I was blogging to find strength for an apology until

I found The Bull on the jeepney home. Notes collected on my dying blackberry include: hollow in his cheeks, strong eyebrows, womanish hands, scuffed five year-old leather office shoes, grubby corduroy pants, a white and red striped shirt, clean fingers, a five o'clock shadow, an expression of pain or anticipation or the pain that attends (intense) anticipation, lines around his mouth will deepen with age, how would it feel to be held flush against him like some blunt hill piercing sky?

The Bull is twenty-nine, on the cusp of respectability, and waiting on the sidewalk for an Angono-bound jeepney, same as I was. He drew the eye the way he was angry, and I noticed him when he raised his arm curved like a hook, anxious to get home. His stop was Pioneer Homes past the last SM east of Manila.  

Gail took me on a short tour around her part of the university. White buildings stacked on top of each other on a gentle slope. The path opened out to a spacious field, a couple of wide white roads, a couple of slim trees whose shadows cracked on jagged concrete. It was a beautiful day.

I was anxious to sit back and rest but I had been walking all day, my white shirt translucent with sweat. Summer officially ended a week or so ago, officially lifted the giant bell jar under which everyone wilted. The rainclouds from the past couple of (months) days were beginning to clear the way wind scatters a thunderstorm. Soon there will be nothing left to remember or fear (that sounds strange, even to me). 

Hazard light blinking on the dash, my best friend listened as my voice dropped and grew sombre; she didn't comment on how I fidgeted, unstuck my thighs from her seat.

My cousin told me The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey piqued his interest in the larger Lord of the Rings mythology and I successfully suppressed the instant and insistent desire to drag him to Taytay to watch. Complimentary popcorn available.

The Bull existed before I discovered him; there were a couple of chairs carved for giants in the Physics building. Cut pieces too large to dispose of, these were only planks of some tough old wood sanded till they shone and forced together with violence so thorough it created a seat, a throne, an awkward bed. Gail pointed them out to me, these two cradles, both on the basement ready to be gawked at, and she led me down to knock, reverently, on the wood. And I asked, what if I knocked and someone answered? What if these weren't chairs but carved doors? And that is how Gail led me to another story.
   
 Also, if you looked into my mind, you will find a chain of broken sound reforged from this:

"She said she talked to people who said they no longer wanted to be around you."

"Oh."

"They said you were changing in a way that they didn't like. But you don't care what other people think, do you?"
Is that what you think?
Who are they?
Does it matter? 
And this is the part Gail looked at me, expecting a response, and I didn't know what she wanted me to say.

"I care about what you think. If you think I'm going in the wrong direction,  slap me hard, and set me straight. Figuratively."
 Do you really think I don't care what other people think?

"But I don't think you're doing anything wrong."
I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

"Oh. If one of your friends tells you something about me in confidence, I would rather you honored your friendship with that friend rather than divulge their opinions about me. That's what I think. It's their prerogative to think whatever they want."
 Am I doing something wrong? Was that wrong?