Day Nine: Something that happened in a mall.

“SM Aura would be good,” I wrote in my text message. “There’s a Coffee Bean at the open garden thingy.”

He asked me for a tarot reading about an hour ago. I’ve only talked to Nim on Twitter so far; that was the first time we would be meeting in person.

Like most people who never had a tarot reading, he was quite nervous. He blamed the romantic depictions of tarot in media, with the mysterious reader and the vaguely sinister, magical cards. I could probably achieve that with proper lack of lighting and a smoke machine.

I let him hold my deck (hehe) and browse through the cards so he can be at ease. He asked about each of the suits and what each character of the Majors meant.

It was a short reading, as those things go. He asked a few questions, the answers of which he noted down. I asked him to tell me six months down the road if any of what I said were true.

We were laughing through most of it, too, because he adopted what he called a “faux Catholic schoolgirl” persona while we were talking. Repeatedly, he asked me if that annoyed me. Repeatedly, I assured him that he didn’t.

I’ve had much, much worse clients.

The rest of our stay in the coffee shop, we talked about other things: common friends and acquaintances, work, gay people dating, and the local LGBT movement.

Like many educated, middle class gay men who are also interested in LGBT issues, we’re both frustrated at the seemingly lackluster progress of LGBT rights in the Philippines. Maybe because many gay people from our social class (the class that can potentially have the most influence in LGBT politics) are very uninterested.

We talked about local social media influencers and I told him of my dislike for people who think it is their life’s mission to influence others. “Like evil spirits,” he joked.

We would have stayed longer, but he needed to go home and video chat with his siblings. While I needed to go back and feed my cats.

Next time we hang out, we’ll probably be in the company of other gay Twitter friends. Twitter really has become like a virtual mall for me: A place where I spent lots of hours killing time while talking to friends. Occasionally, there will be something interesting to look at, but not too interesting for me to be buying.