“The cruise is 40k lang.”
I would not have been so concerned if this statement had come from anyone else. Unfortunately, it came from my gay cheapskate friend from Ayala Alabang, whom we shall now call Chastity Botham.
Until that moment, Chastity had developed the habit of measuring everything I bought in units of his monthly fellowship stipend. When I bought a pair of headphones on a whim, he looked at the price and said, “Girl, that’s almost my entire stipend.” When he saw the ridiculous price of iPhone duo, he nearly had a cardiovascular event. “That’s more than three times my stipend!” Apparently, the Philippine peso was no longer his preferred unit of currency. Everything was now measured in fellowship stipends. So when he casually mentioned spending around forty thousand pesos and followed it with lang, I was alarmed.
“Girl,” I said. “That’s a month’s worth of your stipend.”
For once, I was the one reminding him.
This was the same gay who had spent months converting my questionable financial decisions into fellowship stipends. And now, suddenly, forty thousand pesos was lang.
“Ah. There he is. The generational-wealth gay from Ayala Alabang. Calling Forty thousand lang.”
No, Chastity had not won the lottery. No, his rich father had not suddenly become aware of his son’s daily struggle to afford protein powder and poppers and decided to increase his allowance out of paternal concern.
It was worse.
Chastity was talking about a cruise. With his situationship. The same situationship he remains convinced he can somehow fix and eventually persuade to fall in love with him properly. This is a man who will take the train to save money. A man who believes ice is a scam because it reduces the amount of coffee in his cup. A man who will carry ten kilos of free rice across Metro Manila rather than pay for his own. But apparently, put him on a cruise ship with an emotionally unavailable man and suddenly forty thousand pesos is lang.
So perhaps Chastity isn’t a cheapskate after all. He is merely financially responsible in every area of his life except the one with the poorest expected return.
Love.
“Didn’t you clutch your pearls when you heard the price?” I asked, genuinely concerned whether this was still the same Chastity I knew.
“No. It’s 40k for a seven-day international cruise.” he said, as if this somehow made things better.
“Okay, isn’t that too good to be true?” I asked. “Where are you sleeping? Third class? Somewhere near the boiler room?”
“Like, are you going to be locked below deck when the ship starts sinking because there aren’t enough lifeboats? Do you at least get the Heart of the Ocean?”
Then another possibility occurred to me.
“Wait. What if he’s scamming you? Girl. What if this is a love scam?”
Suddenly, the forty thousand pesos lang became even more concerning.
Then he told me, “Girl, I know a lot of gays like you. Men who have given up on love. I’m different. I still believe forever might exist. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, at least I enjoyed the trip.” I wanted to argue. I had several arguments ready, actually. But I kept them to myself.
Let’s see if you’re still this philosophical when you come back from the cruise and you’re still a situationship.
Instead, I said, “Fine. Just pack your sexiest lingerie. And don’t forget your travel insurance. Set up your online banking too, in case this really is a scam and you need an emergency money transfer.”
“Thanks, Queen,” he said, genuinely touched. “Always watching my back. A girl’s girl.”
“Please. If your situationship abandons you on top of a mountain in Japan, don’t call me. Call your rich dad. I’m a busy girl.”
If, against all my predictions, the two of them actually end up together someday, I’ll be at their wedding in a suit, drunk and dancing harder than everyone else, eating my way through the entire buffet table, acting as though I hadn’t spent years telling Chastity to dump the groom.
I will deny everything.
A girl’s girl.
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