Iris After the Incident by Mina V. Esguerra

Author:Mina V. Esguerra [Esguerra, Mina V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mina V. Esguerra

My place, my bed, a different kind of threesome.

Him, me, and my phone.

I didn’t delete anything. At first it was out of a stubborn insistence that I was fine, so while I set all my social media to private, I didn’t delete anything. I pulled up a photo from a little over two years ago. A photo of me and my friend Bessy, two days before Bradley broke the news to me.

Bessy invited me to coffee after work to catch up. I was a little tense in that photo because while Bessy was her usual fun self, her topic of conversation was when Bradley and I would decide to get married already. I held my tongue, didn’t tell her that it wasn’t the right time to talk about it. The barista snapped this photo after we asked her to.

“You look—“

I watched his face as he tried to find the word.

Gio ended the mental search, his shoulders moving in a defeated shrug. “The same.”

“This is Iris, before The Incident,” I said. “I think the biggest problem I had at the time was paying my credit card bill, and how annoying it was that the office printer always broke down whenever I had a presentation the next day.”

“Legit problems.”

“I wish I cared about those again,” I said, laughing a little. “You know that feeling when you look at your credit card bill and it’s the day after the due and you haven’t paid yet? God, I used to think that was the worst.”

“It’s not the worst.”

“No. But you’ve probably never been late on a credit card bill.”

“I don’t have a credit card.”

I rolled my eyes. “Anyway. My other most important problem at the time was that I felt that Bradley and I were growing apart. And then Bessy here suggests we should get married already, and I was twenty-two and starting to enjoy my job and…”

Well, enough of that. Moving on.

“There’s a gap of like three weeks, before I even posted anything new,” I told him, showing him the feed. “That’s when it happened.”

He pointed to the first photo of the new era, After The Incident. A sunrise with no caption. I had forgotten that I had taken that.

“I went to stay at a hotel. Bradley joined me the next day but I spent one night on my own and I went up to the roof when I couldn’t sleep. I napped on a couch up there and woke up when the sun came up.”

“Was it the sign you were waiting for?”

“Oh I wanted it to be. I wanted it to mean something. But it really was just the beginning.”

I switched to my email app, and showed him a forward from Liam. It was an “open letter” of sorts from Tita Ara to my other family members. Typical of the extended family’s childless matriarch, it was about her—her disappointment, her dismay, her shame—and then she went on to admonish the other family members for how they’ve raised their children to be sinful, shameful, immoral whores.

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