could see was how her hair fell in disarray on her face, her hands gripping mine, her body moving forward, backward, forward, and backward again, each thrust accompanied by her moans calling out the name of her husband who was in Kuwait at the time searching for oil, until the seconds turned into minutes, fifteen or twenty, I lost count, our bodies entangled, perspiring. And then she came, her orgasm, that sweet momentary bliss that you wish would never end. But she ended hers right after she had it. She dismounted, and I was left on my own, still with a full erection to satiate and an orgasm that was yet to happen.

She stood, grabbed a towel, and wore her ring back on her finger. “Get out before I phone your wife,” she said.



III.

My neighbor’s wife died a day before he did. She was his Juliet and he was her Romeo, both old folks, except that he waited for a day before he decided to follow her to the grave. Between those final hours of his life, he must have mulled deeply whether it truly is death that can only make them part. He must have finally been able to give voice to all the suspicions he suppressed all the while. He loved her when she was still alive, but he felt uncertainty when she was already a corpse, forever gone to cancer, all fifty years of their happy marriage suddenly placed under the mercy of a question mark and the afterthoughts that followed fifty years too late. When she was finally gone, he must have had all the chances in his life to prosecute his doubts without keeling from any guilt for hurting her feelings. The dead can’t defend themselves, he was sure.

Like the time when he worked a thousand miles away from home for three months and she would never answer any one of his five letters, or the time when he would be home earlier than usual and not find her in the house until she came later in the afternoon a few minutes before his duties would usually end in the office, or the time when she got pregnant when he knew that he was completely impotent for the last twenty years in his life, or the time when she said she lost the fetus in her womb, an accident she never wanted to happen, an unwanted abortion. But like all secrets, even doubts must go to the grave.

He took his own life, anyway. Ultimately, it was futile to resolve his doubts now that she’s in the coffin. He may be able to find the answers, but they would be answers that no longer mean anything, like revelations that signify nothing. It would be an insignificant triumph, a fleeting episode of victory with no one else to boast and celebrate it with. He’d rather die with a riddled mind than live another day trying to enjoy his meaningless discoveries of her imagined infidelities.

He hanged himself at the backyard.