So M.E., the partee-going engineer who lives somewhere in Ortigas and works somewhere in Pasig City, has started asking Tar, my partee-going partner, to “move what we have outside of the bedroom”. It’s the attempt to take this “chem love” – that drug-induced feeling that one is in love with a partee-mate, though mainly only when they’re both high – to another level.
He knows Tar is partnered; he – supposedly – even kept saying that “no matter what you (Tar) do, you will always have his love”. All the same, he’s “pressuring” Tar to start doing “couple stuff” with him – e.g. be seen together while outside, watch movie/s together, and so on.
In hindsight, Tar said, perhaps the signs were always there… and he just didn’t pay attention, or maybe he just chose to ignore them.
Like when M.E. “made me skip your birthday, taking steps so I didn’t leave his bed so I can be with you”. Or injecting Tar with more drugs when he was supposed to leave already to fulfill his promise to his mom that he’d head home already.
Particularly with me, Tar thinks “he was ‘competing’ with you; maybe he was always in ‘competition’ with you.”
There was always this insinuation, based on Tar’s observation, that “I didn’t deserve you… or the love that you give me because I am a ‘flawed’ person, using drugs and all.” It’s almost as if “happiness for someone like me can only be found with those doing what we’re doing; and so we ‘belong’ together, should be together as partee-going people”.
M.E. is still a means to an end for Tar; he exists as a drug source and co-user.That at times Tar partees with others shows M.E. “disposability”, if you know what I mean. And so in a way, what they have is a one-way “chem love affair”.
But the attempts to make the “chem love” mutual has been increasing.
There’s the “paying” (cash; aside from the free drugs) to “lure” Tar to come more frequently. There’re those planned out-of-the-bedroom activities, mainly to “show to the world we’re now together”. There’re palipad-hangin mentions of trips together. Things like that.
I wonder, though, why, when discussing “chem love”, there’s this seeming skirting of the main issue: the drug use.
Like: When someone not partee-ing with them would ask them how they met, will lying be their “normal” response? Since drug is their glue, is drug use going to be the “normal” activity that will keep them together, forever? Are there plans, at all, to eventually stop using drugs; or will drug use be a staple, else the loving feelings will disappear?
M.E.’s entrapment of Tar already caused Tar to lose jobs more than once. If there’s proof of the falseness of “chem love”, it’s that. Alas… for those partee-ing, this may not be as apparent. And so the partee-ing continues, searching for some loving feeling while foregoing the love of those who truly care for them, but outside of the partee circles…
