Hot Pot Magazine

By Heather Ann Pulido

Yesterday, on the dental chair, I contemplated the intricacies of loving and leaving:

You are loving me (more than I thought I’d ever be loved).
But you are leaving me (and this country of dead-end jobs).
I am loving you (more than I’ve ever loved before).
But I am leaving you (because I’m sick of getting left
in the middle of nowhere, the address of all promises).

Every time I went to my dentist, I knew I was going to get hurt.
But I went anyway. I went dutifully, month after month after month.
“Soon, you’ll have a perfect smile,” she would say.
“You just need to live with this pain.”

Heather Ann Pulido is a Language and Literature graduate student at the University
of the Philippines. Her work has been published in the Philippine anthologies Ani and Kimata.