Duty

by sam.prudente
His was not a life of privilege, but of duty. He had his daily chores, and as the responsibility of being the
eldest of an ordinary Filipino family with four children weighed on him, how he longed to shrug it off and live
fabulously! In college, barely a year into it, the murder of a Hero and the tumultuous events after it
presaged the journey he was about to take for himself. The whole country shrugged off martial law, how
fabulous was that? Almost 30 years later, living fabulously all out, it was not so fabulous as the Hero's Son
looked more like Tyrranical Ruler day by day. Once again the will of the people stirred debate and they
whispered amongst themselves: what is it that we really want? He dug in. Pork Barrel? Oink! This was
familiar territory after all, and with his collaborators, he was prepared to engage in another good fight.
The Land of Opportunity beckoned and flight was the decidedly devilish option. Imagine starting over, a
new identity, another adventure at 45! And at the same time armed with the power to heckle politics from
the sidelines, with the exquisite requisite of so-called objective distance! But he fell in love with an ISIS
militia terrorist, long deep undercover from a sleeper cell that decided to loosen up during the Folsom Street
Fair. And though he had first waved his country's colors down the first ever gay pride march in Asia, worked
side by side with all the men who had most effectively pushed for gay rights in his country, and supported
the grassroots movements of gay rights advocates throughout the world, he couldn't even start thinking
about how he would ask his lover to espouse gay rights to his own brotherhood of fighters.
So he became all their lovers, denying knowledge of all that he picked up along the way. At first denying his
profligate nature. Until they broke him with secret codes and references to bombings, fires and airport
breaches. It came down both ears, whispered maybe, in one or the other by one or the other of them, and
stayed there echoing to nothing in particular until their very reverberations approximated nothing. Knowing
all this was shared to him because he had nothing in his nature to wantonly share information. And so he
felt like he was nothing, nothing and noone of any importance at all, whatsoever.
Nothing. Much as he had felt in all of the lonely one-night stands he had in his younger days, but not the
way he was made to feel in these current days by these boys. Not when every ISIS soldier in hiding was
bound to come to share his bed, and several of them coming every night. What would it take to give it all
up? Could he ever, this very day, deny it all? Turn around, turn back into nothing? They all said he was
special. He had so wanted to be special. And it was so easy now, especially now, especially when they
grew harder inside him. Grew bigger within him. Last longer in rhythm with him. Til they all said they would
do anything for him. How they praised him! How they would be willing to bestow privileges unlike any other!
He answered always, every time, that his was not a life of privilege, but of duty.