Slow-dancing in a burning room

The memory of prom has become this new-world ephemeral. You become all about it for a moment, then sooner or later, the details escape.

So prom’s come and gone.How’d your date go? Did you subject yourself to the balls-to-the-wall humiliation of issuing a prom-posal? Or the excruciating wait of being asked? If you haven’t, let me do you a service by volunteering my wall mirror to help you realize that the only person you needed to be on a date with, besides maybe your close group of friends, single or taken, is yourself — the man or woman staring right back at you from said reflective surface. No, seriously. It saves you all the financial and existential hassle later on (not to be confused with the 20-something existential hustle).

If there is a loss of fuel (or hope) in my tone, it is no way reflective of my personal prom experience. I happen to have been asked by several girls to prom, to which I humbly obliged (no matter the incarcerating expenses of buying a corsage, gas, and a cocktail or two for the after-party). I also happen to have asked someone I believe I fancied to my junior prom. Lari, her name was. We remain acquaintances to this day, with sightings maybe once every four years.

“Fancy seeing you here!” I tell her a decade later, bumping into her at a Makati CBD mall. She looked different. The same but different. I looked different, too. More importantly, I was different. She got in touch with me a few years back to ask for help in hosting some foreigners here for some political convention in Manila. Since my parents are pretty private individuals though very much political, our dealings didn’t go beyond the standard niceties. Instead, we made small talk — the kind whose length and brevity could rival Kim Kardashian’s hemline. “What are you doing now? Let’s plan a get-together soon!”

As we disappeared in opposite directions, her into the escalator and myself into Mango, my thoughts flurried. “I took this girl to prom once. I gave her a night to remember. At least, I thought I did. Sh*t, I even had a photo to prove it.” Alas, the photo was lost, along with most of my high school past. I realized then that, a) prom, like many other moments in our history, is but one of many where everything matters at the friggin’ moment and then disappears into the realm of obscurity — into the strong and very potent 20-something realm of “who the f*ck cares?”

I also realized that, b) in matters of prescience and where we find ourselves a decade later (in my case, going through the racks of Mango), prom is actually just another form of transaction (“I take you, I thank you, goodbye”), dictated by mores and pop culture’s invisible hand. Otherwise, it’s c) your mother saying, “Do you have a date yet? I can set you up with Tita (insert name here)’s daughter. I can ask her for you also if you want.” True story for someone I was related to. 

Prom, in fact, has become a precursor to everything personal yet impersonal that happens in the real world — that is, transaction, a false sense of intimacy (which is challenged in this gray area of a modern civilization) and the fleeting human experience at the crossroads of a “defining moment.” I mean, have you asked anyone to prom yet? Wasn’t it quite harrowing? The feeling of several bad dates in replay, done often enough that it becomes as excruciating (and cyclical) as the act of shitting. In prom’s case, it’s but one of many “rites of passage,” like circumcision, and then there’s college, the real world, then the rest of your life, where the memory of prom gets smaller and smaller than the “big deal” it supposedly is.

Like most transactions in the modern age, prom is about extolling some form of emotional capital to achieve a certain end — to ask someone to be your date, go through the totemic mise en scène of prom-posals and other related rituals (i.e., putting on the corsage, the slow dance), and have the night you’ll “never” forget. Alas, in these modern times, not to mention the swiftness with which our minds gravitate from one thing to another, it is a night you’ll actually soon forget. Heck, I hardly remember the details of my own prom. And suddenly, prom is a million miles away … unless you went with Carrie. In that case, you’d be dead.

The transactional property of prom, in fact, has made it next to impossible to come to any sort of arraignment with the hallways of history — a fleeting moment we can supposedly cling to for the ages. In fact, beyond some form of awareness of being asked to several proms, and getting to ask a girl I once fancied to prom, I have vague recollections of what actually happened (i.e., the venue, our small talk in the car, our conversations at the dinner table, the after-party), other than the diminishing returns that reveal only the shell of an experience.

I must have gotten her a corsage, too, right? Flash forward to Mango. “Miss, I’ll pay by card — yung three-month, zero-percent installment.” We must have slow-danced to some Lisa Loeb or Sugarfree song, right? “Manong, pa-off ng radyo. Naiingayan ako. (Driver, turn off the radio. It’s too loud).” And did I really stare at my watch at some point because I wasn’t having it? Oh, wait, that was another prom. “Manong, pakibilisan. Late na ako! (Driver, hurry up. I’m running late!)”

“Defining moments” supposedly possess a degree of gravitas in our history. Yet the memory of prom, to me, has become this sort of new-world ephemeral. You become all about it for a moment, then sooner or later, the details escape — the feelings that may have made it all the rage, ultimately lost. Ten years later, all you feel is how much you’ve aged and how different you’ve become. After all, prom was always just another means to a certain end. And while the means were certainly totemic, and gruesome to an extent, the end is something you find yourself questioning or regretting at wit’s end. Corsages and coming-of-age, was prom really worth it?

Prom season’s up. Now let’s all move on.