Cold Night, An Excerpt from a Novel in the works

She closed the door behind her, carrying only a towel. She disappeared behind the door, the light inside reflecting on the door. Seconds later, I could hear the shower like rain. Stark naked, I remained on the bed, trying to count the seconds, the minutes, or the hours she would be absent from my side, from her usual spot on this bed.
One minute.
When I think about boredom, I imagine some leftover change in the pocket of jeans I’ve been wearing since my freshman year. I bought it at a garage sale, and I never felt the need to buy a new pair. Day in, day out, I wear the same jeans, and always, some change would be left in its pockets, and I’d only remember them when they make a clanking sound in the washing machine. I never check the pockets before I drown the jeans in detergent and water. I just throw them in like pebbles in a well.
I’m sorry, my spare change. I can’t think of situations where I must use you. At the time that is. Sometimes, I’d be forced to hand a bill in the jeepney because I have no spare change. Or buy a stick of cigarette with a hundred peso bill because for some reason, all the spare change has left me.
Sad but true. When you need things, they disappear from sight. When they’re abundant, my head would crack open thinking about some way to spend them. To use them.
Five minutes now.
The air conditioner was humming a sleepy tune, a drone that seemed to lull the walls and ceiling of the hotel room to sleep. I couldn’t, for the life of me, ever sleep in a hotel room. There was nothing in there that lulled me to sleep, that sang me songs the way rain and wind do in cold nights. Everything was doused with unfamiliarity. I could feel the linoleum floor clawing at my feet, the ceiling drawing nearer and nearer that it could almost kiss my forehead, and the blankets—don’t get me started on the blankets—the smell of cheap detergent and fabric conditioner, the dreaded plain where semen of countless strangers where left rotting and neglected.
I once bit a pillow. When I came so hard inside some girl I probably met somewhere. Or bought. I couldn’t remember.
“That feels good, doesn’t it?” she said.
“Very,” I said.
“Wanna do it again?”
I nodded.
***
Fifteen minutes.
Funny how time passes.
It ticks away silently, measured by the movement of heavenly bodies pushed by gravity, the degree of push determined by a curve.
We can’t feel the push. It’s just there. Something normal is always absent, despite being eternally present. Like breathing. You don’t care about the process. You just do.
Inhale. Exhale. Tick. Tick. Tick.
This is the reason why we needed things to preserve our memories. To capture moments, because eventually we know that we will move on and forget. That is the reason why photography is a divine work. It allows us to frame an instance, a passing moment, a fad, into a two-dimensional image—representation.
We look at a photograph and say, oh yeah—that happened. Or something like that happened. I was so young then. I wasn’t shaving yet. Was I circumcised already? Oh, maybe. Ha! Look! That’s you before all the freckles faded away. You look so cute in pigtails!
Twenty minutes now.
The bathroom door opened, and she found me in the same position as she had left me before she took a shower.
“Was I gone long?” she asked, drying her hair with the towel. Her breasts shook as she did this.
“Not really,” I replied.
***
Kristelle told me once, in those months before she left me that I was always searching for something that I couldn’t find anywhere.
“Yet,” she continued.
“Though I’d like to agree,” I told her. “And believe me, I’d really love to agree with you, I’m in big trouble.”
“How so?”
“Because I don’t know what I’m searching for. Or what you think I’m searching for.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
And in the following days she would tell me that pleasure and intensity was my reason for existence. It was something that was kind of pulled from a book.
It was on a rainy day, and I didn’t know what to do to myself. It seemed to be the coldest night of November, and Kristelle said goodbye.
I tried stopping her. Telling her that if I was really troubled, it was a cruel act to leave me right when I needed her the most. Words were simply that, though. The sound resonated, but the real meaning dispersed in the air like an asteroid meeting the atmosphere. The friction chipping away every bit of rock and ice, until what remained was a miniscule piece, yet damaging nonetheless.
In the weeks that followed I obsessed myself over her. Called her every night. Her phone ringing, like a cry for help of a hopeless spelunker. I texted her every day, like NASA searching for signs of extraterrestrial life.
She changed her number. She blocked me on Facebook.
I changed my number.
I jailed myself inside my apartment. Went out usually at night, took aimless strolls, logging them inside a bank in my chest, trying to overlap Kristelle’s deposits.
Met with new girls. Made friends. Slept with them.
Rainy days came and went. Seasons changed. I toss a log on a fire that never died.
Yes, she was right: I was searching for something.
***
“My father died when I was young,” I told her. “He didn’t live long enough for me to hate him.”
“So it’s like, you die while your loved, or live long enough to be hated?”
“Something like that.”
“Now that’s depressing.”
“Maybe I am a depressing person.”
“Not really,” she teased. “You’re good at other things.”
I pinched her left nipple. She sighed. “How long can you go?”
She threw it back to me. “How long can you go?”
“Don’t know exactly,” I said and then I stared at the ceiling.
Yes, I meant the other way around.