POKPOK

ive never been called a slut before. ive never even remotely thought of myself as a slut, actually. I’ve had several relationships and one-night stands, but ive never felt cheap and ive never felt that i was being compromised by my actions. sex is just like shaking hands only more fun; is what i’ve always said. i’ve always felt comfortable letting people know my views on fuckers and fucking and I am no stranger to insults and other verbal evidence of narrow, medieval thinking.

one word changed that, however. well, not exactly changed, but it shook me for a few minutes. last night someone sent me an sms that contained a single word that made my hands tremble and my vision turn red: POKPOK.

Pokpok is filipino street slang for “whore” or “slut”. and the person who sent me that message is somebody that i’m in a committed relationship with.

The strange thing is, I have seriously religious catholic friends who are almost prudish in their personal lives. I have happily married friends who have only had sex with their husbands or wives. These people are part of what I privately call “mainstream society” and they are people that I expect to condemn me at one time or another for my lifestyle choices or my personal ethics. BUt these people have never once called me a whore or tried to debunk my attitude towards sex. They are maybe more than a little bit amused by my so-called antics but they have never insulted me or made me feel like a bad person just because I have had sex with more than ten people in the past two years.

This boy, my boyfriend, says that he is an anarchist and has read nearly as many books on anarchism as I have. I don’t know about all anarchists, but most of us believe that we make our own moral laws. morally i feel that there is nothing wrong with how i have lived my life. but subjectivity is a double-edged sword, perhaps he believes that I’ve been degrading myself by having consensual sex with random people. Therefore he felt the need to degrade me further by calling me a slut. Snort.

I’ve never been particularly fond of open relattionships; all the zipless fucking that I had done I did when I was single. Now that I’m in committed relationship with the boy in question, i’d never felt the need to explore other people’s bodies. Yes, I still mindfuck a lot of people and have had intellectual multiple orgasms with people that i meet, but physically I’m, excuse my vulgar language, only attracted to my boyfriend. However, his SMS to me has started to make me think twice about him. Is what he says and reads really that different from who he really is? I’m a forgiving person and I have let it pass, for the meantime. But I’m reduced to the confused thinking of a teenage girl in an unhealthy relationship with a troubled classmate. I’m trying to be mature and forgiving and all that, but deep down I think he might just be full of shit.

Hello world. It’s me again.

Please don’t think that I am an ungrateful daughter. Although your flowers and your mountains and your vast oceans are as far away from me as your sister planets, I love you as much as your other children. Perhaps more. I’ve been walking all night, trying to find comfort in the dirt of the streets, the shrill laughter echoing in the dark, the lovers walking arms entwined on their way to cheap motels. I breathe the noxious fumes of manila and I ironically feel safe in the turbulence of your darkness. I light a cigarette and look up at a starless sky and I feel wonderfully, exhilaratingly free.

(I’m not free. Not really. And I’m not really happy. Why do you think I never stay in one place? Why do you think I’m so reckless and eager for things and people that would make me feel alive?

Because I don’t.

Because most of the time i feel dead inside and if I’m honest with myself i gave up on life-as-everyone-else-knows-it by the time i was fifteen.)

Dearest world, what I live for now are your moments of excruciating beauty and clarity…however fleeting, these moments are all that I look forward to. If i take a step back and look at life the way most people do; as a steady or even crooked path to a set destination, i would go completely and irrevocably mad.

(I wish that he didn’t have to see me this way. I wish he didn’t have to uncover the truth of me behind the masks that I wore and which I sometimes could no longer distinguish from my real face. This is my hand and that is his and we can be as close as two people can possibly be and I will still be drowning in an ocean two thousand miles away from him.)

It’s morning again and it’s time for me to sleep.

Good morning. And I hope you have a nice day today.