A Kiss of Bleeding Fire

36

WE  STAYED in our condo in Makati for several days. Several days of being away from Garrett and several days of moping in my room, crying for his absence. I missed the bastard and the thought of him believing those rumors about me gutted me. I did not know if he contacted me or tried to reach out to me in any form because my phone was confiscated by my mother for the sake of my mental health.

The confiscation of my phone stemmed from the fact that she saw me reading those nasty comments about me on the videos posted on the internet. The views of my make-out session with Paul reached millions of views. There were comments from some people I knew and there were some from the people I didn't know. Their nasty prejudice about me was solely based on the video they had seen on the internet.

It was ironically pathetic to think that when these kinds of scandals were leaked on the internet, the ones who mostly got criticized or vilified were women. Women were always the subject of their preying eyes, the center of their scrutiny, and the punching bag of their nasty misogynistic mindset. In this society, there would never be equal treatment for both women and men. Men were always ahead of us, women. They always had the advantage when it came to many things.

There were women out there, trying to bring the patriarchy to its end, to advocate women's empowerment, to have the same respect the society had given to men even without them doing anything. That was it, while women worked hard to earn respect and equal treatment to both men and women, men on the other hand did not have to do anything because those were willingly served to them on a silver platter from the day they were born with a dangling penis between their legs.

The nasty comments were not only from men. They were also from women. While some women praised Paul for being hot and good at kissing, they dragged me to the pit of hell by calling me names. Misogyny came in many forms— men and women. Not because you were a woman, you couldn't be a misogynist. Women can be misogynists; they could be sexists; they could be anything opposed to what you believed. Not because they were women, they instantly became your ally.

I didn't want to come clean in this narrative, I knew I did bad things to my sister. Maybe, I was once a misogynist— I hated her and I was jealous of her. I projected my insecurities onto her and made her suffer even though she hadn't done anything to me.

I could still remember the first day Father introduced Lia to me. I was mean and rude to her. The little Cornelia, with her pigtails, pink hairpins, and fresh smell like freshly bloomed daisies, followed me wherever I went. She tried asking questions about my toys and about my school supplies. She also said, without me asking, that she was excited to go to school. She said she would like to buy a pink backpack and all pink school supplies. She also said she was excited because her mom would buy her a new pink dress.

Then I shouted at her. Yelled at her. Told her she was a pest. Told her she was the reason why my family was broken. Told her she shouldn't have been brought to this world. Told her she didn't have a place in my life. She cried that time. She cried but she never told Papa about it. She cried silently by going to the comfort room.

To be honest, a slash of guilt ripped through me. However, my anger about the life I had at that time overpowered any guilt I had toward her. On that day, Lia stayed away from me as much as she could. She always tried to avoid me. If we were in a room, she would just stay beside Father, not wanting to be separated from him as if I was a lioness ready to pound on her.

I closed my eyes as tears streamed down my cheeks. I'd lost years of my life by hating my sister. I wished Lia to come home so I could be the sister she wanted. To be the sister she deserved. I wished she could give me the chance to prove to her that I could be her sister, not the bitch who treated her badly.