three at three a.m.

at the unholiest of hours, i received a text message from louie transcribable as "sir, andito ngayon si nico, kumusta raw kayo...bantay kami rito," referring to their dimsum-and-congee kiosk. he added that "hanggang umaga kami rito" and "miss ka na raw ni nico." naturally, i got excited like a leech sprinkled with salt. why not, when two of my currently favorite humans were together? even if i had long abandoned my three o'clock habit, i knew i had to go. also, i repressed entertaining the idea of a troika, triad, or any other malicious term that begins with letter t or that alludes to number 3. it didn't help that the song "bizarre love triangle" still played sinisterly on my mind while the cab i hailed blared with the outlandish news that australian floods flushed snakes and crocodiles out of hiding and into the streets.
arriving there, i almost got disheartened when i saw louie's big brother leo teaching his friends what seemed to me capoeira moves (which, in fact, were arnis actions taught by their eldest brother). where's louie? turned out that he was with nico, concealed by the burger stand nearby. a lengthy talk among us, from schooling to films to the cockroach that louie recently gifted me with, followed up until the earliest rays of sunshine dizon signaled the new morning.
did being with louie and nico make me happy? yes, references to ara mina's two timer be damned. they're friends, alright, but they're straight too, so their romantic rivalry is out of the question, mind you, kim chiu. swear to michel foucault's grave, galema will never go bold enough to lose the budding (no pun intended) friendship among the three of us.
then again, i am not young anymore to play coy about who between them is really dearer to me. it seems that fate acts like an obnoxious prankster yet again by sending nico out of my immediate environment and making louie happen along. i mean, when nico and his housemates were driven by legal circumstances to find a new house far from where i regularly see him, here came louie whose sister took over the vacated slot of the pepperly (read:mute) girl's food cart fronting the mutineers' secret meeting place. the more visible one suits my type and we get along well so in the interest of fairness, my texts to nico dwindled lest i be the actual epitome of the virgin/vamp binary i warn my class about. being both isabelans and schoolmates, the two are not unlikely to know each other (indeed they are, when louie asked me one time if there's something between me and his friend. i almost crashed from my kiosk seat). carmi martin does not let two timers go unpunished, right? anyway, the pictures below show the apples of my left and right eyes: