Once upon a time, there lived a couple. Alex and Belle.

Their romance bloomed from a young passion. They were more privileged than most — they travelled across the world and married within the alps of Europe.

One fateful day, Alex was hit by oncoming traffic, her blood splattering across the pavement. The ambulance came and to the hospital she went. Belle held on to what little composure she could muster as she waited outside the operating room branded as occupied. Hours stretched in that hallway, and Belle thought the personnel who came and went were evading her, but sooner did the doctor come out to seek out Alex’s next of kin. The doctors needed her family’s permission to perform a life-saving miracle.

The doctors asked Belle’s relation to Alex.

“I’m her wife.”

According to who? Not their country. Not their own families. Not their law. Not according to the consent form crumpling underneath her grip. They could love each other for all eternity, but when all is said and done — regardless of who blesses their marriage — the Philippines will never see them as each other’s spouse. 

So, why love at all?

When it puts them in harm’s way, when it risks the alienation of their family, when it would actively destroy their standing in society, when it risks becoming the subject of targeted attack, why love at all?

When it will never be the image of success, when it would never give them biological children, when they would never be a union in the eyes of the law, and never be each other’s family in an official capacity, why love at all?

When their love has to be fought for rather than be celebrated, why love at all?

Belle stared at her wife’s hand, clutched between her own. She was terrified of Alex’s touch, lifeless, unmoving, even as tears fell on her bare skin. Belle wondered if a husband would have been more decisive, more heartening or reliable. For a split second, she thought that if her wife had a legal spouse, maybe she would be more comfortable.

Her right hand traced the dextrose on Alex’s arm until she was staring up at the IV drip beside the beeping monitor. It was the first time she had raised her head. Her gaze landed on her spouse’s unconscious face, eerie in its silence. 

“Alex…” she whispered amid her tears.

“Belle…” she imagined her wife responding, as she always had. She recalled the bright face of her love, how Alex’s cheeks round and her lips taut into a small smile as she pronounces “Belle”. And at once, her doubts were dispelled. 

When benefits fall away and civic, economic, and social grace evade, all that remains is love. A raw, defiant connection, doubted instead of recognized, scorned instead of validated. When celebration no longer keeps a couple’s hands intertwined, solidarity does — for persisting against doubt and scorn.

The Philippines is taught by the powers which subdued it of a cisgender and heteronormative reality, where a union of man and woman, dictated by mere sex, is the only acceptable relation. And even after these powers depart the shores of the archipelago, the islands retain a colonial language, colonial customs, colonial laws, and colonial realities.

And so, Belle and Alex — descended from a people who saw the spectrum in genders — remain trapped across the box laid before them when they were born.

Even if Belle gives her life to her wife.

Even if Belle remains the only one Alex will ever trust. 

Even if their safety is a continued sacrifice to keep such a love alive. 

Their society has deemed their love immoral, lesser, unworthy.  

But a love which does not hinge on society’s validation embodies love more than anything else.