I Don't Yet Know Love, II

My right wrist still hurts, as does my right forearm. I can imagine the muscles, the tissues, its fibres and the tendons that connect them, having been twisted severely, as in Manny Pacquiao’s interminable sci-fi Alaxan commercials: to unknot the pain there might be a need for fast-relief analgesics. But this memory of going ten-pin bowling with you –and of losing three games out of three– will ache only temporarily; long-term it is something that I shall remember fondly.

I wonder why, until we talked about what to do that Sunday afternoon, I had never bowled before. I never did understand the appeal of the sport, at least as far as the concept of playing and winning was concerned. Even the bowling shoes I saw only as a kind of fashion accessory. I liked to think that an asphalt basketball playground, imagined with tattooed opponents and drunken hecklers (even armed frat boys, as was the case in the gritty Quezon City district where I grew up), would unleash much more freely my competitive nature than would an air-conditioned, bubblegum-coloured alley on the fourth floor of a tycoon-owned shopping mall.

Ah, the alley: it could not have possibly been less dark. Its shiny synthetic lanes, manicured with bright shades and glossy brand logos, made for an effect that I can only describe as tranquilizing. The panel walls were plastered with stickers of balloons, clownish, cartoonish faces, and unnamed planets surrounded by happy grainy gases. Soft jazz emanated from speakers located behind the bar, while moustached spectators lounged and watched and smoked cigarettes and took small, smooth swigs from their bottles of San Mig Light. What if a player accidentally drinks too much beer? I don’t want to be too imaginative here, but one might do more than just fracture a finger; so much for balance and for stabilising the body! Bowling, I had always thought, was for people unable to exude grace any other way. And for Woody Harrelson. “Gawd, Kingpin was atrocious,” I remember you saying. “I didn’t find the film funny at all.”

What is funny is that I believed in your sense of humour a little bit more than in your athletic skill. I mean, you always tripped on the smoothest of pavements and you always scurried too quickly along zebra crossings. And you were the one who had made the rather charming profession of being “useless” in any sport, even in those that didn’t always require sobriety. But when you scored a 133 in our first game, with at least three strikes and a couple of spares, beating me by a margin so wide that I cannot now be bothered to remember how wide, and when like a majestic show-off you turned round to look at me before your ball ever hit the pins, such that you could witness my profanity-laced reaction and at the same time listen to the soundtrack of a beautiful crash, I no longer was the one laughing.

In a comedy of embarrassment, I begged and promised to pay for a second game, and then a third; if it weren’t for a primetime telecast of The Emmys that evening I might have insisted on continuing to fight the losing battle. Oh, how utterly pathetic I looked in my humourless attempts to win, to feed my almost childish desire for victory. And you beat me each time without any unnecessary excitement or alcohol. I, meanwhile, achieved nothing but muscle pain that until now has not been eased.

At any rate, I hope that you will not blame me if my sharpest instinct is to always keep score. Not that that will hurt you; I only inflict damage on myself. Did you notice how desperately I deciphered and monitored the lime-coloured lines on the scoreboard? You’d think that, aside from my wrist and arm, my neck too would have suffered some kind of strain. More than being ignorant of what ten-pin bowling on a Sunday afternoon stands for, perhaps my affliction has to do with making a competition out of too many things, and with feeling insecure and bereft and bitter after even just the most minor losses. And perhaps I don’t yet know love, which is why I treat it too as a game, and you as a kind of prize – which you most certainly are not. You mean much, much more than something or someone I’d be terrified to lose.