Look inside your head

After Waps' torn-off piece of yellow pad paper:

*

I would like to be the moon. I already see which mothers are tending to their sleeping first-borns, when I close my eyes. Only when I close my eyes. Because otherwise, it is my father I hear intoning from the next room: Do you not love me anymore? and then: the obligatory rustle of bed sheets. I have understood that the world makes the noises that matter most when it thinks no one is listening -- the butterfly-wing beat of the fingers of widows too sad; the sudden thunder of a car down the street, about to drive away; an abrupt lullaby; the inexplicable sadness of that widow, who may be too young, and her sleeping son. My father would chant, Love-Love-Love, and I know everything confounds him, especially those noises that matter most. Especially those.

I am the third son. My mother is sleeping. I can wake her up if I say, Mother, I would like to be the moon.

*

I would like to be the moon. Then, I no longer have to write about grown men leaning to kiss new blooms by leaves, about how I can never spell obsession right the first time, about how that girl I fell in step with on the street happens to write too -- that just last night, she sat with the man whose name she was been writing on the margins of her books, and he asked her to Please, tell me a story, and she began, A year ago there was a girl who'd only been kissed twice, and the man held up his hand and said, Stop, and the girl looked at him, and she became quiet. I would like to be the moon because I only need to concern myself with pulling oceans and holding gazes, with men and with word -- none of which I know anything about, not really.

The trees forgive me

I wrote about missing this one here, about sleeping there, and losing that one, no the other one. I read about the love of a good woman, the spectacle of the scaffold, and how this sissy boy got whisked away by the goddess of love. I wrote about this woman whose sister kept the hair they cut off years ago, I wrote about that man waking up from a dream of the way his mother's lips sounded like when she talked. I read about how the children must stay, about this bacchanalia on the hill of some guy named Samuel. I said, Get me something pretty, when I should have said, Spartan, come back with your shield or on it, sabay hi-five. I said, 'Pag malamig, pasok ka na lang sa tent, alam mo na gagawin dun. Tribute to Heath Ledger. He's dead. The Joker killed him. The earthquake in China killed off some pandas. Pandas are cute. You are too. You are currently in an earthquake zone. At dahil cute ang pandas at namatay sila sa earthquake, ingat ka kasi cute ka at nasa earthquake zone ka. Sabi ng nanay ko, marami raw umiyak nung linibing yung mga panda. Cute kasi sila. Tsaka onti na lang sila. Hindi hassle na libu-libo namatay dahil sa lindol na pumatay sa mga panda. Marami namang tao sa mundo. Population control 'yan ng Mother Nature, sabi ng Philo teacher ko. Onti lang ang panda, marami namang tao, kaya iniyakan yung panda. Cute rin sila. Cute ka, pero naks, anong gagawin ko sa maraming tao? Kaya mag-ingat ka, puwede? Uy. Tsaka hindi 'to masyadong related, pero sabi rin ng nanay ko, "I wish I had someone to talk to about intellectual things, but then I realized: I have nothing intellectual to say. All I have are novels and Newsweek." Sabi ko, "Ah."

Segue.

I grew tired of the bed growing while I slept, so I finally moved in to that place in Escaler. Bisitahin niyo naman ako. Cool place. I bounce on the bed, though I doubt I'll find the time to do some (literal) bed-bouncing. I can smoke, as long as I blow the smoke toward the mango tree at my window. Do mango trees have kapre (ang conyo-plural ba ng kapre ay kapres?) Yeah, I think so. That's cool, though, he and I will have a lot in common. I sleep tonight in an empty room. Beside my bed is another bed with floral sheets. It's empty too, in an almost lurid kind of way. There are drawings of the male anatomy on the walls. The last tenant must have been very lonely. Or repressed.

Segue.

Yesterday, in Recto, I was on my hands and knees, unearthing Doctor Faustus and John Milton. I went home with dirt under my fingernails, my mom calls it nerd-dirt. Nerd-dirt. That's like having slashes of ink on your palms because you dropped your pen into the black hole that is your bag; like having orange highlighter marks on the sides of your fingers because your hand can't keep still when you read something intellectual. Like, dude, na-a-agit ako. Bakit? Dude, Philo 104, dude. Brother na lang, parang si Desmond. Ah, Desmond. Sawyer has a daughter in Albuquerque. I should look up how to spell Albuquerque. What's in Albuquerque? Miss, I think you dropped your Albuquerques.


*


Happy Father's Day to my daddy who likes to send me text messages from Imus that go like, "Ineng, pataba ka. Tsaka tayo ng maayos, ipalipat mo na 'yang likod mo sa boobs mo."

The pebbles forgive me

It's not everyday I walk around Katipunan with copies of Homer's The Iliad, Burton Raffel's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and, er, The Sad Clown and Other Five-Minute Tales for Bedtime inside my bag.

Buti na lang. (That's thank goodness, for the konyo.)

(I text my mother: "Foucault is cool." And she replies, "You should check out my pendulum." I'm sure I'm not the only one with a compulsion to giggle at that statement, no?)

All this pretending-to-be-smart-and-well-read thing is a strain on my budget. And oh yeah, on my mind. And my eyes, as some idiot lost her glasses. Gahdammit, what kind of idiot loses her glasses while she's wearing them? Never mind the sudden rains last Wednesday, never mind the flash-lake around the overpass. Those glasses were on your head -- how could you have lost them?

Ahem.

Everything about me is either about to melt, or go poof! so I leave you with an excerpt of the latest short story I managed to squeeze out of wherever these things come from. It's called Park 9 Alley, and I have a feeling this will be one of those bitcheries of a story that would forever be in-progress, guh. Anyway:

Somewhere in this street, someone is kissing someone he is not supposed to kiss. I suspect it is Francisco Revelar, the architect [note to self: scratch that -- change it to "accountant."] who has not seen his wife in two years. It is understandable that he kiss someone else – I think he is kissing the girl Marta from the sari-sari store in front of his house for she often has that sad, faraway look on her pale, prematurely lined face and I’ve learned that it is those sad looks that make the men rise from their beds in the middle of the night and cup a young girl’s aging face. It is understandable that Francisco Revelar kiss Marta. After all, two years is a long time, a very long time. Dishes get stacked in the sink, the sinks are cleared, then get filled again. Drains record the remains of breakfasts, lunches and dinners, until they revolt by clogging up, and someone has to push his sleeves to his elbows sooner or later so water can make its proper descent into the sewage that spreads like misplaced roots underneath the gray concretes of this city. Windows turn muddy, then are wiped down one procrastinating afternoon months later. Doors squeak, complaining of the capricious comings and goings of men, these doors swell in their hinges after a thunderstorm, they crack in the heat of a summer, until they are oiled into silence, or replaced by something sturdier, not necessarily prettier. Oh, don’t let me get started on floors.

All this and more, over and over for seven hundred and thirty days, more or less – am I the only one who wonders what I should do with the quarter-day that helps define a year? What exactly is “365 ¼ days a year”?

Anyway. A lot happens, two years is a long time. Imagine all that waiting, all those mornings with no one to listen to you say, “Five minutes more.” All those noontime show summaries not recorded. All those six o’clock bell tolls without some floury, sun-kissed arms thrown around your neck. All those nights lying in a bed that grows larger and wider with every passing night.

Two years is a long time. Francisco Revelar knows – he has waited that long.

The classic story: Ida Revelar goes out one night after making dinner, she tells her husband of twenty-two years she needs more vinegar. Her husband, the architect, looks up from his newspaper for the barest of moments just to nod – trifle acknowledgment in a marriage that has lasted that long. It used to be enough, that little nod, a swift kiss on the shoulder before he went off to work, a distracted squeeze of the bridge between thumb and forefinger in social gatherings.

Francisco Revelar gives his wife a nod, returns to his newspaper.

He has read through the Obituaries, notes that someone with his first name died yesterday, and he looks at the front door, expecting Ida to come bustling in, her hair escaping the loose bun arranged at her nape, apologizing for taking so long, the neighbors wanted to chat about the president’s daughter, dinner will be ready in a bit, god she hopes she didn’t burn anything while she was away gossiping.
But she does not come in, she won’t. Although Francisco stays in his chair, at first puzzled, then worried, then a dismal bewilderment – Ida does not come in.

And he thinks then: What will I eat for dinner?

She’s dead, she’s surely dead, he thinks three months later.

What is wrong with that sink? he thinks two months after that.

I can’t change the locks, he thinks five months after that.

Where did the brown of the linoleum go? he thinks four months after that.

Another Francisco Something is dead, he thinks a month after that.

What now? he thinks, finally, eighteen months into that nightly ritual in his chair.

Every night, in that chair, he wonders. He cannot help it. There is so little one can do when one is waiting. He has tried, many times. He has busied himself with a company that used to bear his surname, he has started a garden (he has discovered a fondness for ferns), he has even decided (with the help of a self-help book) that it is his calling to be a poet. The distractions worked, to a point, although the last one did not work very well. But Francisco Revelar has learned that no matter how many ways he busies himself, he ends up, every night, on his chair, with the day’s newspaper in his hand, reading it from cover to cover, saving the Obituaries for last.

Until tonight, apparently. Because he is kissing Marta from the sari-sari store in front of his house. He is still waiting, of course, he must, he always is – any minute now Ida will shuffle into the living room with a bottle of vinegar and an unplanned basket of vegetables. He should be in the house now, he should be waiting. What if she comes home? What if she can’t see through the grime of the windows? What if another Francisco has died, and he can’t pour some Scotch in honor of the unfortunate soul?
But there he is now, kissing a sad young girl in the middle of the night. He has cupped her face in his hands. Her cheeks are so pale beneath his callused fingertips. Two years ago, his wife went to get some vinegar. He does not even remember Ida’s face when she told him so. He remembers that someone named Francisco died, and that he shall be remembered through life by a wife and two daughters. Not Ida’s face, though.

He is kissing Marta. He is kissing her with his eyes open, so he can watch how her eyelashes flutter to rest on her cheeks. Marta is young. Two years is a long time.

All right? All right. Off I go now.

Pahabol, a wave to Pancho, who's probably running in a field of strawberries with A.G. right now. Brokeback Plateau. Okay, fine, corny.

Toodles.

Portraits hung on empty halls

I've got a buzzing headache from those Lights I kept chugging down, just because I had something to prove to myself -- mainly that I can drink something as vile as beer. Yes, beer is vile. It is yellow, bubbly, and clings to the tip of your tongue and the back of your throat. I'm writing this as I wait for work to load, because work is technological that way. My mind is whirring with things I have to write down. God, my head, it hurts. There was too much poetry written down tonight, all those epic rengas, especially for someone who's in a Fiction diet. Gahdammit, my head. I hate beer. I am not drunk, just piss-ass mad at the world. Insert momentary Zen moment here --

Say something interesting: Good morning. Today I woke up to the neighbor singing Don McLean. I cannot go on with how his voice sounds like, if it sounds like anything at all, whether the timbre shivers the bones by my heart, because he is in another house, and the walls are thick. But I hear him. He sings and when no hope is left inside and it is easy toi magine him sitting up in his bed, a glass of water suspended in the air, forgetting its own path to his lips. Would I know if, right now, he thinks of Van Gogh, the one who took your life as lovers often do? Does he wonder who this Vincent is, does he know the man cut his ear off to stop the voices in his head? No, I don;t think I would know, because the walls are thick. But then, I could always leave this house and go knock on his door. But then, what would I say? Something interesting like, Good morning. I hear you through the walls. And by the way, I'm just your neighbor, trying to get some song out of her head.

-- okay, that was done. And this bleeping headache won't go away and I've got somewhere to go early tomorrow, early later, god, head, shut up shut up shut up.

I came to this strange world

Nothing to see here, folks.

1 - Just a girl who's not sleeping very well, aggravated by the fact that I was conned into watching The Matrix Trilogy plus Animatrix for the entire bleeping night last night. (But hey, all is good -- at least I get what it all means now. Sort of. Watch out, nerds.) School starts this Tuesday and I'm still only just starting to sleep around 11 in the morning. This is not good, no? No, no, I don't think so, especially with eight more episodes of the fourth season of Lost. Gah, I'll just wing it.

2 - I've officially enrolled, and learned I'm taking a slew of teachers who either terrify me to bits and pieces, or those of whom I know nothing about. And I've got class everyday -- yeah, I'm mortal now -- which means this kind of fucks up work, not to mention hangover-indulging. Anyhoo, I guess this is as good a time as any to get into Serious Student mode. Watch out, Arneow, I'm going to work my effin' ass off.

3 - I'm writing again, after a month of nothing but revisions and Hellgate and sad, sorry attempts at poetry. It's Fiction, folks. There's this girl. And then there's this other girl. And in another one, there's that girl, with that mom and that dad. And in another one, there's this mother, and that hot mathematician's daughter. And then looking out at them all, there's Sasha, who remembers that the first short story she ever wrote (er, completed) was written in a ten-peso notebook whose cover may or may not have been Judy Ann Santos.

4 - I wish I have something to say that's actually worth those few, endless moments of inanity I put you through, but there's nothing. Nothing, really.

5 - From Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera:

"Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion : beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid, the closer it came to death."

6 - Yeahba. I am made of love.