Five minutes.

That was all he needed, he said, when he finally got me cornered.

“Just five minutes. And then it’ll all be over,” he had promised, when he saw my hesitation.

We stood there, in silence, a foot apart. He set the timer on my phone, five minutes on the dot.

And then he just stared at me.

I glanced at my phone in his hand. A minute ticked by. I opened my mouth to speak, wanting to know why we weren’t talking, why he wasted the first of the five minutes he had asked for just by staring at me.

“No,” he said, with a sharp shake of his head, so I stayed silent.

I followed his suit, gazing into his eyes. I gazed into this pair of eyes so many times in thousands of hours of conversations, and I thought it would be easy. With the arguments, corny jokes, problems, funny stories, and deepest, darkest secrets that we’ve told each other… everything in between, it should be a piece of cake.

But the silence made it different. Gazing into his eyes in this silence was different.

There were so many things the eyes hold that words couldn’t convey, and the silence made me hypersensitive to the emotions in his eyes.

Pain. There was pain in his eyes. But what for? I was the one who had hurt and was still hurting after all this time. Because he knew he lost me? Or that he hurt me?

Or that he knew he hurt me, but he hadn’t realized it was this much?

But he had been careless. After months of grappling over the right term, I finally found the right word for everything that had happened. He was careless with me and whatever I felt for him. He wanted to keep me and our friendship so much that he didn’t realize he’d been careless. You just don’t go on sweeping things and feelings under the rug because you think that would make them go away. Eventually they would pile up, and that rug would burst with all the things you kept on sweeping under it.

And then everything you tried to keep hiding or running away from would come to bite you back.

He then took a step forward, cutting the space between us to half. The air was suddenly so thin in the room, and it was harder to breathe. He reached up, cupping my cheek in his hand.

Sadness. He rubbed his thumb on my cheek and the first of my tears fell. He brushed them dry and—
Then there was regret. We were once so solid, so great, but now we’re broken.

I reached for him, placing my hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze.

That was when his tears fell.

I almost pulled back in surprise. He never cried. In the years that I’ve known him and loved him, I haven’t seen him shed a single tear. To him, crying was for the weak, but he had always been there for me for every tear I shed that he knew about, the ones that he was sure weren’t about him or because of him.

(All the other tears were part of the things he had swept under the rug.)

But why? Why these tears?

I couldn’t take it anymore. Just when I was about to demand for him to say something, the alarm went off.

Our time’s up.

I removed my hand on his shoulder, but then he reached out for it before it fell to my side, holding it in his.

We spent another minute, the alarm blaring, standing there. My tears were falling; his, too.

And then the ringing stopped.

The sudden silence made me move again. I exhaled loudly, reaching for my phone in his hands. That seemed to pull him out of his reverie.

He cleared his throat. “Five minutes.”

I nodded. I didn’t have the heart anymore to correct him that it was more than five minutes.

“I’m sorry,” he continued. “For everything.” His voice broke at the last word.

I averted his gaze, choking back a sob. This was it, the apology that I was waiting for.

And hearing it lifted the weight that I carried in my chest in the past months since I made the choice to leave.

“I’m too late already, right? I can’t get you back anymore. Had I apologized earlier—”
I cut him off with a shake of my head. I took a deep breath, finding his eyes. His eyes had always been beautiful to me. “Even if you had, I still would’ve left,” I admitted.

He gave a small gasp, as if my reply wasn’t what he had expected.

Three seconds ticked by. He wiped his tears with the back of his hand, slightly recovered. “Well, I guess our time’s really up.”

I nodded, smiling sadly. “It is.” I leaned in, pressing my lips on his cheek. He was quick to try to wrap his arms around me, trying to hold me in this moment longer, but I was faster. I shrugged them off.

“Have a good life,” I said to him.

And then I walked away from him for good.

Send us your poetry and fiction

Super publishes poetry and fiction. Please send a piece of short fiction (or an excerpt from a longer work that is 500-800 words) or three poems in English or Filipino to [email protected] or to Ruel S. De Vera, Literary Editor, Super, c/o Philippine Daily Inquirer, 1098 Chino Roces Ave., Makati City 1204 Metro Manila.