6/03/2013
Monday morning

They found her. They found her in a grassy field somewhere in Imus. Her hands were tied, her body was mutilated all over - and that's apart from the 27 stab wounds - and her clothes were nowhere to be found.

I saw all this on television, on the morning news, as I prepared for work. I was cutting my fingernails when it happened. "Isang babae ang ginahasa at pinatay..." and I almost didn't look up, until I heard Rainy's name, and I dropped my nail cutter, and I started sobbing.

I didn't go to work that day.

The funeral was five days later. The coffin was closed; her mother decided that she's suffered far too much. For a moment I was glad that there were no television crews looking for footage of her wailing relatives. Of me, her boyfriend, her distraught boyfriend, tired of crying, occasionally hysterically, but not knowing how to do anything else. I will not see her again, I say, over and over again. I cannot get myself to open the coffin.

Before the coffin goes down the grave, I run away, knowing I will make a scene, the sort that I always did in high school, the sort that got me kicked out of high school.

I go to sleep crying. It's been eight days since Rainy was killed, three days since the funeral, and I am inconsolable. I myself find it uncomfortable, dragging my whole family into this. "Nandito kami para sa'yo," my mother would tell me, over and over again, but I just sob again, and she'd just hug me, again. I'd try to wrap my arms around her, the way I would to Rainy, but I am just too weak.

I wake up the following day to check my phone if she'd text. I see nothing, and I'd cry again.

The thought of being fired from my work, for being such an unproductive wreck, never crosses my mind.

It's been fifteen days since Rainy was killed, and it's been fifteen days since I last tweeted or blogged. I take my phone and open the app and, slowly, type in eleven characters.

I miss her.

All this, all this is just a dream. Rainy's dream. We were on the phone yesterday morning and she finally remembered that "weird" dream of hers, one that she had a few days before. I wanted her to tell me, and with her memory, a memory way sharper than mine, she recounted everything. She was bound, raped, killed. She became a ghost, and went to visit me, and watched me cry and cry for those two weeks, and perhaps longer. She'd see me be a wreck from the moment I saw the news report, and perhaps for the rest of my days.

As she told me the story - I had my earphones on - I began looking for a possible interpretation to dreaming your own death. You're in a stage of transition, the pop dreamcatchers say, or you feel something lacking in you. But that didn't matter to me, because as she  talked I imagined myself cutting my fingernails on a Monday morning, watching the news, hearing Rainy's name, and instantly being transformed.

In that moment - Sunday morning, in my bedroom, my earphones on, talking to the love of my life - I realized I do not know what to do when that, heavens forbid, when that happens. When I lose her. When I lose her for good. And then I started crying.

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