1:43 PM

Sitting on the green floor of grasses, somebody is wasting his afternoon. He is thinking about you. About him about you. He lights another cigarette, his 23rd for the day, 3rd of that afternoon. His eyes are fixed on the bright summer skies. Anyone can see it, he still believes in you and him.

He thinks of you in many ways. Sometimes he cannot think of himself without you in it. You have etched a breathing space inside of him, he said one time.

He had to breathe a lungful everytime he remembers you. He smells you everywhere, your sweat that melded with that fancy scent. And everytime that happens, he is up on
his toes looking for you to see if you’re around. Of course you are nowhere near, and he is still not used to it.

He gropes his pocket. He takes out a piece of paper. It took him awhile to take off his eyes on it.
 
He figures. He muses, then lights another stick.

When you came, he said you made him happy and sad at the same time. Happy because he thinks he met a great person in you who tried no harder for him to like. Sad because people like you never stays long; the moment you realize you are great, you are gonna leave him.
 
He grips the grasses after he threw the used cigarette. Adrift the playful summer zephyr gliding through the leaves of the trees is the burnt smell of ennui. He never thought you would cause him this much loneliness. Loneliness is all that is left of you, like that kind of loneliness you feel during Sundays.

He counts the days. He has stopped counting since you took him away from the world he had securely built for himself and for the people he loves. He cannot remember the last morning when the sun was as bright as his dreams. Right now, you are the only ambition he knows.

He thinks about you in his future, and the bigger role you have to play. But the more he thinks about it, the more you go away. Nevertheless, he will remember in you the things that will never happen: that house out on the beach, backyard playing on the swingset, sitting quiet in the sunroom, sundown, big moon, big sky, 4:58 PM, the Associates, NewYork skyline.

You can hardly measure how he feels. He, himself, has no idea of this hefty feeling he has towards you. Sometimes, it’s too big an emotion that he just would like to give it up. Yet at the end of the day, he still thinks about you and the loneliness you bring and how comfortable he is with it.
A yellow Frisbee alighted infront of him. He takes it and throws it against the current of hot air, going, going afar, sinking into the blue skies until somebody catches it. If you were a Frisbee, he would like to take you inside his bag, bring you to some happy place and let you fly. He will let you fly because he knows he can catch you anytime you fall. He won’t fake it, though you are too good to be true.

The muggy afternoon makes him feel red-hot. He is feverish. Under his heart, his stomach churns crazily. Marquez wrote the symptoms of love are no different from the symptoms of cholera. He feels sick. He lights another cigarette to stop him from puking out.

Most of the time, he asks if you are relevant. Still he finds no answer. What he knows is that he sets you apart from everybody else because he feels you are not just somebody. He believes in you more than you can actually guess.

But because of all of these, he pities himself so much. He hates to think that you don’t see him the way he does on you. He hates it even more every time you pretend you don’t see him. But then again, he doesn’t blame you. If your world is too tight for people like him, he doesn’t mind at all. All he wanted was for you to stick around, to see you everyday, to let you see that his world is yours too.

Somebody is wasting his afternoon right now. He wastes it not because of you. He wastes it because he is sick of his self that has you on it.

He has no questions to his answers. He ceases to think about you only to taste salt on his lips.

It’s been a long time since he felt this wasted. But where are you?