On Coffee Cups (2005)

my first and last radio storytelling gig. :)


She has no name. Or at least, it was unknown to me. She’s one of those people whom you knew by face because she went to the places you went to and hung out with the people you knew, but never had a name to go with the familiar face.

I’ve asked her for a light a couple of times already. In fact, I’ve even had more decent conversations with her than most of the people I knew. My friends know her. I never really had the guts to ask her what her name was. Sometimes I’m just too chicken. Or maybe it was because it felt like we knew each other so well that it was quite queer for me to ask.

It’s not like I’ve never tried to get hold of her name. I’ve tried remembering who introduced us, or how we met each other, and tried to dig up anything that would sound like her name. But it feels like I’ve known her forever that I don’t even remember the day we met—not because it was unimportant to remember, but because it’s as if we’ve known each other for so long. And it just simply fascinates me how I can know someone so well, but at the same time, not know the most basic detail about her.

I had coffee with her and my friends this afternoon. Of course, there were no introductions—we were almost together as a barkada. Barkadas don’t need introductions. She sat there and laughed at my jokes and listened to my stories. I looked into her eyes and realized that she knew me by face, and she knew my name. I felt every bit guilty for not knowing enough, for knowing too little.

She wasn’t beautiful. But she was fascinating. There was always something about her I could never understand. The way she laughed, the way she spoke and the way she looked at things differently—these are just some of the things that got me lost in awe when we were together.

Today, as she drank her coffee, she made fun of her haircut, which according to her looked so Bon Jovi. Eliza breaks into laughter as she pulled her ponytail and let her insanely layered do fall into an almost retro mess.

“I’ll never let a gay hairdresser touch my hair again,” she laughed.

“Don’t worry, it’ll grow back,” the other girls told her.

Her hair did look like Bon Jovi’s hair back in the 80’s. It was crazy. 

While they tried to contain their laughter, I watched her gentle bangs fall over her left eye. I watched her pull her hair back again into her disguising ponytail to show off the pair of chandelier earrings she borrowed from Eliza. After she made Eliza take her picture, she smiled at me and giggled. I stopped staring.

Then she stopped clowning around and reached out to Eliza. 

“I need human contact,” she said in a small voice. She kissed Angela on the cheek and tried to cuddle up with her.

“I need a hug!”

She was a child. She wasn’t needy or clingy, like some people thought she was. Or on the other hand, maybe she was, because children are clingy and needy—and she was still a child. Can anyone else see that child in her?

“Do you think I’m weird?” She asked me with a laugh. “I need warmth.”

I smiled back and shook my head. I wondered why she’d need warmth when we were in a cozy coffee shop and it was such a warm afternoon outside. Maybe I was too shallow to understand the warmth she was looking for.

She took Margaret’s hand and snuggled closer. Then she talked about death as casually as we would talk about gossip. She made it seem as if it was as normal as breathing, or rain, or love. She was one of those people who died little deaths everyday. She dies when she wants to and at her own pace because after all, she gets born when she feels like it, anyway. She was too melodramatic, but she was optimistic. Maybe she just remembers too much. I remember how she speaks of years of memories as if they all happened yesterday.

I must have been staring at her again, because she suddenly pointed at her coffee cup for me to look at.

“Look,” she said, “all my name’s worth is a measly paper cup with cold coffee.”

She pouted then she looked at me with really sad eyes. Her stare burned my heart. It scorned me for not knowing her name.

“It’s sad,” she told me. She closed her hands around her paper cup then she pushed it towards me.

And then I realized how silly I was for not looking at the name scrawled on her paper cup. I took her cup and looked at it. I held her name in my hands. M-I-K-A. The messy letters made out her name. It was ironically shocking and expected at the same time. I looked at the glass panel beside me and her faint reflection stared back at me. My nameless fascination, whose name is worth nothing but a paper cup, looked at me with my own eyes. She has always been me. And I’ve always been her.