To be consumed

“My heart is yours; you can even eat it.”

The line comes from the song “Pag-ibig ay Kanibalismo”, a piece that uses cannibalism as a metaphor for love so intense it consumes. It speaks of devotion, obsession, and it simply means that love can be beautifully painful. The kind of affection that slowly devours you until you no longer recognize yourself.

My own Pag-ibig ay Kanibalismo was my puppy love — a relationship formed at an age when I was learning who I was. We were too young to understand how love should work, so we held onto each other with bare hands and reckless hearts. When things started to blur, I gave more and more of myself. Just to keep us alive, while I slowly disappear in the making.

Love is really cannibalism; it will eat you alive, even if it leaves you with nothing.

I used to believe love means sacrifice. That if I loved hard enough, deeply enough, I would finally be enough for someone to stay. But some kinds of love do not heal; they hollow you out. They leave you carrying the weight of memories that continue to haunt long after the person is gone. That love still exists within me even now, tucked down in a corner of myself to remind me who I was before I let someone else turn me into something that only existed for them.

Now, I find myself rebuilding the parts of me I once handed away so easily. Learning that love should not require self-destruction to prove something. Maybe that is the cruelest thing about love: sometimes, we willingly offer our hearts to be consumed, believing that being devoured is the same as being loved.

Tell me, what is your Pag-ibig ay Kanibalismo?