A Pilgrimage of the Haunted Minds

A long and piercing moan pervaded Juliet’s room. She liberated a sigh of satisfaction and remained seated near her windowpane. She was thinking about Romeo the entire time. He was not even aware of her existence but in her mind, they have been sharing nights and nights of endless pleasure. The emotions weren’t defined. Maybe it was love, or lust or obsession; she did not care.

Her mother knocked on the door and her rumination was interrupted. It was already time for dinner so she cleaned up after the traces of her intemperate fantasy. Phantoms of sexual or maybe emotional thirst started coming after her the moment she heard him speak. It was one of those moments in fairy tales when the prince speaks, the princess suddenly goes into trance, romantic music plays to break the silence and everything starts happening in slow motion. Since then, she would steal little moments to stare at him, admire the tiny blemishes on his cheeks, relish his clementine-ish, male scent, and savor his elusive, trembling voice.

He was not a man of many words. He would give the shortest replies to specific and limited conversations but these short-lived instances fuel her nightly routines. Sometimes, she would imagine him slowly and softly pressing the warmth of his slightly rugged skin against her; sometimes, she would just be contended with a minor tingling in her womanhood through a concoction of short voice recordings.

            She was in her senior year in college and was on the stage of completing her thesis. So that particular Wednesday, she had a scheduled meeting with her thesis adviser. She arrived at the cubicle and accidentally ran into him. It seemed as if he was on his way out in a hurry; like some sort of an argument just took place between him and her thesis adviser but since she was on a rush, she shrugged the whole thing off.

            Romeo got into an unintentional fight with Mr. Mercado that morning when an unfamiliar girl came rushing in. He was not utterly certain if he knew the girl from somewhere but he was strangely seeing her more than a few times. However, it seemed irrelevant because his thoughts were pinned onto Jaime or Mr. Mercado. He was just dropping off a poem he wrote especially for him and Jaime awkwardly rejected it for, according to him, some moral reasons.

            He dismissed the thought and reached for Jaime’s picture on his desk while simultaneously reaching for his thighs. It was as if Jaime’s face expunged the tension between them that morning and suddenly brushed a lingering eroticism in his veins. He was in love with his teacher and nobody else knew. Every night, he would be visited by his sexual thirst for his teacher and he would always feel powerless and submissive. This has been going on for somewhat a long time now. He cannot resist the thought even though he cannot come out of the closet. His parents, who have very high expectations of him being a lawyer, will absolutely disinherit him.

            Once again, lust defeated him. He slept with an overwhelming feeling of contentment. He was concealing his identity crisis with the hope that it’s just a phase he needs to conquer.  At one point, he started questioning his sanity or the entire playing-with-himself thing.

At one point, she started questioning her sanity or the entire playing-with-herself thing. Her parents are already having suspicions about her unusual behaviour. She woke up with a post-it on her desk from her mom saying she’d meet a physician after lunch to talk about the “problem”. She wanted to go but she could not; going might mean she was accepting the fact that she was ill.

Her parents ambushed her at school that same afternoon; practically dragged her to the doctor and signed a waiver to do a test without the patient’s consent. She was assured that it’ll remain confidential, though. The doctor said it would take a week for the test results to come out.

He refused to take the test. He immediately dismissed the thought that he was ill and went with the flow of his nightly activities. Seeing Jaime in the mornings remained as painful as him denying his true sexuality. Talking to the teacher would not do him any good. All he would get is a long politically correct double talk about the moral and ethical implications of teacher-student relationships.

Even if he wanted to escape the ghosts of Jaime in the middle of the night, he could not help it. It was like this pathological need to be sexually involved with a man. He did his research. It was a different or a special case, rather. He found no need to visit a doctor for proper medication. As far as he was concerned, he was not ill.

Her lab results came to mail after exactly a week. She found it first, so there’s really no need to let her parents know. The results came with medicines that, according to her doctor, would help minimize her sexual urges and would appease her sudden convulsions. She stopped reading upon seeing the words minimize and appease. So the doctors really concluded she was ill. She decided not to take the medications. As far as she was concerned, she was not ill.

It went viral, the visions went viral. It used to be one vision at a time, and then they started coming after her in series of demented and warped Romeo imageries. Most of the time, she would have seizures, hallucinations and paroxysms. She had an extreme panic attack yesterday at Mr. Mercado’s class; she felt a cold rush of blood through her veins and just an irrepressible erotic stimulation. Romeo was in the same class; maybe that was the reason for the attack. However, Romeo was not really able to make it to class that day but his smell permeated every single cell in her body. The sight of his chair, of his locker, everything made her quiver. The attack made her take one of the medicines the doctor sent her.

Romeo opted to skip class today; even if it was Jaime’s. He hardly slept that night; visions of Jaime came defiling his thought process bit by bit. Most of the time, he would have seizures, hallucinations and paroxysms. He managed to steal some of his mom’s tranquilizers to make it through the day. Then he called their family doctor for a confidential lab testing. All he should do is to wait for the results and take the tranquilizers he stole from his mom.

The results came with medicines that, according to his doctor, would help minimize his sexual urges and would appease his sudden convulsions. Taking the medicines for a while helped with the manic attacks but the nights remained the same. He would still get random, erotic visits from Jaime in the middle of the night.

He came to Jaime’s cubicle the next morning to supposedly profess his feelings towards him. Coming out clean about it might lessen the manic attacks. As expected, he and Jaime went through an extreme argument about it. Only this time, Juliet was at the door, unintentionally listening to the conversation. She could not breathe. She felt pathetic and stupid and subjugated. The very thought that she was having this sexual or maybe romantic feelings for this guy, who apparently, turned out to be attracted to the same sex, made her want to punch a wall down.

She felt betrayed. Tracing back to those nights when she thought she was in love with this man and even used him as a masturbatory prop numerous times makes her more furious than nauseous. She was mad. The mental illness destabilized her academics, her social life, everything and now, the only man that she loved will, unfortunately, never be able to reciprocate her feelings.  

Learning about Romeo’s sexuality made her take the medications religiously. She needed to find a way to make her mind and heart forget. She tried getting back to her usual routines before the incident; going to school, hanging out with friends, clubbing on Friday nights.

Mr. Mercado, out of desperation, found no other alternative but to threaten him of expulsion if he would not stop his depraved actions. In spite of this, he still refused to give it up and so Mr. Mercado made a compromise. He would not tell his parents about his behaviour and he would never bother him again. Romeo knew the consequences of facing the wrath of his parents so he conceded. It was mortifying more than painful. Not fighting for his feelings and giving in to threat made him feel weak and gutless.

Romeo decided to take the medicines and undergo further lab tests. As of the moment, this was the only thing that would prove him to be a brave man. The medicines might take his mind off the circumstance. He would still see the weird girl from his class around campus; less creepy than before. He would catch her staring at him sometimes but she would look the other way.

It has been three months since Juliet started with the medication. She would still see Romeo around campus; she would stare at him once in a while but would eventually look the other way when he would catch her. She is feeling all better now. The medications make her a bit restless, though and they, little by little, exterminate the old, pathetic Juliet she had been.

Sometimes, Romeo would still come in the middle of the night, thieving the new Juliet of little romantic moments but the new Juliet would resolutely refuse.

 -end-