Chapter Text
The empty email sits in front of Raissa, the screen reflecting her face as she stares at the blinking cursor. She knows she has to be back in— she glances at the small clock at the bottom of the screen— fifteen minutes. Two projects, three quizzes to study for, and four assignments await her at the small college dorm she calls “home”.
There are two months left until her flight booked for the Philippines brings her back to sandy beaches, warm sun, and the smell of salty breeze. Her real home. Raissa never understood how Americans can spend Christmas so horridly. It felt more like a knock-off version of the bright, overstimulating, festive holiday she remembers from back then.
Still, bringing her to the United States took a lot of budgeting and effort on the part of her parents, and of course she was incredibly blessed to be able to take up her dream course in her dream school. Raissa still remembers how pissed her mom was when she almost missed her flight back then, when she had first left.
So she had declined the invite to go back home for Christmas, saying she wanted to experience the snow and whatnot. Said she’d come back for a longer vacation during summer instead. She had regretted that the entirety of December, but grit her teeth and held back her complaints anyway. Delayed gratification and all that.
Raissa would like to say she never forgot to stay in touch with her family. Never turned down calling her parents in the middle of the night when it was midday back in the Philippines. She knows how expensive long-distance phone calls are and isn’t going to waste her few chances at hearing their voices after a tiring day. Even when the voice she missed most wasn’t there.
The emails she sent were ones filled with stories of annoying professors and crazy shenanigans, as well as the mundane, stressful college experience. But if you looked too hard in between the lines about the pranks she played with her roommate and the new foods she got to try in the downtown malls, you’d find the hollow longing of a girl who misses her home.
Hello. Today was fun. I got to solve a crazy equation! It’ll help me with this project I’m completing. I miss you. Yesterday was insaneee, Sam found a way to make the practice rockets we had made on Monday go even higher, LOL! Do you miss me? There were some food stalls set up around campus today, and I tried out an iced latte from one of them. Why don’t you ever reply to me, Jo?
She sounds insane. Slowly, Raissa deletes each sentence, letter by letter until only “Hello” remains. 102 emails. The majority of them were sent last year. They were about anything, from a song she heard that reminded her of Jo, to how she got the highest score on the first applied physics exam when the class got an average of 17 points.
The frequency they got sent at decreased heavily around the mid-December mark. After she realised Jo didn’t even greet her maligayang Pasko. Raissa knew she messed up leaving her behind on the beach that night, but hell, she had a flight to catch, and she wasn’t going to let a some boulder—
She once again deletes the new paragraph she wrote. This one’s filled with too many curses. Raissa's scared someone else might see her typing it out on the public library computer and think she’s some crazy psycho who sends hate emails.
Look, they made a pact, okay? Right around the time Raissa visited Jo at her new gig and told her the news. That they would stay in touch no matter what. And yes, they had fought hard that night on the beach, harder than they ever had. But that shouldn’t have erased a decade of hanging out, relying on each other, and remembering each moment with a charm.
Still, that fight was different. From any they ever had.
Raissa let it slip that her parents hadn’t pushed her to Caltech at all. That it was all her. Jo flipped, of course, and berated her for valuing their friendship so lowly, talking as if they were just meant to orbit around each other for the rest of their lives.
Jo was just as incredible as Raissa, in different areas, sure, but she could have fame, fans, the whole works if she just believed in her damn self. Instead, she wallows.
Wallows in self-pity, saying she’s better suited to quick jobs than focusing on her art or further schooling. Raissa isn’t proud of it but those were the exact words she threw at Jo that night. The sea breeze felt like flames that night, burning the delicate, silent agreement they had reached to not question Jo’s current life plan too much.
But damn it, Raissa wasn’t the enabler type. She wanted her friends to be just as successful as her, especially when she knew that they had the ability to do so, that it was only their own self-hindrance in the way.
“I heard what your mom said. I’m a boulder dragging you down, huh?” Jo screams at her across the sandy beach, the unshed tears in her eyes reflecting the moon’s light. Raissa’s throat aches with a sharp pain. She swallows and somehow feels like lava’s trickling down into her heart.
Jo paces a bit, her back to Raissa now. “I mean, I always knew she hated me. Especially since I had thought,” she basically scoffs the word at Raissa, “that she was the one who made you leave.” Jo walks toward her, poking a finger at her chest, such hateful force in a small action that it makes Raissa stumble back from the hurt, not the actual strength.
“It was you all along.” Each word punctuated by a jab of her finger. Jo’s voice cracks and Raissa wants the Earth to swallow her. She can’t stand to face her anymore, turning her head to the side, her long wispy bangs blocking Jo’s view from Raissa’s own matching teary eyes.
Jo isn’t having it. She grabs the lapels of Raissa’s jacket, shaking it to make her face her worst nightmare. The possibility of losing her closest friend. Her only true one.
“You could’ve told me, man. Why… Did you think I would’ve stopped you?”
Raissa’s head snaps towards her. “No! You know I would never think that. It’s just that… It’s like you had our whole lives planned out, Jo!” She grabs the two hands holding her. “Yes, dorming together and having crazy fun every day sounds awesome, but not at the expense of me chasing my dream!”
“I don’t wanna stay here if my dream school is calling me. If my best shot at NASA is calling me to be there, why the hell wouldn’t I answer?”
“Because your best friend is here!”
A silent beat passes. Their faces are inches apart. Raissa can feel the heat of Jo’s hands beneath hers. Can feel the expanding of her ribs with each breath. What the hell was she supposed to say to that?
“So I should stay here just to… What? Light fireworks off with you?” Jo opens her mouth to retort but Raissa cuts her off, pushing herself closer to Jo, gripping her hands tighter. “No, okay, just no! Tell me, Jo? You would rather I decline the best opportunity I’ve got to do what? To spend my life forever just dicking around with you?”
“I’m not gonna spend my life throwing rocks at my high school bully’s car, Jo! I’m not going to spend,” Raissa rips Jo’s hands off her, “my life weighed down by—” She pushes her off with too much force, Jo goes stumbling down on the rough sand—
“You!”
Jo stares up at her. A betrayed look crosses her face for a second, before it's replaced by a forced expression of neutrality. Raissa immediately knows she went too far. Jo tries to look like she couldn’t care less, but the tears she’s blinking away betray her. She pulls herself up before Raissa can snap herself out of her frozen state.
Jo dusts her pants off, softly sniffles, then wipes her face as if nothing happened. “Right. You should go. Wouldn’t wanna miss that flight.”
“Jo…” Raissa’s hand reaches for her but falls halfway through. “I didn’t mean that you know that I—”
“Just go.” Jo turns away from her once again. “Leave.”
A rising anger fills Raissa’s chest. Why does Jo get upset? Why does she get to act as if she’s wronged? Raissa’s the one who’s been helping Jo get out of trouble for years, who’d never once complained about Jo’s antics, even when her parents wanted to stop them from seeing each other years ago.
The urge to throw out every hurtful thing she could say bubbles up in Raissa. The urge to hurt Jo as much as her dismissal does rises every second that she stares at her friend’s back. She already said Jo drags her down anyway, right? Why doesn’t she just let out the one thing she’s been holding back? In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Lola would be so disappointed in you.”
Now that gets a reaction out of Jo. She turns slowly, as if maybe it wasn’t Raissa who just said that. As if maybe for a split second she could believe her best friend didn’t just throw the death of her grandmother in her face for an argument.
But Raissa knows this is the truth. Before the fight, she had wanted to bring this up countless times, but could never find the right moment. How lola knew Jo could be so much more. How she had tried to be understanding, to support Jo no matter what, especially since her dad had left. How she had approached Raissa one night, asking her to take care of Jo if ever something happened to her. How Raissa would be the only one Jo would have left.
And how would lola react seeing Jo now? Job hopping, with no concrete plans? How would that hurt her, knowing it was probably her own self-indulgence in a way that made Jo so unready to face the realities of the fast-moving world? After all, she still dreams of Nakali. The world she stuck her head in, to avoid every real consequence and truth.
That’s why Raissa tried so hard to shield Jo from the fact she was leaving voluntarily. Shield her from the fact that beyond their friendship, Raissa needs more. More of life outside the small island they call home. More of herself outside the friendship that had defined her for the majority of her life.
Raissa didn’t want to forget Jo. She didn’t want to remove Jo from her life either. Raissa just knew her capabilities deserved to be known. That they didn’t deserve to be restrained to the small streets of their city, to the jeepney by the beach, or in small rockets blasted to the starry sky, only to eventually fall down.
Raissa wants to blast a rocket so big that it makes it out. Out of the island, out of Earth. Raissa wants to soar. And she isn’t doing that anytime soon if she continues on the path laid out so resolutely by Jo.
She waits for Jo to lash out. To scream and cry at her for being a horrid person. A bad friend. But she does nothing. Her half-turn left uncontinued. Her head partially bowed as she stared out to the sea, her eyes refusing to meet Raissa’s.
Raissa turns, having nothing left to say. She didn’t spare a glance back, each of her steps forceful and absolute. She said what she had to. If Jo wanted her to leave, then fine, just wait a day and she’s gone for good.
That was then-Raissa. Now-Raissa wants to smash her head into the keyboard. Why the hell did she just leave? Why didn’t she turn back at any point during the walk to her house, run to Jo, and just apologise a million times?
Well. Why should she have to?
Yes, she knows what she said at the end was wrong, specifically bringing up Jo’s lola. But the sentiment was true. Jo’s current state wasn’t uplifting anyone, especially not herself. She was wallowing in her refusal to move forward in life, and yes, damn it, it was affecting Raissa. So no, they weren’t the best choice of words, but there was truth in them.
All of their past silly arguments would normally be made up the next day, the majority of the time with a new shiny charm on that old ratty bracelet of theirs. Raissa absentmindedly fiddles with the new woven wristlet she got the other day. The purple-blue is missing from her arm, tucked in the drawer of her dorm room.
It just hadn’t gone with her outfit today, she tells herself. Suppose you can say it hadn’t gone with the past 30-something outfits either.
The next day after the argument, Raissa was at the small airport hugging all her family goodbye while wincing at the jeep covered in banners wishing her well, once more wishing that just like at the party, Jo would burst in with her antics and take the spotlight away from her.
But she never came. The crowd of onlookers came and went, her family dwindling down to go get ready for the party at their house, since it was rare they all got together like this, until only her and her parents remained.
“Raissa, anak, maybe you should go in na…” Her dad nervously fidgeted with his watch. Never mind that she still had four hours before her flight.
“Your daughter wants to spend more time with us before she leaves and you’re complaining?", Her mom gestured to the small provincial airport. “Jusko, the airport is tiny! She’ll enter and basically be on her seat na sa plane. Don’t rush her.”
Raissa chuckled nervously, her head craning around to catch a glimpse of the familiar ponytail. She gripped her suitcase until her knuckles turned white. She wouldn’t not see her off just cause they fought, right?
No. That isn’t Jo at all. In fact, she normally would’ve gone to Raissa’s house in the middle of the night and asked her out to a midnight walk where they would’ve had a tearful and heartfelt goodbye, promising to forever remain best friends.
Sure, they couldn’t talk to each other every day, but they had exchanged emails for a reason. Jo had given Raissa her email a week prior, with a stupid username that perfectly suited her. [email protected].
Never mind that the majority of the world took emails seriously. Raissa’s mom had helped with making hers, a perfectly presentable and professional [email protected]. Then Jo came over and made Raissa another email, just for their secret correspondence, she said. She then created: [email protected]
Raissa flipped, trying to push Jo away from the keyboard, but was too late. Issabahoutot was made. Jo laughed so hard she curled up on the floor, tears streaming down her face. Raissa shrieked at her. What if her mom came home and logged in to see that? She’d kill her own daughter for sending things out with such a vulgar name before Raissa would even be able to set foot in America. What if Raissa forgot to switch emails before sending important school things to her professors or group mates?
Still, it was funny. Still, she was annoyed. If it was her cousins who were making fun of her like this, she’d probably get truly upset. But it was Jo. Her friend Jo, who always turned the centre of attention to herself when Raissa felt uncomfortable. Who never intentionally made Raissa feel any less than incredible. She knew it meant no harm, just a joke between friends, who years from now will have emails upon emails sent between _j0isthebest and issabahoutot.
Well, that's what she thought it would be like. 102 emails from [email protected], and not one reply.
Could one argument truly ruin a decade of friendship?
If it did… Well then that was all on Jo. Raissa’s done nearly everything she could have to reach out. If this was truly it, then fine. She’s got new friends here, ones who take their life seriously. Maybe a little too seriously.
But they work hard. And they push each other forward.
Raissa gives up on writing another email. If Jo wanted to, she could read the last 102 she sent. Shutting down the computer, she grabs her bags and heads out, already thinking about the never-ending to-do list in her head.
Do a load of laundry, write the script for her presentation, try and fail at convincing her useless group mates to do their part, call her parents, forget Jo, finish her physics assignment, wash the dishes, try and fail at forgetting Jo, sweep her room… And by the time that's all done, she’ll probably have to do another load of laundry. Laundry, the never-ending chore.
She sighs, swinging open the door to her dorm. It would all be better if Jo was here.
Raissa halts at the thought. Groaning, she shuts the door behind her and leans her back against it, sliding onto the floor. Try and fail at it, she truly does.