(First posted here.)

Dante was staring at the lighted cigarette stick in his hand. And then, in a moment of lucidity he realized what he was doing.

“Shit.”

The vendor at the lagoon was taken aback at the expletive, having sold him the aformentioned cigarette just seconds before.

“I don’t smoke,” Dante said.

The vendor gave him a wide-eyed look, holding on to Dante’s coins a little tighter than usual.

“No, syempre, binayaran ko na.”

The vendor nodded slowly.

Dante walked out of there in a hurry, in no particular direction. He wandered into the wide open space of the lagoon, home of virtually rabid geese and congenial ducks. Why did he want to smoke? He never smoked a cigarette in his life. He did not know what led him there, which map his feet were following, why they were not following his conscious commands.

He sat on a rock facing the water strip. His mind wanted to stray, he felt it, he felt as if his mind was like an uncontrollable, seething mass of sentient worms inside a hole-ridden sheet of flesh, and that it took a certain physical strength to collect these worms: they don’t listen, they don’t heed anything.

But he knew this. He didn’t really find meandering thoughts useful. Which was why he found the mental blips too painful, too taxing. He supposed normal people could fold these thoughts into their streams of consciousness and find meaning in them, actionable meaning. To him they were just plain noise.

He turned his attention to the lagoon, tried, for the sake, to see if the lagoon made actual lagoon sounds. Water bubbling, crickets doing that cricket thing, even maybe the soft rustling of weed at the bank, that sort of thing. Looking at Dante from the outside, nothing much has changed. He stopped moving, sure, but his eyes were open and his hands were clasped together, almost as if in prayer.

As was the wayof things, in these simple moments of total clarity, the most unexpected curveballs take shape.

“Dante?” a voice behind him said. He knew it was Nirvana. The interruption almost annoyed him, but not really. She was always the most welcome distraction.

First this, the sheer joy of her finding him here, a place where they chased and got chased by geese for fun.

But then she began to say things that did not really quite reach that part of his brain that bestowed meaning to auditory signals. Because what his brain quickly grasped was this: he could not hear the voices in Nirvana’s head.

“What’s wrong?” Nirvana said, touching his arm. That one registered.

“I think you lied to me.”

Nirvana brought her hand back. “I’m sorry, what?”

Dante’s emotions reached boiling point in about three seconds as things became clearer and clearer. He had called her last week asking if the night at the river altered her in any way and she said no. During that conversation he assumed the distance was the reason he couldn’t hear her thoughts. And if this affliction affected his interactions with everyone, how is she an exemption? There was no other way to explain it except she was experiencing the same thing and lied about it. But why would she?

“Tell me this isn’t strange!”

“What’s strange?” her voice still the paragon of serenity.

“I can’t hear inside you!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dante wanted to shake her by the shoulders. “Please don’t lie to me, Nirvana.”

She didn’t answer back. Instead, they looked at each other for a long time.

Dante’s anger fell away, looking at her face. There really was no way to stay mad at this frontal assault: it was not that she was heartbreakingly beautiful but that there was no way to call the person behind those eyes anything other than sublime. Sincere, even.

“Please don’t lie to me.”

Nirvana stood up abruptly. “This was a bad idea. I’m sorry.” She started to walk away.

He was no longer mad but his heart was still racing. “Why would you lie to me?” he called out.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her mouth said. But Dante finally caught it, and now he could not understand what it meant. He’d only seen that look one other time, and he was very good at this, and it was during the night of the concert, when they ran after a figure she thought was {ria} but never caught up.

It looked very much like the specific fear of losing something forever. He did not know what he had to do with any of this.