Splice And Dice Feed

Zero Hour

2023-05-31T15:01:00.001+08:00

Sadness is nothing to be trifled with. It offers no comic relief, no consolation, for humor does not grow where the seeds of sorrow are planted. Nor does sadness diminish when called out, as though grief is a sin that must be exposed under the sun, with the anticipation that it will, with little effort, disappear. No, it is not what happens to sadness, but it is what happens to people who, with no one left to turn to, are left with no choice but to vanish.

*** *** ***

I sprawl myself on the bed, trying to think about nothing, the faint afternoon sunlight barging against the rain before sweeping into the room as if begging my body to whisk itself up and break the monotony of the day. I pause and stare at the cats, a few huddled in a corner of the room, others on the floor, most of them sleeping gently with their furry bodies brushing against my chest. Wherever their dreams have taken flight, I may never find out. But out of all the things that I know to be true, do they ever dream about me too?

Like her. I think about her all the time, wondering about the many things I wish I could know, but could only siphon out whatever it is that I am allowed to discover. Her sleep is a guarded sanctuary, a fortress that walls itself from the rest of the wakeful world, and in that temporary peace where her eyes close themselves so that nothing can get in the way of a rest too short to be wasted, her world must be completely different, one where the invitation to enter comes only once.

Does she ever dream about me too? Because I do. Not that she should. It’s a question fished out of curiosity, and each time I cast the net far and wide, all in the hopes that I might find the answer, for it is in dreams where repressed desires take shape. Or at least that’s what Freud says in his psychoanalysis as far back as the 1890s, and it is probably not entirely wrong.

*** *** ***

Some people will start to shy away from seeking clarity, from asking questions, for constant fear of having the tables turned against them, their backs firm against the wall, of being questioned why they even ask, of being chastised, of bearing the brunt of unnecessary actions done unto them as if the raging fire is worth the burn, of being handed guilt to their conscience instead of being given tender reassurance, of being met with loaded silence as if everything has been said in the nothingness that soon follows, as though the blind is to assume what one cannot read, eclipsing the light in pursuit of darkness, or of placing conclusions well before the end of the sentence, the narrative turning accusatory, if not derogatory in the blink of an eye, when all they ever wanted was to know, because often it takes a lifetime to learn someone. A simple yes, or a simple no, would have sufficed for the time being.

But some things are belabored, stretched as far as the imagination will allow, fault being found where there is none. The gravity of this can hardly be scaled, and it takes unbridled patience to bear the weight it heaps on the heart, one that can never be demanded, only freely given, as it is the nature of true forbearance. These people, they carry their crosses no one will ever see, for they live through it as penance for the anxieties that they have been nursing long before. Their sense of insufficiency sustains that which slowly kills them.

And then the days go by, months soon after. To stir nothing, complacency settles in. No questions are ever asked. No responses are taken because none is given. The tides turn countless, and the seasons shift, until the time comes when, on the brink of despair and the ultimatum of where things stand, the people who have muffled their questions out of fear will find themselves on the verge of losing the one they love, wondering what happened, only to be met with the one act that they earnestly, ever so dearly, treated with much precariousness, knowing that it destroys as much as it saves:

If only they asked.

***

The most salient battles in life are won neither by fist nor by fire. This wisdom comes with age, like a blade that sharpens the more it brushes itself against steel. We are born as creatures of emotions, and it is in the stillness of things, like an ocean in the full absence of the waves, where the struggle glares with impunity, even feeds on it. That is why the heart is a war ground; it screams the loudest when it is muffled. It injures the most when it does nothing. But up to what point the heart wages this silence is a question most often left unanswered in the interim, for it is nothing less than a protracted war that demands the kind of madness that flirts with danger, and by the time the heart does speak, the walls are yet to grow ears.

And so, for those who have lost so much, anxieties grip their heart by the day. Fear is the language that has become native to their tongue, every word dragging their heart along the way, which is why those who have yet to lose the ones they genuinely love, slipping like water on their fingers, have yet to learn the vernacular. As though born out of sheer necessity, those at the cusps of solitude have come to terms with the simple truth that whatever they have, they can lose. And so they live by the hours, not wasting any, spending as much time as they can with the people they hold dear, because nothing in life is certain, especially in the absence of consistent assurance in places where it should thrive.

***

I stare at the door, expecting a knock that will never come. My cats are with me, and everything should be fine, except that it is not. The wind pummels the roof, shaking everything beneath it for a moment, a reminder that there was a distant storm that left without ever truly arriving. I stand from the bed, restless from the sleep that never was, my head dizzy, ready to fall off from my neck with the slightest of tug, almost but not quite, like a stone teetering on the edge of a cliff, my wakefulness on the brink of fizzling out, as if my spirit is ready to part ways with my body. I walk to the door, open it slightly, and peer at the outside world — nothing more than a busy intersection of small alleys nesting foot traffic day in and out. I leave a heavy sigh trailing the air, then prepare for work six hours ahead of time.

In Absentia, Or If I Lose You

2022-12-14T07:07:00.002+08:00

In the event that I may be missing, please don’t look for me, for by then I might have rinsed myself from all grief, finding myself awash with enough courage to be swept aside by fate so completely, drifting wherever the wind blows in my weightlessness. There will be no more room left for weeping, and my eyes would have barely anything left to give because I have dried them up for all the right people from a past I have not known for quite a while, one that I wish I will no longer remember. When the day comes when it will be your turn to squeeze the last drop, I will offer you the last apology my lips can offer, because if I could I would have saved all of my sorrow just for this day, but for the last time I will have failed you because I will not be prepared for this. No one can ever be ready for their biggest heartbreak. And though I will have already emptied myself, having nothing more left to give, my emptiness will be such an embarrassment, flailing my conscience in front of you like a penance far too late, so please don’t look for me because to you and for you I have given my all.

You will not find me, probably not in the body that you will discover off coast, floating after the storm like a misplaced reminder, biding its unholy time until it is found by strangers who will never know my name, for this body, the very same one that pressed itself against yours in search of warmth on countless early mornings when the world was cold and our hearts more so, has become nothing more than a shell of the past, a breath short of the future it could have had, for life without you is no life at all, like an ocean thirsty for water: devoid of depth, exposed in its emptiness, barren. I have rented this body for years on end, and the day will come when I will have to return it in its sorry state, crushed by expectations falling short, collapsing from their own weight as swift as your departure.

As I choke in my melancholy like stones racing down my throat, you will no longer hear from me, and my silence will be forever yours to own. On that day and the ones to follow, treasure it like a secret because you will carry it with you until the end, like a child never to be born, the same way that I carry yours with me in nowhere land. Where it is, I wish I could say, because you were once every north and east and west and south that I took, navigating life with the steady assurance that you are where I will be, but the day I lose you will be the day I lose every sense of direction. I can go anywhere but it will be as if I have only left, never truly arriving, a perpetual solitary journey with no word to keep me company, no voice to tell me I’m finally home.

You will not find me in the streets where I used to seek refuge from the cruel life that once held this flesh hostage. These concrete arteries that gut the city, witness to a thousand stories including mine, seeping with the kind of inanimate forgiveness that only the streets could give, they are probably the only friends I have ever known but have abandoned me all the same at the final moment, so please don’t look for me there. No one, even nothing, stays forever. This is probably the only gospel truth I will tuck in my heart, retrieving it like a card kept in my pocket whenever things get too comfortable so that I may never again mistake complacency for assurance, for the same reason that a street cannot go by different names: we get lost when we do not know where we stand.

I will rest under the carpet of stars, my back on moist grass as I lay humbled by the eternal cosmos, my eyes folding from the weight of sadness, making them surrender and close after having acquainted themselves with happiness from years of tender innocence, this time perhaps finding comfort in perpetual night, never to wish for the sun again as though there is nothing left to see. But darkness can be beautiful. It relies on nothing but absence, finding sufficiency in whatever it lacks, making itself known by the shadows it casts far and wide. Please don’t search for me even if we continue to share the same evening sky above our heads, for it is enough that the darkness that separates us is the same one that binds us. We will both find comfort in what we cannot see, because time and again what we do not know will not make us cry.

Please don’t hope for my return, for I have scraped my heart on solid ground on summer nights too many to count, standing in the line of fire with a misguided sense of courage, wielding my heart like a pistol only to be made its first attrition. Because you will be the one to leave, the heaviest of chests will be mine to endure. I will walk away, too, but know that with each stride my heart will sink from its weight and I will have to drag them by my feet once they reach the ground. The distance between where we will make our final stand, the very last conversation we will ever have in our short lives, and where I intend to go will be the longest exit I will ever take. It might never end.

The day I lose you will be the day I will have the longest sleep, one that you have wished for me to take since the day we first talked. It will be the only consolation I will ever have, so please don’t look for me.

Pagbigyan

2022-11-23T09:18:00.001+08:00

11/21/2022 | Quezon City

A Heart In Search of A Home

2022-11-04T15:22:00.001+08:00

The world does not keel over on its own – this I have learned with kindness undeserved yet given nonetheless. For this, the gratitude that brims from my heart spills into my wakefulness the way water from a river would crawl the miles in desperate search of the calm it yearns for, finding refuge in the depths of the ocean it seeks to dive into: unseen, thriving in partial silence, in full surrender to the currents of life, but unhesitant to flow where the tide ebbs. I sink on the bed, her hands creating the gentle undertow that hoists my sanity back to where it belongs. I grip them with no intention of letting go, although at times fear would cradle my heart, my fingers trembling ever so slightly, because one day this too could be over, waking up to find nothing more than the same hands that were once so full but now having become nothing more than an empty shell. Yet if everything was to fold and fall over time and again, I would have held on, without reluctance, to the one person who moves my world, for life would have still been the same even if everything else has changed. In her, I found a glimpse of permanence despite the uncertainties that hound my steps like relentless shadows.

She says her hands can move things, but perhaps she forgets during days of little to no sleep that it is her willingness that drives one to turn the world on its head when life seems to drift farther than it should. There is a kind of warmth in her touch that nurtures things into their proper place and time, retrieving what might have been misplaced because these days no one else seems to get things right, and in a world full of sin her touch feels like it is the only one left that is divine, though truth be told she is far from perfect. But I have never desired perfection, let alone for the one I love. All I ever wanted was someone who stands tall even if the world makes her feel small. She does so with what others might mistake for as relative ease, though I know that, deep within, she, too, has to summon all the strength she could muster just to anchor herself and weather every storm. This she does with grace. She is five feet and six inches, her stature imposing itself off the ground with the kind of humility that does not gesture itself into view just to make itself known, for it has always been there, having seen many prayers, ours notwithstanding, others to reappear in redundancy, floating momentarily before dropping on the earth like a moth without wings, and what moves everything in my life at this point may just as well be the same hands that I hold.

But even if it were not for those same hands, even if they do not possess the same firmness in which they hold mine, I would have loved her all the same, because I have learned that hope is as persistent as the rain that knocks on the roof on sullen days, and this same hope I would have nurtured even when all that is left is the raging sun leaving everything dry in its wake, because life is short and sometimes all we need is a little rain to get by.

They say she is young, but her age does not compromise the ways in which she leaves no stone left unturned. Her resolve in committing to whatever she has on her plate, though not always the type where food is involved, is quite similar to what water does to fire: it seeks to put out what is getting in the way by diving straight into the heat of things. This she does with measured eagerness despite the trepidation that others may find as ample reason to pause, for she does things without misguided confidence, but rather one with the humble certainty that some things in life are at least worth the try.

There are times, too, when her body can barely shoulder the weight of her world and her knees can only hold themselves together so much, and by then she would find herself at the mercy of decisions that had to be made one way or the other. At times when her hands become full, she recedes into the comfort of her solitary space, confining herself to these little pockets of air where she could breathe and regain her composure. By then, she would carry herself without flinching when that is what the world demands from her, because she has learned that what has been given can be taken away without warning, often too early and rarely too late, so she must carry on. And if I could help her – if only I could and if she would only let me – then maybe we would have finally understood that life without complications stirs people into complacency, truncating whatever it is that they have tried to build into nothing more than a memory best forgotten. The art of surrender is painfully beautiful, but I would rather be given the ugly side of life if it meant having the kind of acceptance that is nowhere less than complete.

“You are not for the weak,” she said one day not too long ago. For someone who is primed to move a world as big and as heavy as this heart whenever I have my back against the wall, she has become the home my heart has been searching for.

Perhaps A True Story, Among Other Things

2022-09-25T07:50:00.003+08:00

She says I am her favorite, and if this is a true story, I guess I am more like her favorite secret, free to roam as far out as this blanket will allow, but rarely traversing its edges because that is where revelations begin and where troubles rear their ugly head. I tuck myself in like a child, fearing whatever it is that will wrest away from my hands what little hope I cling to. I cannot betray the light for I live where the shadows grow cold and where people's hearts turn even colder the longer they linger away from the open space. I battle this approaching tundra everyday with the kind of fading warmth that only people like me possess. Or where I am without shackles, I tread wherever my feet plant themselves. Who I am before friends and strangers could well be a shrouded pedestrian embracing this invisibility cloak with such notoriety as though the fullness of my life finds both comfort and solace in the stealth it offers. I hide in plain sight because people can hardly smell what reeks right under their nose. This secret is a camouflage I take with me wherever I go, much as it drags me wherever it pleases.

I was told before that secrets assure nothing but the sureness of not knowing your rightful place in the universe: neither here nor there, neither a yes nor a no, just forever wedged between the convenience of a denial and the sweeping certainty of an affirmation. Life will be in limbo, and everything else can be shrugged off by way of a nervous laugh, the air pushing out of my lungs carrying the trepidation born on the day I first met her, which I remember all too clearly. And although the precipice is where I am forced to thread my way, I yearn for the day when the score will be settled, my knees on the ground, my life in complete surrender, because I have finally won her over, or I have lost her entirely. The stakes are high, the risks more so, and in the language of secrets there is some grain of wisdom to be had: ignorance is bliss. Not knowing your rightful place in the universe is what allows the secret to thrive, the way air is to lungs.

There are glimmers of hope, like stray objects flashing across the sky, burning themselves in the night before they find rest in the nothingness of space. "I can make time for that," she said one day. I had to pick up my jaw from the floor. For the first time in a very long time I suddenly felt important in someone's life. I have been used to being clocked in at the very end of the day's list, like the last item on the grocery shelf patiently waiting amidst the prospect of being discarded instead. It took a while for what she said to sink into my brain, wrap around my senses, before settling in my heart. You see, none of us can make time, but it was an impossibility she was willing to make possible even if she still had a long day ahead of her, because the kind of magic that she does is neither witchcraft nor sorcery, contrary to what others have said about her. It is simply called willingness, and it is probably the most beautiful damn thing in the world.

But either way, I hold her hands tight whenever I can, wherever she will let me, because some other time in the future she will have to let go, her conviction pressed with sheer finality that there is no undoing what is about to come, her resolve as firm as her predilection in life. That day I will have finally understood that some secrets can never be made permanent, that something as obscure as what we had might have even been next to never in the first place. She will let go, taking with her our secret, never to see daylight again as if it never happened precisely because no one else knew. In its wake, a closure that will never be had, because in the eyes of others it was never us.

Then one day in my life the sun will carve out the hole where I dwell and expose my body that has been in a fetal posture for so long it might as well have the shape of forgiveness long overdue, for I have given apologies far too many to count, even for the ones that have never been my fault, because I have learned that there is too much pride to go around these days that if one could only feed on it no one would ever go hungry again. So I lower myself in the hopes that others will not have to look up to me, because I have failed many times in my pursuit of the impossible, her being the latest.

But until that day, perhaps this is a true story, perhaps not. That day I will wake up in the morning, eyes trying to ward off the sunlight, or the moonlight in the dead of the night, in full acceptance that one or the other is true.

Minsang Talambuhay ng Bawat Isa

2022-08-28T10:04:00.004+08:00

Hindi nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Hindi magkakilala.

Nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Hindi magkakilala.

Nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Nagkikita. Nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Hindi nagkikita. Nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Hindi nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Hindi nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Hindi na magkakilala.

Two Things

2022-08-25T11:21:00.000+08:00

I miss my younger days when I would bike all day, pedal my way throughout our small town and the edge of it, sometimes beyond, from sunrise until sunset, my mother the least bit worried for she knew what I was doing on a weekend, on some days returning home with bruises on my arms and blood on my shirt but a smile on my muddy face nonetheless even after an accident, a time long gone when a rock on the dirt road I am speeding through is the only one that would make me fall so hard, and a flat tire is the sole thing in the universe that would break my heart. God I miss those days.

Always And Never: A Study of You

2022-08-17T17:02:00.001+08:00

On weekday afternoons, you are the first to breach my wakefulness, because in my dreams you have always eluded me; you never stayed. You are gone the moment I turn elsewhere, for which I would fault myself without fail. Eyes shut or open, the difference is the same — you are nowhere. And as a gesture to compensate for losing you too fast and too soon, I would close my eyes in the hopes of finding you, feigning sleep if I must, the bed becoming my raft to coast the turbulent waters where you might be, my sudden desolation blowing frail wind to push my sail forward by the inch. Adrift in this dreamland, I chase you with my heart in my hand, not knowing exactly what to do with it, though the weight it carries is enough to anchor me for the rest of my days should I cast it to the open waters. And yet I continue to have my eyes fixed on this temporary blindness for here in this dream there is nothing and no one to see.

But all this would be in vain, for then I would be dreaming another dream where faceless people crowd in silence, where I would call out your name but yours would struggle to crawl out of my lips pressed tight, three letters seeking both freedom and refuge in the open space, always, but never to succeed. For the rest of my dream they would just hang there, like a promise unfulfilled still waiting at the edge of a precipice.

"They're just dreams. You have me in reality."

The world is a special place but only because she is there. Take her out of the picture and you could just as well be living in another planet. Being where she is may look like a difficult place to be in, but that is what makes it worth the while, warts and all.

How does it feel then?

Like this: it feels like having to carve a path through a dense forest using only a spoon, or having to pluck massive trees off the earth with nothing but tweezers on hand. It feels like having to elbow your way through a horde with your hands tied, and God knows how the rope digs deep into your skin, but you press on, because that is where men are born.

That is also where they die.

It, too, feels like being stuck in the middle of a dessert with only a drop of water in the bucket to quench the thirst of everyone else, but you stand your ground despite the sand shifting quickly beneath your feet, scorching as it is for being exposed to the sun for far too long. You hold the line because the quicksand will be there to give you that sinking feeling, for better if not for worse, and before you know it you are burried halfway through — head underneath or otherwise, it does not matter — but you stay because there is nothing else you can do. This is the choice you made, and so you must endure the consequences.

That is how impossibly beautiful she is, and how you are way behind the line. There is a popular term for it.

Queueing.

One day you think she has always been there. The next day you find out she probably never was. This is, perhaps, the reality where you have her, which is, really, just another dream.

The Heart-Shaped City and the Girl Who Never Falls in Love

2022-08-14T03:46:00.000+08:00

One tells of how the place was abundant with a kind of tree called luyong, now more commonly known as anahaw (Saribus rotundifolius) from which canes and furniture were made. - Wikipedia

To have that singular shot of winning her over, you will have to cross her territory and play her game, one where she commands full dominion, and where the rules bend to her will. One false move is fatal. Either be cautious or be reckless. You cannot draw both cards because neither does she, for she can strictly be as calculating and as precise in the ways in which she conducts herself, or she can only be as heedless and as playful in the manner in which she will make you move. Some lines she does not cross, completely cutting herself off the very moment the ogre rears its ugly head, figuratively if not literally. Other ones she simply bulldozes her way through as if there is nothing and no one standing in her way if only to kill time, because in a land where she is both king and queen, the only sovereign in the heart-shaped city who wields all the power that will ever be, falling in love is hardly her option.

And no one can demand for her time just as well. It is something that others will need to earn, because in the abundance of what she has to offer, no one can ever come close to claiming all of her. You only get what she is willing to give: all of her body but never her heart and soul, or all of her heart and soul but only a fraction of her body. And then there are the men she has dated at a previous juncture in her life, men who can only mull over in their recollection being surrounded by her presence both body and soul, but not having any of it at the end of the day, like being marooned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: all this water but none to drink. They remain restless long after the tide has washed their senses over, the undertow dragging their feet so constantly back to the depths of her, and they succumb just as easily, even willingly, because she is a current too strong to swim against, and you will have to drown first long before she will start to fall in love, or even before she begins considering the idea.

As to why she does not fall in love, the reasons may be few and far between, but all the same they could be just as plenty. All the Einsteins in the world can only stitch their guesses together and still find themselves in a mental hemorrhage. Perhaps she does not want to miss the part where you tell her you are home after you have spent a few hours together, or the part where you tell her good morning after waking up, or good night just before sleeping, because time is at her beck and call and you are not the one to control it for her. She can make your sun set or rise as she pleases, in its stead the moon on a clear evening, or a slew of clouds rolling in on a random hour. And so she does not fall in love. Not in summer. Not in any given hour.

Perhaps she has already married herself to the idea with no chance of divorce that she can never be as good as the partner that the men she has went out with has imagined her to be, and in her mind is the outright refusal to live according to the standards they want to shove down her throat. After all, such is not the way of kings and queens, the ones who issue the laws that the serfs will have to abide by, not the other way around. She probably thinks, too, that she is not girlfriend material, although one can only wonder what exactly they are supposed to be made of and to what extent, certainly not some fancy cosmic stardust raining from the sky, or some flower blossoming from the earth with utter haste so that it can relish in the light. Some people say that those who do not fall in love are made of stern stuff, and it is maybe for the same reason why she could never figure herself as being romantically involved with anyone, though time and again she might drop a line or two saying things to the contrary: that she cries easily, a softie through and through.

Maybe she thinks that even when the days get cold and the nights turn lonely, she needs no help. She is fine and she can get by with life. She is her own company, her own fire. And there is truth to it. She has been at peace with her solitude, and her skin is the only blanket she has needed to keep her warm in a world where people can be cold even while their lives burn away. Or maybe she says her flag is redder than the crimson she wears on her lips you can spot it from afar, the danger it invites being far too tempting to ignore when all your scopes are zeroed in on where she is, and who she is about to become, her banner bright as the blood that will boil in your veins before you completely lose them by the drop. She believes no one, owes nobody any explanation, because truth is whatever it is that she decides to qualify as one, and she shapes everything so that they may fit the course of her life in a city that, although shaped like a heart, is not the one to make her fall in love.

How I Write What I Write

2022-08-07T04:01:00.005+08:00

"I want to see you write," she said.

"It's a solitary affair; I will bore you just by watching me," I replied.

"It doesn't matter."

I usually begin with a random word, sometimes a calculated phrase, oftentimes just a silly thought teetering between sanity and insanity, until it blossoms into a sentence — a life sentence mostly — because my faulty hands were given both a gift and a curse called prose, which I have to endure daily like a pile of shit trying to force its way out of my ass when the toilet is so damn near. It is a gift, because where I start to push pen on paper, or hack away at a keypad, is also where the magic begins, the kind that gets you baked without having to snort anything illegal — through your nose or elsewhere is completely your call — taking you to heights unimaginable it's almost like you're going places without having to catapult yourself from a trebuchet. The sky's the langit, as they say. Strangely enough, one can also say that writing is its own forbidden substance that has previously sent writers to nowhere other than jail only to be shot from behind if history is to remind us anything, but that's another story best told by Jose Rizal from his grave.

Alas, by the same token, this gift is also its own curse, because where the magic ends is where the nightmares creep in long before I could finish what I write. If it's about something sad — and for the love of crackers I rarely write about happy ones – the temptation to either downgrade everything into prosaic drivel, or leave it to gather dust as a draft left untouched over the course of a year or two, can be overwhelming. It is my escape from my escape, as temporary and unstable as the shifting seasons, for it will reel me back in sooner than later because in my freedom I am never truly free from anything. Or anyone. I have been writing for so many years and yet I still have to get myself fully desensitized from the emotional doom and gloom that I deftly hide, try as I might, under the cloak of fiction, because the longer I stretch the boundaries the more it consumes me, and the more I become one with what I write the more I reveal myself.

Which, of course, defeats the whole purpose of writing fiction.

"Are you really sure you want to see me write?"

"Yes."

"Alright then."

Someone from long ago said that I have a distinct way with my words, probably beyond playful, dressing everything with such pageantry despite the ambiguousness, to the point that clarity is not something you will want to demand from me. I thought Baby when I write, vagueness is my cup of tea, and I drink it everyday like a thirsty sonofabitch. And if I can make you wet by virtue of this ambivalence I possess, then allow me to speak in tongues forever. But that was just my imagination. Truth be told, the day I become clear may just as well be the day I stop writing altogether. I confided that, quite on the contrary, words are the ones that have their way with me. And so, how I write what I write depends on whether the words conceived in my mind will make me ballistic, or ecstatic, perhaps depressed, sometimes thoroughly unaffected, some other times fully possessed. If you see me sitting by the corner, staring at the wall while splitting hairs, mumbling gibberish, then you have me at my perfect form, about to give birth to a novel.

Which reminds me. Years back, when I was in the midst of attempting to complete the drudgery of writing a novel – which to this very day remains stillborn, my room back in the province its womb – I remember someone telling me that she feels like she is talking to the dead national hero whenever I reply to her. I thought Very well then, Josephine Bracken, my dear judge jury and executioner, touch me not, this filibuster, but should I turn my back now and wait for the bullets to rip through my heart just so that we can call it a day? I wasn't particularly amused with the comparison, because I knew I was far from the caliber of the guy who used to hide under the names Laong Laan and Dimasalang, he who already published two major novels at my age, while I struggled like a slug crawling uphill to even finish just one draft. That was the last time I talked to her. But I figured maybe she had a point without her being fully aware of it. Maybe I needed to be as seditious, treacherous, and rebellious as I could be so that I can finally understand how to write what I write, even if it meant I had to lay my neck on the line, if not the entire corpus of my existence.

"Splice, on cue: I'm a fan, not a muse."

"You are both."

What A Love Song Is Not

2022-08-02T07:16:00.002+08:00

Filed under fiction, in the hopes that all this will never happen, if it hasn't just yet.

A love song is not something you will want to remember as you revisit this page five years or maybe decades into the future, which will be an excursion into a territory once so familiar you could stare it in the face without flinching, because here is a place where only your brave and daring self is willing to venture, confusing fact for fiction, and so is the other way around. But you tell yourself, "That was then," to which you respond, "Perhaps," because you will barely recognize that there was a time in your life when you were someone a little different, still borderline timid, heart precarious at times, but far more deliberate with your intentions, although this you will have to debate with yourself time and again, for which a resolution you shall barely reach. You can't even tell what a love song is not, but you will still belabor the point. And for good measure.

Maybe a love song is something that you will want to forget, to squeeze out of the pulp of your sanity, leaving you stale as a proper consequence, a price that must be paid at the cost of your memory of the girl floating away with such finality that the point of no return is all that will ever be. Beyond that, you will never go back, and so will she. All the rules of goodbye will have to be obeyed, because at least for once you were happy, and that is more than what life will allow.

Time is of minor consequence, because a love song is not what you hear on the radio first thing in the morning before you sleep, or late in the evening after you wakeup. It's the one that plays at the back of your mind whenever you remember her, without warning, and at any given hour, like the time many years from now when you will recall seeing her waiting for you for the very first time, seated calmly, her dress black as the night, your knees melting like butter with each step you take towards her, fingers fidgety, knowing fully well that someone so beautiful inside and out you do not deserve, not in this lifetime or the next, because her heart is not one to be trifled with, not even to be looked after, for she has learned not to give it away without mounting the strongest resistance, whether by force or by old age, for which she might lose her teeth first before she will ever lose her heart, herself being way ahead of her age precisely because time is on her side.

And so that night you approach her, and as you do there is a tune playing at the back of your mind, although you know that it is what a love song should not be. Many years from now you will try to reach into this past juncture in your life, your hands barely holding themselves together, the song you can barely remember as you struggle to give it its rightful place in your recollection, but that same night, the one in your reverie, will hold a space so special in your memory you can hardly replace it. You are forgetful, but that evening you will never forget, her embrace most of all, which came all too sudden, brief as it was, before both of you parted ways and you went home. You walked the short distance, and it felt as though you had to anchor your feet on the ground lest you become airborne, your heart ballooning with what Milan Kundera properly called as the unbearable lightness of being.

Then again, a love song is not the one that played over the car's stereo that same night when you were on your way home, thinking how in the world you ever found someone like her, which should have been next to impossible, because she likes to play hide and seek if only to test you of how conscious you are of her world, of what she allows others to see, and those that she decides to leave out, stored somewhere only she knows until someone else finds out, kept almost like a closely guarded secret but not quite, which is why she says she has nothing to hide, especially from you, an observer, almost an intruder, that she must likewise observe, because she blips in and out. One moment she is there, the next moment she is not, and for this she had you on your toes, and still has, to which you must perpetually take caution because you have everything on the line. But you have been reckless since day one, and you soldier on with all the bullets you can fire. In the end, you have always known that there can only be one casualty, and between the two of you it will not be her.

You will be as dead as an exploded ventricle, death by heart shot, by which time you are still yet to figure out what a love song is not.

The Boy and the Weather Called La Niña: An Episode of Body Language

2022-07-30T11:05:00.002+08:00

It rained today just like the days before, and the clouds washed him over, his shirt clinging to his body, the fortress of the language he has only truly ever known, never the words that he writes that can only reach not quite as far no matter how hard he stretches his imagination, contrary to what people would make him believe. He is not a poet, never has been. He is just drenched in rain, his body tired and weary. That is all there is to him. Or perhaps just a little more, but not as much.

True to form, his body language will betray his words, revealing in them what he truly means the way light would shed off the shadows that embrace him like an armor for a skin:

the I hope you're telling the truth for every I don't believe you whenever he looks away discreetly, shying away from the prospect of revelation, except that the depth of the gratitude in his heart will swell all the way up to his eyes, so much so that he cannot help but just sigh as he looks at you, which is his inward acceptance of the things that can hardly be, though he is thankful all the same. There is no relief to be had in kindness being few and far between these days, yet in this mess that is called life he easily discovers light wherever there is darkness, to the point that there are things that might as well be the start of something grand, something where kindness could push all the way above ground with more than enough conviction than one is willing to offer, germinate like a seed nascent with life, and finally meet the sun, and yet this you will hardly notice in him;

the glances he would steal despite the certainty of contempt, his eyes unmoving except for the momentary blink, everyone else busy with what they think keeps them alive these days, not realizing that what sustains them is the same thing that will kill them, and their judgment will fall on him swiftly, calling him out for the furtive nature of what he does, but glance he would anyway, because fuck it, living has never been a crime, and such a thief that only takes away what his eyes will allow him to hold captive can never be found guilty in medias res, because the crime is extinguished by the time the deed is done as if it never happened;

the fingers that would brush against his own will mark him like an imprint for the rest of his life, or maybe what little is left of it. Those gentlest and slightest of all touches, whether by accident or on purpose, they will clobber his senses, turning the screw in his head a little loose one bit more, his brain cast under a spell he finds challenging to name because prudence and recklessness never mix like oil is to water, prompting him to drink more water than he should, because his throat is dry and damn will she ever wet her lips with mine he mumbles to himself, and while some things he will forget and most things he will remember, he will not find what you said he is trying to look for. Here or elsewhere, it matters not. Hands are meant for holding, they say, but no one can ever hold the rain.

And so, La Niña made it rain today just like the days before. It is the weekend and the boy could just walk all the way home and weather the storm, the language of and in his body waiting for the clearance that the rain could bring so that he could talk a little less, write a little less, and do a little bit more. By the time he gets home, he would have nothing to write about, talk about, and all that is left will be body language.

But this, it seems, is just the beginning. Or maybe not, clarity to dwindle down to the point of confusion.

Tender Feet

2022-07-22T15:22:00.006+08:00

To the child, the love of my life, who will never be born from the womb of the love I will never forget: I would have been your dad, but please forgive me just the same. These tired hands have earned a living for most of my life, and they would have easily carried you to sleep on so many nights, but all that is left of the strength they now have is one that can even barely cling on to hope, a burden so heavy to bear for those who have nothing more to lose. These tired hands, rest they know not, but today until God knows when, they will be just as restless. I did what I could, and I have loved you even when you were still in my dreams, a place where you will now forever be, of which my weary eyes can only breach whenever I close them. There you will blossom on the days that will never dawn and the nights that will never follow, I never to witness you become who you would have wanted to be, you never to walk this earth with tender feet.

I tried to save myself from myself, from the monster it has been growing into, a cynic who could only see the wretched hours and days revealed as months and years of peril. I gave it my all to undo what I have slowly become, but it was too late. My heart was anchored on all the wrong places, and they took root deep where I will never be able to reach them, far beyond my grasp with what little I know. I never knew how it was to be a father, nor exactly why I desired to be one, but the thought gripped my heart as though my life depended on it, held hostage where escape never stood a chance. And in the sorry state where I dwell, made to confess by the circumstance where I find myself now, I say these things not as an excuse, but as a belated attempt to make me remember, or so that I may never forget, that once there was a man who could only love so much.

But if alibis and dreams were to count for the many times when I imagined you, I would have drifted too far and lost count, like a boat that could only depend on the stars for navigation. The happy days I have created in my mind linger like an aftertaste that was never there to begin with, and I search for them with much yearning that the more I look for them the lonelier I get, which is the same thing I would have told her, and which she probably already knows by now. These days when I walk I bow my head as if there is nothing more to look forward to, my shoulders carrying a cross nobody sees, recognized only by those who have suffered a similar fate. How many of us are left, I cannot say. But we crowd the streets where you would have walked beside me, your tiny hand holding on to mine, never having to worry about time and how cruel it can get, because where there are no memories there is nothing to remember. And so I continue to dream, until I find you there.

A Lesson From Her Father, The Etymologist

2022-07-17T01:56:00.000+08:00

“Go on, tell me, papa,” Emily says.

The Etymologist confides that Difficult and Hard are words that are similar but not the same. “On the one hand,” he says, “the word Difficult takes its origin from the Latin difficultas, which is an expression for the reversal (dis-) of ability (-facultas). Thus, what is difficult requires some level of skill; mere willingness is not enough. Practice is indispensable. Mastery is the goal. Ultimately, something is difficult because it demands skill.”

“On the other hand,“ the Etymologist continues, “the word Hard comes from the Old English heard, which means something is carried on with great exertion. Ergo, what is hard demands effort and commitment; no amount of skill can guarantee success with the struggle. Perseverance is vital”.

“This, Emily, is why it is often said that it is difficult to say Hello, and hard to say Goodbye.” The Etymologist looks at Emily, weariness growing in his eyes.

“So remember, young one,” he continues between suppressed coughs, “saying Hello takes skill, but saying Goodbye begs commitment.”

Emily smiles at the thought. She stares at the window, the setting sun pouring its light through the curtains, parting the shadows before spilling on the wooden floor. “Now tell me something about Hello and Goodbye, papa.”

The Etymologist leafs through his handwritten notes, drags a finger across the lines of text, stops, and resumes his reading. “The word Hello is a 19th century variant of the earlier hollo, which is related to holla, which, in turn, is from the French holà — an order to stop or cease.” He pauses to fix his reading glasses.

“An order,” Emily says.

The Etymologist nods. “So it is my love -- an order, and orders can only come from those who are in a position of power, whatever form it may be. And so, saying Hello is actually a blatant affirmation of imbalanced relations. To say Hello is to claim the upper hand, to assume the throne of authority.” He returns to the notes. “Meanwhile, Goodbye is a contraction of Good be with ye. Basically, it is a salutation in parting.”

“Is a goodbye final?”

“It is. Or at least it should be. Telling someone that the good be with them implies a sense of finality. The parting is the end, and you never know what is ahead for the person you are wishing goodness for, which is why you desire that good things come their way. From the point of goodbye, everything becomes unknown simply because there is nothing more between two people.”

“Can I say goodbye each day papa?”

“You can, of course, Emily, but it defeats the point of saying goodbye. The salutation loses its sense of permanence because there is no parting.”

“What happens, then, between Hello and Goodbye?”

The Etymologist glances at Emily. Faced with a question that has besieged him for years, one that has brought him to the lonely circumstance of raising a child who has never felt the warmth of a mother, the absence lingering before him like a shadow that stretches far into the night, reaching into his dreams until it crowds the sunrise as if to block the sun, he finally says, “Ah, that is where the magic is, my love. There are only so many words to say. All my life I have learned them, but what I have written can take you no farther than where you began. Everything else you will have to find out for yourself, for better or for worse.”

Isang Dipa

2022-04-23T08:40:00.000+08:00

"Isang Dipa"
June 21, 2020

The Heart of the Problem

2021-09-11T19:26:00.001+08:00

I'm nearing thirty-five, older but none the wiser. In retrospect, I guess I made more bad decisions than good ones. I took a college degree that holds little assurance of landing a stable career. A few years after that, I attended law school, only to stop for financial reasons, flushing down the drain three years of daily mental gymnastics. I took odd jobs in the interim, most of which involved pushing pen on paper, apart from the one where I answered phone calls and spoke to people from halfway around the world, the diversity of their accents ranging from anywhere between the bizarre to the impossible. Some other work opportunities I skipped for reasons I can no longer recall. Then, one day, I gave up on writing. And so I found myself in a fixed rut, ever so consistent the way the night follows the day, barely able to claw my way out, only to find myself regressing to a position far worse than where I began. Something was wrong.

Many times I have tried to diagnose this affliction that has been leeching the life out of me, to give it the name that it is missing, because to fight a nameless foe, let alone one that has taken control of the battlefield that is my sanity, a precarious terrain for a protracted siege waged at the behest of a war that, by all indications thus far, will hardly be won, is to swing your fists in the dark. The symptoms were everywhere, but the sickness hid elsewhere.

I guess the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart.

Follow your heart, people say time and again, probably unaware that you can only follow that which is ahead of you. There is a sense of implied detachment there, a separation demanding to be closed out, oftentimes made familiar by that feeling of pursuit, an impulse to zip the gap, birthing a chase that can be unforgiving. Maybe I tried to follow my heart during the many occasions where the road forked. Decisions had to be made, and I trailed the path that my heart has carved before my feet. Yet my heart might have been out of place, meandering so far out, so distanced and equally confused in its insolence, that whatever I did back then my heart was not into any of it, precisely because my heart was elsewhere. I had my eyes scoping out the place where I thought my heart was, all the while neglecting the task at hand, oftentimes literally.

But if it is worth anything, I dreamed of dreams in those same years, dreams that anchored my feet closer to the ground, a temporary reconciliation of heaven and earth for airborne Icarus, reminding me that there can still be certain yearnings even during a time riddled with uncertainties, or precisely because of it.

I dreamed of having children one day, of driving them to school and of fetching them. I can imagine myself taking them for a quick detour to a nearby food stall, and treating them to a snack they fancy before we head home. I dreamed of putting them to bed at night, of telling them stories, sometimes real, other times imagined, planting the seeds of their dreams as I watch over them gently fall asleep, their eyes half-open in a final act of resistance before submitting to the call of the moon and the stars. By daybreak, I'll be cooking breakfast for them, setting the table and serving their food on their plates as they make their way downstairs, their voices in a sleepy chorus calling out to me through the morning sunshine, "Papa, I had a dream!"

"Do tell my loves," I'd say as I hold them close to my paunch, stooping to plant my lips on their forehead. "But go kiss your mama first," I'd whisper. And off they'd go.

I also dreamed of being a lawyer on weekdays, a sedentary job that will foot the bills, and a busker blues musician on Friday and Saturday evenings, a bohemic pursuit that will tour me around the metropolis. Mondays through Fridays I'd be astir with clerical tasks in a cubicle, a legal serf ensconced in his little manor of three wooden partitions, etching his legacy one notarized document at a time, and other meetings and paperwork that require nothing more than legalese. On rare occasions I'd appear in court before a judge, wearing a suit and armed with the formalities that legal proceedings demand, and by the end of every Friday I'd be off to busk, guitar case in tow. In front of strangers walking hither and thither, I'd play the music that has helped me tide the rough times. Some would pause to observe the performance of this nondescript blues musician, dropping coins in my guitar case before walking away, never to be seen again, like penance for a sin they did not do, but which they have to pay for anyway before they disappear, much like how legal cases go in this country.

And then there's the dream of publishing a novel. At night when the family is sleeping soundly, I'd devote an hour or two to writing, to make the story move, or fly, so that one day it will see print and find home in a friend or stranger's bookshelf, its pages visibly ageing after having been read many times from cover to cover before settling in its spot with finality to gather dust.

The door creeks open. "You're writing again Papa?" my youngest would ask, rubbing her eyes with her fingers while squinting, walking to where I sat by the desk, a lamp revealing sheets of paper and a pen in the dark. She would sit on my lap, her sleepy face on my chest. I could feel the gentle breathing of the little one.

"Papa will soon be finished with this for tonight," I'd tell her, like those many other nights. She would fall asleep. I'd write a few more lines before carrying my daughter back to her room, the thought of completing the novel tugging at my heart with the same firmness as the way the little one would clutch my shoulders as we made our way upstairs. I'd tuck her to bed, then gaze at the distant stars outside the window before closing the door.

But I feel that I am grasping at straws each time I conjure those images in my mind. Social media offers no reassuring hand either, one that could hopefully save a man from drowning. I am genuinely happy for the accomplishments of my friends, seeing them advertize their life triumphs with such calculated pageantry in our tiny virtual sphere, like bright sparks that recede quickly into the darkness before one could make out where they came from. I smile at the thought of them fulfilling their desires, especially at such a time when many things, even the trivial ones, have become so restricted that dreaming might as well be considered a crime. Yet I cannot help but wish that somehow, in some way, the universe would also conspire to make things in my life fall into their proper place so that maybe one day I, too, can share even just one blinking feat in that vast mural. By then I can finally say that I made my parents proud, or at least I tried to, if only for a moment.

I'm nearing thirty-five, older but none the wiser. Where my heart is at this moment, I know not.

Whether Laundry Weather: A Writing Exercise

2016-02-25T21:01:00.001+08:00

Your pen sits on the table to your right. To your left, the great unwashed: literally, the laundry that reeks of some ghoulish decay, smelling like the story of thirty-one days. The scent is uninviting, unenticing as it lingers in your room, and in the basket it has found its temporary asylum. "Extradite your self," you mutter, "or suffer the penalty of turning incognito by way of destierro beneath my bed." After an hour of debating with yourself you eventually decide to do your laundry with your pen, or to pen your laundry, whichever comes first, or draws the blood, and somehow you understand that it is far from being the most glamorous chore. Yours is the prerogative to write your laundry and to laundry your writings, so soap all bitter memories with a thousand words, until you could bleach the sun and rinse the rain.

Which isn't really possible, of course. But what gives.

Next step: soak everything in your recipe of onion, garlic, beef stock, a dash of grin, another dash of incredulity, then some tears here and there from a time when your spritely self walked away from you for a month or so, garnish it with silantro and a bit of regret, and call this unbecoming mixture the broth from the underworld. Cook your clothes but don't eat them. This is not your last supper. And you have no disciples to break bread with. Even Judas Iscariot is ashamed of you. But miracles are your specialty, and for a while you think by way of obfuscation that you are a welcome messiah. You are not. All saintly gates are sealed, and so are your eyelids. Pray that your daydream is not part of the pope's itinerary. He can visit you there just to excommunicate you. But, alas, he might not. After all, everyone in the Vatican is busy waiting for heaven. As for you, well, you're just busy with your laundry. Supposedly.

Now, if there is a wrinkle on a page, or a spot of stain that is begging for a hard scrub, go ahead: give it the time of its life. Brush it like a bad case of fleas. Undo its misery by turning it into virgin pulp again, then say fuckyeah come'n git some ya biatch. Repeat as often as necessary, which is once every five seconds, or until you are fully convinced beyond an iota of doubt that the trouble you are going through is divine in its earthliness, and earthly in its divinity. Nature has its own devices of reminding you that the world is not a gallant purveyor of innocence. Everything is corrupted. Like your laundry. And words. Lo, you hear the rustle of the leaves from a distance. Mute the whistle of the wind because what's the point. You can take good care of yourself just fine and boy do you like to wash your clothes. You feel like it's your calling, and you dub thyself Pastor Genteel Cotton and Wool of the Holy Church of Good Laundry and All Things About Clothes dot com.

Hang everything. Leave them to dry under the overcast sky where for once you could use a little help from the sun because the night has always been your day and your eyes have never been fond of bright things. "Them shiny thangs like the rims of they car," you could hear your politically incorrect mind say as it reels from your unrelenting defiance. "You are not African-American," says the mind, reminding you in the process of your ethnicity, which is a cross between the outlandish Bicolano that you are and the miser Ilocano that you have become. Separate the whites from the coloreds, the racist statesman would pontify, like casting pearls before swine, or swine before pearls, but you're just dealing with clothes and not ethnic cleansing, or the gentrification of the world, which is equally awful. Shiver at the thought.

Watch your laundry occupy the length of the clothes line. One by one they fall in place, like a series of headless and limbless and torsoless suicides of invisible bodies flapping with the gale. It is not their fault that they were bound to hang themselves, some of the times together, some other times separately. Neither is it yours. There is no grave error in observing your duty. Circumstances beyond your control have forced you to do your laundry and hang them, poor clothes whose only sin was to have been woven into existence by the hands of workers who never get paid enough while the rest of the world gallivants in lavish splendor, preferably while wearing designer clothes --- look how unconscionable, imagine how denigrating, how despicable, how appaling, and while you're at it, how's your laundry?

None of these make any sense. In a few hours, the sun will set and the moon will take its stead. And now that you are finally done writing, you may now actually begin washing your laundry.

One

2015-10-15T23:53:00.000+08:00

One is the sunlight that breaches the silence of daybreak, like a whisper shaking off the muteness of the dark, urging you to awaken to the nascent fog because another gentle day is at the cusp of your dream. The past summer has been harsh, unforgiving in its tropical heat, but your kindness delivers the comfort that can dampen even the driest of hearts, famished in so many ways by willful solitude, yet cured on so many mornings by the touch of your hand. Life was only a dream, until you happened. Now, I can open my eyes to how real everything has become. If only I can, I do not wish to sleep. I cannot afford to blink in the midst of this happiness.

The days are different, but one is Sunday becoming everyday. So it must be: you are my endless Sabbath. You are the rest that I deserve in this weary existence. I can taste the flavor of life in your lips, so I nourish myself with you, breathe you as though I am drowning. But the waters are tranquil and I find myself ashore in the safety of your embrace.

One is presence neither encumbered nor interrupted by episodes of momentary separation. We cannot be together all the time, but space hardly breaches the continuity of your memory. It lingers in me. It fills me like a river emptying itself into the high seas. And in the abundance of you in my mind, I see everything in you. I see you in everything, too, the way a compass would always point to where you are. The north that you have become is the south that I will be. We are not polar opposites, because in the grander scheme of things we are the same direction we both need. Wherever we may travel, we are bound to find ourselves: you in me, and I in you.

One is the absence of doubt. This is clarity, and it demands neither public recognition nor approval. It is complete in its own right. What we have does not depend on the appraisal of the world. What we have is the world. We are what we have.

One is the antecedent of nothingness, and it presages truths as ancient as the language of prayer, and through your lips my world begins the moment you speak. When you say stories I have yet to hear, I let my mind commune with your words, for there is nothing more divine than the acceptance of the thoughts you hold dear, and I receive them like a gift that validates the worth of the only life I will ever have. Should fate be kind enough, I will live the rest of my days with you and your thoughts. Nothing more, nothing less, and I am satisfied.

One is a story of twelve months and two lives accompanied by the kind of music that only the heart can hear, of songs turning endless long after the night has shushed half of the world, and of our hands held tight in a world where nothing stays, because truth be told there is just the two of us in the oneness of it all.

For Kae.

The View From Here

2015-07-17T04:28:00.001+08:00

Con·do·min·i·um
noun
from Latin con-, “together with,” and dominium, “right of ownership.”

The concrete frames, like bones, remain exposed to the sun. There is no sign of breathing, but it arrests the wind by standing in its way. It does not move hither and yon; it is inanimate. But the structure is not dead. Far from being lifeless, it is on the brink of becoming alive. Which is strange, because it bears the unrelenting patience of a carcass. For months now, the condominium awaits its motherless birth.

At night, it towers like a beacon appended onto the ground, its scaffolding beaming its light across the terra firma where I live, as though the illumination is an attempt to vindicate the secrets it conceals in the darkness. Opulence that is yet to take form, they say, is perennially susceptible to failure. Should its unrealized grandeur cast a long shadow on it, the splendor it promises must end on a sorry note. The condominium might hold itself together physically, as it should, but its image will collapse under its own weight. Yet the workers who toil day and night to make that dream rise from the din of the earth will not be allowed to let their creation weather the years and elements unfinished and naked. In the name of something that will one day impose itself on the skyline, they will brave the rain. They will risk life and limb, often unwillingly, for the corporate cause. They will spend countless hours building something that they will never own. And when all has been said and done, they will walk away like disposable soldiers with a heart heavier than anything they can carry, never to set their weary feet on the polished floors of the lobby again. From my window, I stare at the incomplete condominium as it looms ahead with what feels like a grand gesture of avarice: it upends the illusory mantle of social equity and reveals the poverty that surrounds it. What I realize is that there is no safe distance from here to there. The beacon may well be a watchtower.

Lately, the weather has been unforgiving. The sky seems to be in a catharsis, as though it has been wronged for a long time and it has now come to release its grief, washing down the city of its accumulated grime. Where I live, the mornings have been cold, the nights more so. The exit of summer has been unceremonious. I do not know what to make of it. The monsoon made its way without warning. Like a thief. I patched some of the holes on the roof to stop the water from leaking. Some others I barely managed to cover, so I resigned myself to putting a basin on each spot where the water would drip, all to no avail; the wooden floor would still be drenched. On those many occasions when I would be marooned in my room, I would look out the window and observe the building standing proud and defiant in the midst of the thunderstorm. Each time, I wish I could destroy it before it could complete its transformation. I dream of felling it with an ax the way one would smite the last surviving timber in a land so defiled there is no more use for anything. I imagine ridding the city of that phallic eyesore, clear it with the same vengeance that the rain carries. But then I would snap back to reality and realize that there is no stopping its construction now. There is nothing heroic about being late.

This coffee is cold. Bland. Somewhat rusty. The bitterness is gone. It tastes like it is complicit with the lethargy of the wet evening. I wonder if coffee tastes different when you are ten floors above the earth. Or eleven. Twelve. Perhaps thirteen. Maybe more. It must be nice. The aroma must be more stimulating. The coffee granules must be ecstatic to dissolve in hot water, like planets racing to a black hole, eager for their eternal extinction. I can imagine myself. An overwhelming sense of comfort might touch my lips after each sip. If I gorge it down like a thirsty sonofabitch, I just might feel like a nobleman, a distinguished fellow ensconced in his seat of wisdom, hand holding the cup, little finger pointing away, mulling over the ways to fatten further his paycheck and trim his waistline, letting out a sigh of relief after realizing that the condominium has a gym where he can work his ass off the way a yuppie desiring the muscular physique of the hardworking proletariat would — which is to say, the body of the same men who built the condominium. What irony. Such conundrum. But the yuppie might jeer at the thought and simply cover his mouth in a manner that one might mistake the mouth for the anus. I wonder. But I stop imagining. I train my eyes on the distant structure. Then, lightning cleaved the sky. In its wake, complete darkness as the lights went out. Lighting a candle, I figured out what was wrong with my drink. Alas, this is not coffee. This is a cup of rainwater that leaked from one of the holes on the roof.

I remember. Not too long ago, I sold the only electric guitar I owned. Unaware of the exact route I must take, I rode a cab. Some of the roads along the way were impassable. Stranded cars, some partially submerged, took up the stalled traffic where the floodwater ran deep. I arrived an hour later and waited at the condominium lobby. Ten minutes after, the buyer emerged from the elevator. He was about fifty, on the heavy side, and had an easy smile on his face. His balding head somewhat reflected the yellow ceiling lights as he approached. Having disposed of the unfamiliarity with the perfunctory courtesies, we went to his room, the guitar in the bag slung on my shoulder like the spoils of the war I just had as offering to his majesty and his insatiable appetite for trophies he did not break a sweat for. It was a room enough for a family of four, but judging by the way the furniture looked — one table, one chair — the man was living alone. On the far end of one of the walls, there stood a line of five guitars: three Stratocasters, and two Les Pauls. Beside them, three guitar amplifiers. I unpacked the guitar in my bag. It felt like I was about to sell my only child. In haste of inspecting the pickups, he disassembled the guitar with eagerness, as though he was a doctor dissecting then disemboweling a patient without the benefit of anesthesia. Convinced that it was what he wanted — and god knows what else it is that he wants in his affluent life — he got up and fished from his wallet. “In case you still plan to sell stuff like this again, just call me. You have my number,” he said. Transaction complete. He handed me a bottle of Coke, but I refused and told him I should be going. I left the room, money in my pocket. I stayed in the lobby for a while, waiting for the rain to let up, until I decided to barge into the open. Finally, I thought, I can pay half of my school tuition. My socks and shoes were drenched when I got home. To this day, I still wonder if it was all worth it.

I look at the unfinished condominium and ask myself how long it will stand the test of time. Anything that grows from the earth is assured of its mortality, but the ones that rise on artificial foundations and without the benefit of life cannot hold on to the promise of a natural death. Even utter disuse and subsequent disrepair can neither will nor lull concrete structures into nonexistence. The condominium will still be there, abandoned or otherwise. Yet I realize that my question is one that takes a stab at the future. For now, I only have to worry about the rain and the city that owns everything that can be found in it. Everything except, perhaps, the condominium. Because in theory, saying that having a condominium unit goes together with the right of ownership is a mistaken proposition. It is the other way around: the condominium owns the city.

Camera Obscura, Because None of This Makes Sense

2015-06-05T04:15:00.001+08:00

Look out the window. Glare at the contemptuous state in which the world presents itself before your inquiring eyes. Witness a feeble empire sprawled on top of the dying and the innocent, those who crawl despite the weight, or precisely because of it, pretending to be alive, their eyes trained to the sky, arms aiming for the last drop of sunlight. They call themselves professionals. Of what, exactly, nobody knows. Dusk settles slowly like a velvet curtain, its urgency lost in an irreversible decay, preaching the darkness as though the city is a church anchored on the bedrock of godlessness, the skyline its pulpit perched on defiled ground, all ears, deaf as it is from its own noise. There is trepidation, and it foams in the mouth of those who wish they could speak their own voice in the absence of words.

I am no longer sure if this is a massage. The masseuse gathers her woes, balls them in her fists, and presses them on my skin like a punishment long overdue. There is no permanence in sorrow, but the way her hands pummel my shoulders seems as if her agony is forever, or that the terror nesting in her heart is about to spawn the hatred that will transform her nails into talons. There is neither modesty nor caution in the force of her palms. None of it is my fault. I blame her father. Men who are womanizers deserve more than the excessive flailing that a vexed daughter can inflict within the reach of an uppercut. I feel some of her tears land on my back the way a drizzle would usher the heavy rain — without warning, unstoppable. I say nothing. My lips are busy cringing.

Listen: the Kulintang muffles whispers and whimpers, sounding off its protest at the artifice of the overhead speakers, as though an unseen musician is making a mockery of the incoming silence. There is a missing note in the song. One more, and then another. Mistake them for the faint coughing from behind the wall as it signals the onset of a tubercular symphony. Find them hanging at the edge of an ellipsis, or a comma, or a coma, because the difference between deep unconsciousness and pause between phrases is an arbitrary letter. Search where organized oppression tastes like the food that minimum wage can never afford, where demands for reinstatement are met with the iron fist of the capitalist, where fire safety is in perpetual absentia even at the unceremonious end of seventy-two lives roasted amid rubber slippers, where workers in liquor factories stand against someone intoxicated in his own wealth and power, and where progress treats human labor as a dispensable commodity. The machine prohibits the celebration of life. It loathes music, improvisation most of all, precisely because it worships the dullness of repetition. The Kulintang stops.

I sit on the foam bed. She positions herself behind, holds my shoulders with her arms, and extends my back sideways, almost to the point where my hips are about to jut out of my torso. I am almost tempted to say, “I am not your father. I do not deserve this.” But then we lose balance. She staggers, plants her arms on the floor, saves herself from further humiliation. I lie down. She laughs. Briefly. “Sorry sir,” she says. I realize how strange this place is, a Thai spa in the Philippines that offers Swedish massage coursed through the hard hands of a laughing and crying, bespectacled masseuse. After a while, she stops, stands, and leaves the room. She returns with a glass of cold water and a warm towel. She places both items on the floor, and, in a rush, leaves a second time. She does not return.

I lie on my back, feeling sore, wondering if I should leave now while I am still able to walk, or at least crawl.

I remember the birds zigzagging beneath the rust of the clouds, and the vanity of the concrete landscape as it continues to refuse to pray for the rain, knowing that the only sin that heaven would allow it is that of foolish pride. No one in this city keeps tab of humility. Certainly not the condominiums racing to meet the sun, their tenants notwithstanding. Everyone is his or her own messiah, or at least that is how they present themselves, and in their eyes all others are sheep in wolf’s clothing. This place is a jungle urging the summer to rush forth, except that everyone is prey and no one is a true predator. And so I remember the birds. The vultures. Circling above. Waiting. Their patience is humbling. Such is the clarity of the law that governs the modicum for survival among scavengers. I call it avian verba legis.

So I stand, weak on my knees and toes, my strength gone to some crevice I do not know, perhaps leeched out of my skin and into the earth way beneath my feet. I leave the place with the weight of her woes on my body, like a phantom limb that I have to carry as my cross, which is the only penance I can afford for all of the sins that still pelt my conscience to this day. Middle-class guilt, they call it. Which is strange, because I am not even middle-class.

I, The Living

2015-01-13T03:33:00.001+08:00

To you I offer my life the way a river empties itself to the sea: calm and deliberate as the water that runs deep on days that never seem to end, assured that the only path that lays before it leads to nowhere else but the shore where it properly belongs, a place where the waves glide along the surface like my fingers on your shoulders when a touch is all that it takes for us to affirm that we are alive. And when all has been said and done I will bow before the sky and you, and earnestly say, with the purest of intentions that my innocence can muster, that I would have had it no other way, for I am with you now and there is no yearning in my soul to return to where I came from, simply because my heart is where you are, and rightly so. Your kindness is as boundless as the open ocean, and in your vastness I find you, my destination. This I say with nary a mote of regret: the journey has been worth the sun and moon and wind and rain and the days that the calendar forgot to count. I guess the universe was not strong enough to stop me.

To you I surrender my body. The skin and scars that make the man that I have become procure what heaven and earth cannot afford to create in most others just yet: a dauntless and doubtless human being emboldened by the errors that cripple the meek, fueled as I am now by this just desire to conquer the troubles that have, for a time before, beset my mind. There is neither arrogance nor blindness in this. My audacity springs from my singularity of purpose, which is to live this life with the choices I must take, to which the frail at heart might only find madness by design. But I do not blame them for I understand where they are, or where they are coming from. I, the living, have resurrected myself from an extended repose, away from this metropolis that thrives on the negation of aspirations, this ominous terrain of concrete and smoke that muffles our woes as though they have not been spoken of. My return has been long overdue, and I am now as alive as I have never been. So to you I surrender my body, and let it be the ultimate proof that some dreams we can hold.

To you I devote my time. I wager it with the confidence of one who has earned his keep. Yet, the past I cannot abandon, for it is impossible; I carry it with me wherever I go, like an ambulant darkness that trails my footsteps where there is light. The future I can only promise, for it is not yet mine to give. But the present I can deliver, cup it in my hands like a seed yearning for the goodness of the earth, protect it so that it may grow into the great things that you and I are more than prepared to see through, until each today overwhelms every yesterday and tomorrow, and I find myself the least bit surprised that today feels just like one of those days. I understand that there is no forever, but there is everyday. So it must be said: you are my everyday.

I say this, proclaim even, not as a gentle reminder but as my way of reaffirming, even if only in print, that resurrections are possible: I am alive again because I am yours.

For Kae
XIII: Resurrection

26

2014-11-27T01:41:00.000+08:00

You and I.

If time had a taste, you’d be the flavor of every season there is, and they turn into the drops of sweetness exploding in my tongue as the final days of November ease the cold of the night until it touches my skin, and all the more I cannot help but yearn for your hands. And as they give my fingers and palms the warmth they need, I cannot help but realize that this miracle deserves a name. It is yours.

If Ludwig Wittgenstein is right when he said that language is the limit of our world, then you are my final frontier, and your name defines all that there is left for me to understand, for in it I find meaning and sense, all in four words of twenty letters, maybe even just one and three: Kae.

You are as lively as the promise of spring, giving me the life that I have wanted for so long. I taste you in my mouth the way I anticipate the coming of rain: full of strength and desire and all that there is in love. I am as eager as a thirsty river waiting for the high tide.

I nourish myself with your kindness as though I have not eaten since I was born, and you satiate my heart and mind and body and soul the way they have never been satiated before. Your kindness whets my appetite for kindness of the same measure.

You are water, quenching my thirst when my lips are dry and barely able to say a word. You are an oasis, giving me comfort when the days become unforgiving, and for that I am thankful. I love you the way the night longs for sunrise.

Doubtless, you are a little girl with a heart so big I could easily fit inside, like a cast is to its mold, a shelter from the drudgery of this world. But even if you are small, let alone the heart that you keep, I love you just the same.

Whenever I think of you — and god knows how often I do — I just want to split the sun in half and take one to the other side of the world so that there will be no evenings and the days will run twice as fast until the time that I can finally be with you again. But I love the nights when I am with you, and I pray most often that they would not end soon, that the sun would wait a little longer and let the moon have its way through and through.

I take photos of you when you are not looking, or when you least expect me to, because most of the simplest joys in life are too overwhelming they pass us by unnoticed, and so I try to capture them, one image at a time, so that I can look back at them when we are not together.

You say you can hardly carry a tune, but know that when you sing, your voice beckons my heart and then I think to myself “If it is true that she cannot sing then I do not know what else she is capable of doing the moment she is able to carry one.” But you can carry a tune, no matter how truncated or prolonged, with as much as ease as the smile that you make. The modesty you have is a melody on its own.

10.

Know that you are not just my song. You are mine, all of you, as much as I am yours.

11.

When I told you I’ll be right there, it was a promise I intended to fulfill. Eight days later, on the tenth day of the tenth month, I returned to the city, hope swelling in my eyes to the point that everywhere I look all I can see is you. For the first time in my life, I realized then and there that I never wanted to close my eyes again.

12.

You and I share many interests and, most often, think about the same things. It fascinates me. It is as though there is a long nerve that connects our brains, one that spans the distance between Naga City and Pangasinan, stretched out like a massive highway with its center right in Quezon City, and we are the only ones allowed to traverse that meandering road, much to the exclusion of the universe and the strangers that we encounter everyday. It is like a secret between you and I.

13.

But of course, we are not one and the same. You say you can be an impatient woman. Patience, however, is probably my strongest suit, my virtue and my vice. You say you tend to get easily bored. I don’t. You dwell on the bright side of things, as though you have lived all your life on the face of the earth where the sun never sets. I have the tendency to linger where the shadows thrive. In a way, you bear the vitality of daytime, and I possess the melancholia of the night on a winter solstice.

14.

So it is: you and I are worlds apart and yet we have our world all to ourselves. You and I dwell in it as though it is the only universe there is, and I really do not mind if that is the case, for here we are, you and I, proof that there is life and that we need not look further, farther.

15.

All along you were in my mind before we met, like a seed eager for sun and rain, taking root slowly but surely in my fertile imagination, pushing its way through the thicket of my memories until, at last, it has blossomed and all I could see before my eyes are colors where there used to be none.

16.

We first met on the fifteenth day of October, shy but full of unspoken passions waiting to thrust themselves in the air at the right moment that we dared to make. The second I held your hand, I felt my anxieties peel away until all I am left with are the words that I have wanted to tell you, free from the limits of the page and ink, dancing in complete liberty.

17.

And on the sixteenth you and I were one, because we are as unconventional as lovers go, but conventional still in the many other ways that complete us.

18.

You have become the sum of the minutes and hours that I yearn to live, and should the weeks and months ahead compress themselves into a fleeting second, I will not blink. The rarity of finding someone like you, of discovering the closest to a miracle that I will ever be able to encounter in a world that sustains itself through wanton indifference and betrayals, it is enough for me to finally draw my gaze away from the stars and settle my eyes on you.

19.

Gone are the days when I used to wonder how it feels to hold the hand that writes the words that make my world spin, that turn me into a believer, a man who believes that the world can be a happy place if we choose to turn it into one, a place where every tomorrow tastes like every today — full of promise, ripe with possibilities, enduring in its own wisdom. Gone are the days when I used to wonder, for now I can hold your hands.

20.

I trace the veins on your fingers, marvel at how they ultimately find their way to your heart, the source of your life, your life the source of my own.

21.

The way you carry yourself, it is as if you grace the earth beneath your feet with your footsteps, as though the air you breathe will one day find its way to my lungs and nourish my body with the strength of a thousand soldiers, maybe more. The wind lapping against your hair, all the millions of them, it carries your scent and surrounds my flesh, and I surrender myself to it because I do not want to be anywhere else.

22.

If touch is the language of love, I speak with my hands whenever I am with you, and the verses I keep in the hours and days of your momentary absence long to find their way to your skin, envelop you because you are where they rightfully belong. Home is who you are.

23.

It is true: your absence makes my heart grow fonder. But if truth has gradations, what is truer is this: your presence makes my heart grow. Today, I am as big as my heart. I may be a Goliath any time soon.

24.

And now, wherever I go, I walk with a sense of direction, because you are every north and south and east and west that I am willing to take. Forward. Always forward.

25.

Because of you, I am whole again, and so you deserve the best that I can be.

26.

Today is the twenty-seventh and you turn twenty-six. Never reveal a woman’s age, they say. Fuck the world, I say, because in my mind you are forever young. Besides, I am not good with numbers. And as always, math is not my cup of tea.

You are.

Hello, Love

2014-11-06T17:26:00.001+08:00

Us.

Suddenly I find myself consumed by the kind of happiness that speaks a thousand languages my lips do not know where to start. The alphabet is not enough, nor will the numbers ever be. And so I smile instead because I am beholden to this heart equally beholden to the girl, and because an unspeakable joy such as this, a gladness so convincing such as this, can only be felt in the silence of words, rightly so in the muteness of language, even as they graze my mind so that I may finally write them down, revealed in their naked truth. They trickle into my dreams like a river sourcing itself from a place so high it never ends, finding sanctuary in the open waters of the ocean, and as the wakeful world blurs in the distant shoreline, I float, the weight of my worries sinking beneath the waves, dropping like stones helpless against the surge and undertow.

For the first time after a long, long time, I can greet the sun again like an old friend, rising and rushing to wash my body with its light and sweep away the darkness around it. My mornings are no longer the same, tragic as they were before, the nights more so. Where I stand, my world is now a different place, and I look upon it with the assurance, reverence even, that things are starting to fit their proper spot in the universe. I know now where my heart belongs, and I intend it to stay where it is now.

I wish I can promise her forever, but that is impossible. I can only promise her now and the immediate future, and who I am and who I will be in the course of that time. Perhaps that is enough, because this lifetime happens only once. And I am quite certain that she, too, happens only once in the same lifetime, and I do not want it any other way, certainly not twice and yet a different girl the second time. I do not deign an apology, but if the universe will not allow it, may fate be kinder, gentler at the least, because the first day she becomes a part of my life — as she now does — may just as well be the only day that I am willing to live for the rest of the years ahead. Three hundred and sixty five days and more, of her at the start of it all.

I know now that happiness is the province of love, and it dwells in it under the aegis of a desire so strong it commands my life with a sense of purpose. These I have come to realize with the touch of her hand, my fingers trembling ever so lightly even before contact, and as my palms lock themselves with hers I cannot help but wonder how surreal it is, how beautiful the touch of her hands can be even as it mystifies my being, because if that alone is not magic I do not know what else is. These I have come to realize, too, with her smile that seems perpetual on her lips, climbing up to her eyes as though she sees the world from the vantage point of joy, the rest of the world around her drawn to the bliss that her vision casts upon the humble earth, my self most of all, which is enough proof that to be with her is to be satiated with the taste of contentment in life, the kind that never seems to run dry. And through it all, in the things I do and wish to carry out, she is the purpose I live by, for she stirs my life, awakens it every day from the slumber that it used to tolerate. I have never felt so alive than this.

Hello, Love. I am yours twice. Today for tomorrow. Tomorrow for today.

Waxing Philosophic, So I Wait

2014-10-14T01:42:00.001+08:00

Screenshot of part of the opening credits to The Walking Dead

Or, conversely, waiting, so I wax philosophic.

Wait, according to Google, is a verb that means “stay where one is or delay action until a particular time or until something else happens.” It is “used to indicate that one is eagerly impatient to do something or for something to happen.” The word takes its origin from the Old Northern French waitier, which essentially means almost the same thing as the term wake — “stop sleeping,” or “stir or come to life.” Strange how the concept has shifted in meaning over time. From what once meant stirring to life, the word now means bide one’s time. From activity to inactivity, or passivity. From actual to potential. For the man who was born centuries before, for him to wait is for him to do something. But we live today, and waiting, they say, has now become the closest thing to doing almost nothing, as though one who waits is caught in a seemingly perpetual limbo, anticipating something that has no assurance of ever happening. Manigas ka, as they usually say in common parlance.

I disagree with the part about doing nothing, or the way in which the word has now come to mean, the one about going hard as stone more so.

There are things that — or people who — are worth the wait, and waiting does not necessarily mean doing nothing in the interim. On the contrary, waiting gives us the opportunity to prepare, and it does so while raising anticipation, the same way that one would build a house, brick by brick, eager to see the day when the blueprint will finally take its form, habitable as any home ought to be, visible to the eyes as the good hands that have built it, real to the touch, evidence to the hard labor that will give it the semblance of life it deserves. So we do what we can as we wait.

Waiting, especially the part about patience, is not necessarily opposed to, or mutually exclusive with, having the audacity to go and get what you want. They do not have to cancel out each other. Oftentimes, waiting is part and parcel of the chase, of the struggle. Strike while the iron is hot, so they say, all the while forgetting that you still have to wait for the iron to get hot in the first place. It takes a certain amount of forbearance to dare have an audience with someone who eclipses our world. We wait because we are audacious. We are audacious because we wait.

Timing is everything as everything is a question of time, an inquiry about the when. On its own, there is no right time. Rather, we make the time we choose to be the right one. We select the hour of the day for the reckoning point, and try to turn it into the proper time, which is why it is necessary to exercise prudence and caution in choosing the moment we desire to make proper. For all we know, it, too, is a risk, for there are no guarantees in scheduling things. Which is precisely why we do what we can to make the time we choose to be the right one. This, I think, is the essence of timing.

Because timing dictates the length of the wait, weak emotions are nipped at the bud, snuffed out like the tender flame of a small candle lit up in the midst of a virulent storm. But the strong ones feed on the wind until they explode into a prairie fire. Sometimes, it is not that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Rather, it is that the possibility of presence makes it so, especially if it is for the first time.

Bob Marley has a song where he says, or sings, that he does not want to wait in vain, and I think nobody does. It is for that reason that he asks: “Is it feasible? I want to know now for I to knock some more.” It is his way of saying that he has gambled enough, and that he now wants to know if all the waiting he has done will not end up in futility. He does not want to end up turning into a rock. He is looking for some kind of assurance, a sign to continue, for he has stirred, or steered, himself to life the moment he decided that someone is worth the wait.

I like to believe that my soul was born long before my body first saw the light of day. I might have already lived centuries before, the time when waiting meant doing something. Which is why I wax philosophic and do other things as I wait for her.

Her name is Kae, and I want the world to know. I want the world to know that I wait for her. That I am waiting for her.

Hues of You

2014-10-02T08:28:00.000+08:00

I wish to trace the sunlight on your lips with the gentle touch of my fingers, satiate my wondering at how they seem to make my world spin just by the words that they give birth to. If I can, I would drink the sunlight from your lips, too, so that I may never be thirsty again. You are the water I need, like rain is to the Sahara, if only you would allow. I am willing to risk everything even for a drop.

Your voice is my music, a song I yearn to listen to every day, and my ears do not want it any other way, because in you they hear what the promise of the future brings, what it holds for its secrets, the unknown edging closer to certainty, farther now from doubts, the better things in life just biding their time until, at last, tomorrow has become today.

Oftentimes before I go to sleep I think about the days ahead, and I can always see you there, a presence eclipsing the sorrows I have had. And then happiness trickles in until it turns into a river that rushes forth, carrying the strength of a thousand happy days, maybe more, and at that point I welcome it with open arms, let it consume me because that is the least that a lover can do.

Apart from having to wait, and it humbles me.

I wait with the kind of patience that I suddenly find difficult to measure. I can try to put it in words by saying that I wait the way a seed yearns for the sun as the stars keep vigil over this germ of hope, but that is nowhere near half of what I am feeling. I may say that I wait like a child quite eager to have someone help him find his way home, but the innocence that I bear is the kind that you would expect from someone who knows his way around, never gets lost, and so I will look for you if need be, because now I understand where I belong, where I want to be.

And I think you know where.

For Kae