Venus is the loneliest planet

I sent Diego a message so long that it looks like a lover's letter during wartime.

If it is true that life imitates art, I assume most people think of their lives as some grandiose cinematic experience. I mean, I do. Your first love stole your virginity then buried it with him when he died a heroic death in a pointless war. And despite being a grandparent of seventeen grandkids, you still occasionally have the reveries about his lips when you take your denture out before bed. Or something like that.

But the reality is that most of our stories resemble soap opera more than anything else. So as the plot goes, I was madly in love with Diego but he still wasn't over his ex, so 'us' hung in limbo until he unfriended me on snapchat last week because 'it's not fair for me' to deal with his unresolved horse dung.

I was livid.

As any sane person would react in such situation, I went on a solo trip to the country side with my camping gears and road dirt bike, hoping that the greeneries would ease the sweltering heat of summer and heartbreak. And it certainly did. I read and re-read the message for him, marvelled at my own honesty.

It was something about this cacophony that gave me the push: The pain, at first sharp like walking on broken glass now subdued like a bitter after taste. The vast, endless sky, bluer than freedom, clearer than clear. The silence, or not exactly silence but rather the absence of language, and in replacement was a choir of insects, breeze flirted through the branches, and waves shattered into the shore's embrace. And the soreness from my body like a song: the intense labour, sleepless nights due to the cold. The hunger for sugar and fats - for pleasure.

Compelled by this new found perspective, I confessed everything in the message, making the grand gesture in the final act of a typical story: How embarrassing it is to fall so intensely, so fast. In fact, I was meeting up with multiple men, hoping for the best but expecting the least. I counted myself fortunate because the majority of them were sensible, caring, and sorted. Until Diego.

We chatted online for a few weeks and when the date actually happened, it was rather uneventful.

He insisted to pay for dinner, and was telling me about his ex (which bored me at the time). When we went to the jetty, the sun was at dusk, bleeding strips of gold, lilac, coral, and aqua. My heart still beating fast sometimes thinking about those details, though now pixelated. I was watching the sky blended into the waves, white foams violently crashed like cream melts into rocks. He hugged me from the behind, giggled when the salty water splashed into our faces. An innocent but intimate gesture, caught me by surprise.

Walking on wet sand, his slender fingers pointed at the seaweed then explained the foams were a result of pollution. We argued about jellyfish and he told me about his aquaculture degree.

As random as a force of nature, something in my chest sneakily bloomed for him.

A few expresso martinis later (which he also insisted to pay), we waited for the bus to get back to my place, and by then we already couldn't keep our hands apart. Somehow it felt forever in that moment. Like I had nothing else to desire, nothing else that I could ask for, nothing else matter. It didn't even make sense, he was technically a stranger, but I didn't bother to inquire. It was an easy feeling, like floating in the middle of the sea, every inch of your flesh dipped in the water but your face. You're at peace, preserved and subsumed by something else much bigger than you could ever be.

On the bus, he said that he'd gladly stop by my place tomorrow again to fix my bike. And when we walked a short distance from the bus stop to my place, there was a light drizzle. Not small enough to ignore, nor big enough to stop and find a spot to hide. He then gave me his waterproof jacket and used the beach towel as cover. Our frames, humid by the rain, brushed off each other while we fumbled in the dark pavements.

'How lonely were those streets lamps' were my last thoughts before I locked the door of my bedroom. Just us, blushed cheeks and slightly trembling, and our shadows inside.

So, the more I twisted my brains, the more cloudy it became what truly sets him apart from the other men. Somehow with him I felt as if I just jumped off a cliff. 'Maybe because you touched me in a way that I longed to be touched? Took care of me that I wanted to be taken care of?' I wrote on the message to him. Though these questions were for myself more than for him. And although the bike remain unfixed, it didn't stop me from the camping trip.

When I was younger and isolated from the queer community, every time I fell for a straight boys I'd thought about the tragedy of loving with some one who could never love me back. But now a few years well into adulthood, I slowly realized the universal tragedy of loving someone who COULD love me back but chooses not to.

Earlier in the afternoon, my friend Georgina called me, sobbing on the other side of the phone. Apparently 'the love of her life' just broke up with her. And just like any sane friends would, me and Georgina dissected in-depths the behaviour of both parties involved and compiled all the information available on the external factors, i.e. family, exes, social circle, and even working environments.

All of this effort just reinforced the obvious truth: they're not compatible to each other. Or perhaps too compatible but in all the wrong places. She's obsessive with details, always anxious, and grappling with saviour complex. He has zero emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and running away from conflicts as first instinct. She demands too much and he doesn't know what to give. You know, just a typical heterosexual couple.

Arriving at this conclusion obviously didn't make Georgina feel better. 'I know that you're right, but I'm still in love with him!', she cried out. Of course her reaction just reinforced another obvious truth: no amount of rationing or intellectualizing can stop one feeling what they feel.

'You know, the worst part is that he still couldn't pronounce my name correctly until this day', she sniffed frustratingly. 'Like I understand English isn't his first language but oh god, I kept dropping hints in conversation and even in snapchat stories! It's JOR-gina not JELL-gina!', she wailed.

I laughed. 'You know Shakespeare said love is blind but in fact love is also deaf, mute, and even anosmic. Like with Diego right, he literally stinks. And I'm telling you I SNIFFED his armpits, like filled my lung with that foul smell to convince myself that our hormones are compatible! So you're still on the winning side alright?' There's a teary smile from her end.

'Aw, darling. How's you and Diego?', she genuinely cared. 'I don't know', I let out an awkward laugh. 'I mean it has been two days and still no response from him. But this is exactly what I expected though.'

There was a pause between us, and somehow I knew for a fact that she could feel the enormous sky in front of me.

'But who cares, you know. Listen, I have a funny story for you. This thing that I did last night.' I said excitedly and we giggled as we both know where the story was going.

'So, it was just a casual Tuesday night at the campsite, alright. I had some stale bread from dinner and was scrolling through dating apps. Then came this profile. We chat for a bit and he asked me out for a bike ride!'.

'At 11 pm?' Georgina winced amusingly.

'Correct. It was thrilling! You know, he's a doctor. He has that 'doctor look' from someone who're so used to sterilized environment that they're literally allergic to the world. He was so stiffed and awkward. Oh and his name's Lawrence by the way. I don't even know if it's real but that's part of the fun.

So we were just biking everywhere, all the way from dingy alleys to this huge stadium-park. At one point we stopped at a children playground and squeezed both of our bodies into a tiny, sandy swing.

I can't exactly recall the catalyst, but I was making joke about him being an old man. Oh yeah, and he was like 10 years older than me, by the way. Also part of the fun! Anyways, his reaction to my joke was to turn and looked directly into my eyes, the first time he made eyes contact with me, and said I deserve 10 spanks because I was disrespectful!'

I almost squealed reciting this part of the story while Georgina subtly gasped.

'It caught me off-guards obviously. But then I realized that I put spanking in my bio's hashtags, and he immediately asked to clarify. Do I want to do the spanking or do I wanted to be spanked? To his slightly disappointment, I told him that I only put spanking to look edgy, but of course more than willing to try.'

'Did you?' Georgina asked in anticipation.

'Well, when we're back to his apartment, he stripped me naked, lied me down on my stomach and started to smack me with his palm. Every whiplash was conducted with full force. It felt comedic at first. Almost satirical. But it moved to the painful territory really quickly. It felt like he just poured hot lava to my bare skin. I cried a bit.'

'Jesus! Then what happen after that?'

'What else? We had sex and he came two times. The thing is, he kept staring into my eyes and when I tried to catch his gaze, it gave me chills because it was...so cold. Like there's nothing underneath when you pull the curtain. Just void'.

'Honey, he sounds like a sociopath!' Georgina hollered.

'He IS a sociopath!' I hollered back at her

Of course, there were things that I didn't tell her, or didn't need to because she'd understand the implications anyway.

For example, I'd wonder what did he smell when he dove his nose into my skin. Sunscreen, burnt hair, a faint trail of salt, and a sea of desperation.

In that moment I suddenly wanted to embody freedom. I wanted to become something that he doesn't have: the pointy edges of youth, to fall in love with everything and nothing at the same time. There's a space between the exhaustion and poetry of living as such, and that's where I must peak. I feel like I must curate myself and adhere to this fantasy, like a piece of performance art.

I wanted to speak his language, play his game.

I wanted to be this wild thing that he's horny to domesticate.

I wanted to be a tornado to his fortress. A rebel if he's a king. A heretic if he's a God. And that turns me on, to sin and defy the verdict.

I know that it isn't exactly a healthy thing to do, to conquer men with sex when I can't have their love.

Georgina fell silent on the other side of the phone as an act of solidarity, I told her almost out of the blue: 'Maybe it isn't about doing the right thing, but doing the most with what you have.' Because I'm only 21, I said it with a shrugged.