Excuses

“Are you coming tonight?”

Words I thought I’d never hear again. Especially after all the endless lockdowns. And still, why did it send a shiver of panic down my spine? It’s been years since I’d heard it — you would think I would forget all my impulse reactions to any sentences or words that implied socializing, and yet there it was: the milli-second of scrambling the back of my brain for the usual excuses, wondering which one I’d used more recently, just so I could avoid it, just as a courtesy to the asker. And yet I realized, the last time I’d had a need to excuse myself from coming to any social gathering was — hey, I couldn’t even look that far back. So I stared at my phone, frozen. I contemplated just ending the call. In fact, my finger hovered over the red icon just as my friend, Hans, laughed, like he’d just read my mind.

“Why are you laughing?” I just thought I’d ask. You know, to keep the conversation going, to delay the inevitable, if you will.

“Can’t come up with excuses, huh?”

“I don’t know, dude — ”

“Are you just doing this because you think it’s more consistent with your, um, introverted character?” 

“What do you mean?”

Hans sighed, then laughed. It was still so hard to figure him out, even after we’d conducted most of our friendship on the internet for the past three years. “You’re no less of an introvert if you decide to come out with us for just one night. We’ll let you leave early. Then we’ll make a bet about it behind your back. Come on.”

“What were you planning on?

“Oh you know, dinner.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see when we get there.”

Oh right, the ‘we’ll see when we get there’. Three years ago, before everything went down, before Jim and I broke up over Zoom because I “was a bad communicator” whatever that meant, he and I planned to have dinner at the mall. I said I wanted Japanese, but he said, “We’ll see when we get there.” The rest of the day, I began to hear news of someone in QC who went home with the virus, and how their whole condo building shut down for sanitation. The information came in piecemeal from family and friends who all weren’t sure about what they’d heard and if they should be concerned about it. By the time we were supposed to meet, I was convinced that it was dangerous to venture outside. It was a whole thing.

“It’s just one person. One!” Jim said, trying to contain his irritation over the phone.

“If it were just one person, why’d they have to shut down an entire building?”

“I don’t know. It’s just food, for God’s sake. Bring alcohol and don’t touch doorknobs. Come on.”

“I don’t know, dude — ”

“You’re impossible.”

“I think I’m going back home.”

“And what about your job?”

“What about my life?”

“What about us?”

“What about us?”

“You’re impossible, Lor,” he said, before dropping the call. 

I tried calling him back right after, just because I thought I should. When he answered it, there was surrender in his voice, like he was tired and ready to forgive me, if I would be humble enough to ask for it. But I wasn’t. That wasn’t the plan. Actually, there was no plan. I breathed over the phone for about five seconds, before he began talking my ears off about how I was impossible and how he was tired.

“You’re always tired. You should get checked. It might be something.”

“Are you Woody Allen?” he asked.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know!” He dropped the call again. I didn’t even think about calling him after that. I just looked at the time and wondered if I had enough time to catch the last bus going back to my hometown. I had no idea, but I decided to risk it nevertheless. That happened to be my last night in Quezon City, and the last bus I took home in three years. Jim and I talked again after that, a few days after I got home and when everything turned to basic shit. He was reluctant to admit that I was right to be scared from the start. As the lockdowns dragged on and on, he masked his reluctance with hope, and then accused me of being a “negative person”. Soon, the term he used was “toxic”. All because I said there was no way the lockdowns were going to end by April. When he finally broke up with me, I almost congratulated him. “Good call,” I almost said. But we were on Zoom, and I couldn’t help but fixate on the way my face looked on the video call app. 

“After dinner, that’s it, right?” I said.

Hans laughed. “Of course not. After dinner, karaoke or Starbucks.”

“Those don’t feel like they belong in the same category.”

“Well, karaoke then. And then Starbucks. Happy?”

Karaoke. I actually missed going to karaoke rooms. But mostly I liked the tail end of it, when everyone’s run out of songs to sing, except for the one person who’s still stubbornly looking through the song book. Usually that person was me. I was usually the person who would begin singing just as everyone’s calculating the cost of the room.

The last time I went was the first time I hang out with Hans. We were co-workers, and he had just gotten transferred to our team. We hit it off right at that very last hour. It seemed he had the same habit as mine. We began looking for obscure songs on the song book as our other teammates finished the last of the beers. By the time they pulled us out of the karaoke room, Hans and I decided we were friends. He suggested going to a cafe for a few. I was game, and then the others started chiming in, “Me too” so that by the time we got to an actual cafe, I was already drained and ready to go. I sat for one cake, then I was out of there. Hans and I didn’t even get to really talk.

“Who else is coming?”

Hans rattled out the names. They were okay. But you know how some people are okay one-on-one, but then you put them all together and they begin to act differently? That was how they were. The truth was, I felt the same way about Hans. He was one of the few people I managed to stay in touch with even after I got retrenched from our workplace. We could talk about everything. But then when we would all go on Zoom with our other ex-co-workers, he’d turn into a jokester. One punchline after another. I was okay with jokes, sure. But then when you’re just talking online for an hour and throwing punchlines at one another for the most part, did that mean you didn’t really have anything to talk about? 

“Hmm, okay,” I said, in a kind of sigh.

“What does that okay mean?”

“Do I really have to go?”

“Oh man.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I find this conversation really funny, but I can’t laugh. I think this will be funny in retrospect, though. Like, let’s give it five years.”

I wondered then how I would feel if Hans hadn’t invited me at all. He knew all about my trepidations. I once told him how I would get literally itchy whenever I watched crowds, even in movies that were made years and years ago. Everything was okay now, or at least under control. People no longer wore masks outside. And yet I kept wearing them, I kept practicing social distancing. I refused hugs, even though I and the hugger were already both vaccinated. When Jim called me a year after we’d broken up, asking how I was (meaning, if I was already vaccinated) and if we could meet, I literally told him that he was insane. He laughed. “I missed that,” he said. And I got angry for the first time in years. I didn’t know why. Something about his casualness rubbed me the wrong way. 

“I think I know what it is,” Hans said after a few minutes of silence. That was one thing I liked about him. He was okay with my silences, and unlike most extroverts I knew, he didn’t feel the need to fill them in unless he had to. Like right then.

“What? Enlighten me.”

“I think you’re scared of going back to the real world because the last three years were more real to you than the ones before the pandemic.”

“Hmm, okay. That’s one way to look at it.” He was absolutely right, of course.

“You don’t want to admit that you actually enjoyed the lockdowns.”

“And?”

“I have nothing else. Really, I’m just making you feel bad about possibly declining my invitation to go out.”

“Who said I was declining?”

“So you’re not?”

“I’ll think about it.” I already knew I was going, and that I was going to regret it sometime during the night. But wasn’t that always the way, not just with going out with friends, but life in general? And yet you kept doing it anyway. That was one thing I didn’t know how to admit: that I missed doing things I might regret later. Three years had gone by with me feeling right about every decision I made. It was time for a few mistakes. I felt like I should sneak them in before 40.