Someone I know once went on a date with this guy many years back. On paper, it was perfect pairing. They had many friends in common, most of whom were shrieking with delight when they announced their intention to start, well, seeing each other. Plus, they were both academics: one taught literature, and the other was in town to pursue his master’s degree in marine biology.

Each had seen the other one around campus for some time, each one noting a possibility of connection. That someone I once knew said there was no missing the Marine Biologist’s close-shaven head in Dumaguete, but what attracted him most was the mischievous/melancholy air he had around his handsome Spanish face. He was tall. He had deep-set eyes. His mouth looked strong, pinkish and supple. He was also absolutely funny. Witty to death. There’s nothing like humor to get straight to somebody’s fancy. And so they set a date. A Thursday evening, 8 o’clock. In Chicco’s, that European diner along the Boulevard. When they arrived for their rendezvous, they greeted each other with bottled expectations, began digging into their food, began gossiping about their friends, furtively searching into their eyes for something...

There was absolutely nothing.

Nothing. No attraction, no chemistry. Nothing. Despite both of their best efforts, there was absolutely nothing there, and an hour or so later, they parted right outside the diner’s entrance, wishing each other good luck and God bless. Good luck and God bless? That someone I know says he hurried home feeling somehow amused as well as ravaged, the way one feels when magic evaporates and all you have left is the stark reality of a dull ache. He’d been on dates before where everything was dreamily effortless, as if things were grinding towards a foregone conclusion that two selves must meet and somehow connect. He’d been on dates before where he knew just the right words to say at every given moment, where every chance at touching the other’s skin—accidental brushes with elbows, hands, back—would set off a thrill down the spine, confirming an inevitability.

But they’ve since become good friends after the fact, but that someone I know says that was probably the worst date he has ever had. It was so uncomfortable, he says, you could balance an elephant in the wooden tension between us.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this now, about someone I once knew. Perhaps I’ve been thinking about the laws of attraction since I started rereading my Brett Easton Ellis books again, to prepare myself and get into the mood of the story I’m currently writing. The old truth resurfaces: you can’t force anybody (much less yourself) whom to love, or to be attracted to. And sometimes you realize that the thing you thought was attraction is merely a flicker in the fog, or—to paraphrase Paz Marquez Benitez—the light of dead stars: there’s nothing there except illusion, temporary tempests in a teacup easily stilled when sanity comes back to calm you.

And all that’s left is sadness, really. Because for one brief moment, before you realize there was actually nothing, that expectation, that kilig was something.

       
* * *

Past 30, you begin to marvel often at the things you’ve done in the name of reckless youth. When I was in college, I pretty much played the field, with a charming subtlety that bordered on the somewhat deceitful, always with a view on experience.

What can I say...I was young, I had a nice ass back then and wore tight jeans often, and was careful to cultivate this aura of personal ambiguity and this chameleon-like tendency to be both academic boy by day and party animal by night. I told myself then that I played to get what I wanted. Needless to say, in the games that I wrought, I often got what I wanted, even when my heart broke little by little. All these took a little bit of a juggling act, but it was fun—“fun” of the strangest kind, but that was me. My philosophy back then was that I had to try everything at least once, and that life was too short to regret not doing anything beyond one’s comfort zone. You can imagine the kinds of delicious shenanigans I got myself into — but I never did land into any trouble, and it might have been simply because most people would not expect me to do anything that smacked of the outrageous. I was an honor student, editor of the college paper, member of the student supreme court... all the things that glinted gold in a college resume. I was also very, very polite.

When people would ask me to name a film that would sum up the kind of existence I strove for, I’d always say Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons. Glenn Close’s superb (and devastating) monologue in that film about how she reinvented herself, and how she lives her every day life was, for me, a poetic rendition of what I wanted to do with mine. It was a foolish thing, and I look upon that past with such bemusement. But that scene was indeed powerful. Imagine Close as the Marquise de Merteuil, as she tells the Vicomte de Valmont (played by the wonderful John Malkovich) this confession: “When I came out into society, I was 15. I already knew that the role I was condemned to—namely to keep quiet and do what I was told—gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment.

I learned how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn’t pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with—and in the end, I distilled everything to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.”

That anger, that existential nihilism, that studied simmering detachment…all that appeal to all youths, the way we once fell in love with the hard philosophy of Ayn Rand, or the anger of Holden Caulfield.

Win or die. That was one thing. Indifference was another. And sometimes the result of that can be quite amusing. For example, it soon came to me, when I came into my own as a junior in college, that there were people in campus who looked up to me as a kind of confidante for their unrealized selves. Was it because I dared to live the reckless balance of night and day, and they could not? Maybe. Sometimes, when they sought out my advice, I’d roll my eyes secretly, stick an unseen fork onto the proverbial back of my hand, and say something glib, something full of bohemian bullshit.

Once there was a girl who walked with me the entire stretch of asphalt from The Weekly Sillimanian office to the nearest gate. Let’s call her Sheryl. She was one of those goody-two-shoes type, perfectly holy, and in fact once jumped on a chair screaming when someone showed her a VHS tape that had a porn label. “Ian,” she said to me that one time when we were walking towards the campus gate, “what do you do when you feel there is something inside of you you can’t describe? And you want to let it out, but you’re scared of what other people will say?” She said other things, and I was thinking, I really have no idea, dear. Of course I couldn’t say that, so I just said, “Well, Sheryl, why don’t you get out of your shell, and see what happens.” She nodded, and said nothing more. The very next week, that girl got herself a girlfriend. I wonder where Sheryl is now.

And I wonder how far into the past my youth seems to be now.