The Bashful One

A Virtual Postcard

2011-12-24T19:14:00.000+08:00

Also, thank you for being a part of this blog. We had a blast, didn't we? Adios, amigo.

- Manech

Some days I shouldn't.

2011-12-17T19:59:00.000+08:00

So I yak and figure I'm still a mawkish man. Nothing wrong with it, except it's dull and cliched, and sometimes, I stalk those younger, fiercer bloggers, and I grind my teeth as I take in their brand detachment and hip cynicism. What I wouldn't give to escape me for a day—oh, begone melancholia! begone velvet drama! begone poetic gaze! Oh, how I deconstruct.

I wonder how many people dissatisfy themselves on a daily basis. I bet it's up there, on the 60-70 percentile. If were more audacious and there's really some money involved, I'd even go for an 80-90 mark and keep my two fingers crossed. But I'm sure it's high enough. Otherwise, there'd be no more development, in both art and technology. Everyone would be just lying around, humming, or staring at the skies, or having unprotected sex.

So I wonder too just how many of those freaks like it that way. Not the bareback, but the pimpin. I mean, on the off chance of a reality show makeover, the number who would go back to their default settings after a month or two. Maybe there's statistics somewhere.

I like to know cause I'm one of those people. I think. Hating oneself is a full-time task, I admit, but it's one I've been remarkably good at and comfortable with lately. If only it pays.

But anyway, I still like to be Bret Easton Ellis for a day. Or Chuck Palahniuk. You know, those gay, fiction people. I want to try edginess on for size, though I doubt it would fit. I still want to know how it feels to have my same-room presence cause sudden, hormonal turbulence in people, just because I'm a dickwad.

These Days

2011-12-10T14:40:00.006+08:00

Words come like ghosts, white and weightless, and I scream sometimes.

I put this on paper and burned it out,

2011-11-28T18:59:00.007+08:00

cause this would be the last:

A white elephant sits on my chest, as I lie in bed. I try to heave, but it pounds on me with all its weight. So I give up. In the meantime, I learn some shades of black. One glimmers like a wet fur. One pale and rough like charcoal. One dry and almost purple like bruise. One's a gradient, and it goes deeper and deeper into black until my eyes give up, like in a cave. In the meantime, all my goals seem impossible, so I force myself with the most immediate: sleep. I count all the elephants in the room: two, seventeen, ninety-three. Guilt grows exponentially. I need to relax. In the meantime, some folks help me out, but they do nothing much, except stick to the lyrics. Fine by me, since I'm usually not in the mood for talk: words are hard to come by these days. So I just shut up, listen, and let them scratch the scabs. I wallow in shame / while you sit there on your throne / when I miss you / I cry. I still do, sometimes. I close my eyes. Amidst the black, I see blots of light, blots that move, scatter, blots like Rorschach-shaped prisms. These past few weeks have been a stretch. I almost, I nearly. In the meantime, I hold on. But at times, I tilt. I obsess over how it is to be blind, to unsee, to have all memory reduced to a shade of black. I left you no home / but your words / they shattered by bones / when I miss you / I cry. At times, I wake up in the middle of the night. I see your eyes fluoresce like a curse.

To roam the earth,

2011-11-16T19:31:00.003+08:00

I must lose the home I know. It has been that way from the beginning. The Levantine corridor, the horn of Africa, roughly two million years ago, long before there are words for things: dépaysement, litost, saudade. The first nomad, barefoot, must have known it clearly: only food is essential,

only that I am alive. Our car travels across the suburban landscape, hued by the afternoon. I look at everything conclusively from a window. Perhaps, there is refuge to be found from such a long history of displacement, of elsewhere. To be lost amidst a multitude of wanderers, their faces, races, names. Amidst just how much has been previously left behind,

as everything closes in behind me, all familiar collapses like a passing dream: trees, a distinct smell of leaves, small roads that lead to rows of bungalows, small establishments, honks from jeepneys, streets with easy names, the unanimous black in the eyes of strangers. I close my eyes and seek the wild: the monarch butterfly, the salmon, the bison. They withstand, they carry on,

and I clench my teeth, pray there is no soul.

And So It Is

2011-11-08T20:09:00.008+08:00

She heads towards Broadway and W 74th, an expected multitude hazy in the background. She looks at the camera at one point, but it's been staring at her, only her, like some of the men, eager, as she passes by. A depth of night in her eyes, that hair — almost black against the luster of afternoon, of her shirt, her skin — that spirals down to her shoulders and then, to such lithe frame. A smallness that seems suspect, cunning. There is something about the vigor in her walk, tidal, but subtle, covert, which only hints on how disingenuous her body is with what it can hold, or does. Perhaps, an indifference that covers ache, or a remnant of rage born out of love, or selfishness from fear. It is difficult to tell. A man somewhere sings I can't take my eyes of you repeatedly, in various frustrated ways, until she disappears from view.

Given she didn't, from the start.

54: Through The Motions

2011-10-29T16:10:00.001+08:00

An empty box gaped at me. Was to leave in a couple of days.

Went on autopilot. Filed all important documents. Filled an old shoebox with mementos: pictures, letters, receipts, tickets. Folded clothes, Ziploced shoes. Handed over all films to a few close friends. All books too, save some fiction, some poetry.

Felt nothing throughout. At least none that settled. As to be expected, everything fleeted away.

Passed the glutted box to aunt Gloria. She weighed it, was within limit. OK. She proceeded, covering its gaps with a big, brown tape, evening out its creases.

Stared at her. Then stared at the box, which was carrying my whole life. Gave out a fat sigh. Felt a bit better than goodbye.

To Be Withheld

2011-10-07T17:47:00.003+08:00

I fear most being forgotten alive. I fear it out of its simplicity. I look at strangers on a train, and am reminded of its ease — the cruelty of memory is in its collapse,

and perhaps soon, I would only be a scent, a syllable in your history. You would stare in his eyes and wonder — Where have they been before?

Weather Report

2011-10-03T06:33:00.002+08:00

Everyone knows this rain does not go away easily. It is everywhere now: plants in your backyard still moist from last night, wet shoes left on the pavement before the door. You play Adele on a loop, convinced she sings of your life. You bawl the chorus, your sister shouts a warning from the bedroom, you lower your voice, your sister curses, you stop. A weatherman talks about some depression strengthened by tomorrow. You brace yourself, sum up your optimism: This is a brand new start,

then you repeat history. You have almost memorized the story, topdown, backwards, from the middle, highlights, footnotes. You pour it out to anyone who still listens. Later, to one of your dogs, to a wall. You discuss options with friends, gyms, boxing, yoga, pescetarianism, veganism, while you drink Coke and triumphantly evade any form of diet. You read the horoscopes, Cancer and Leo. You raise a finger to the stars.

Today, the news gets flooded by your loneliness: tsunami-like waves hit Baywalk, survivors call out for help from rooftops in Bulacan, billions of crop destroyed in Central Luzon and Isabela. The archipelago mourns, understandably so, but it is eager to move on after a few days. Ideally, this is the format of loss: by metaphor, the sun after the storm.

But after the pain is the silence, and after the silence is the echo. It comes and goes, clouds gather for the next one, people take again their umbrellas and raincoats as they head out. You walk over suns drawn by children on the streets, hopeful for a clearing. You look at the eyes of strangers, you beg.

At this point, you have forgone all shame. But what is it exactly, about pride, that saves?

I embrace you

2011-09-16T13:03:00.002+08:00

in your absence, my arms, my hands, their curves, their distance, guided now only by memory. An empty room, remove a few essential things, a bed, some chairs, a table, books, a laptop, tableware, clothes. A morning after. You were to leave, back to your first home. I wanted for you not to go, but I too would.

Instead, I held you. Arms on your stomach, head on your back. I knew too much of your body, its breadth, its warmth,

and now I learn its absence. How deep it sinks. I look at our shadows on the floor. I let the light deceive me one last time.

Epilogue

2011-09-05T04:02:00.001+08:00

When asked, she smiles and shifts to silence.

The person who waits for an answer fills it in himself. His version of the story.

Regardless of the facts, the bottom line is that there is so much pain one can inflict or receive. Funny thing is, sometimes, there is no telling what side one is on. The pain just goes out and in, in and out.

Julia,

2011-08-08T16:38:00.004+08:00

You remain as my cloud. Your voice that soothes me from anger. Your hand with mine, all fingers locked in place, save your thumb that skims that little bump just below thumb and forefinger. In my mind, we were in the balcony of our house, seated on adjacent rocking chairs, looking at a dusky horizon, hands held until sunset. We have braved our nightfall with grace, were old and happy.

This night deepens, and our cab speeds along the streets of a city already asleep, sullen lights, empty roads, closed shops. A few hours from now, the city will hustle on to a new day. But for now, bound by darkness, it is almost still. Still, like you are, while my head rests upon your shoulder and while I sink deeper into this solitude with you, this solace, this silence.

And at this moment, I love you with all a boy can for another boy, and a man another man. I love you as a window to a room, a soul to a body, a shore to a sea. A part of me always leads to you, and I go back, again and again, to grant myself such happiness, such incredible tenderness.

(Happy Birthday love. You are my life.)

Amidst Ruins

2011-07-14T21:58:00.003+08:00

The room was an easy anomaly. On its left was a gallery of dubious x-rays posted on a wall: blacks and whites of indistinct bones. Somewhere below it, a rave party. The new decade was everywhere.

That particular spot, in contrast, was a memento of things past. It had wallpaper, green and white in diamonds and stripes, although torn or peeled off in spots. It reminded of a wallpaper back in Manila, back when I was five. Parts of it already lost adhesive after all the yearly rains, and were already bloated. I peeled off those I could reach. The cuts were never clean, the urge to take it all off never sated.

Easily, the room had an air of nostalgia. A grayscale portrait of what seemed like a lady in a frock hung on the wall, near one of two lamps. The other was also tall and cylindrical and colored the room with a warm yellow, but had a dome top. The first had a flat one.

There was also a huge, wooden cabinet, which stood on a corner. A wooden table and a few chairs filled the remaining space. There was this wooden armchair with a gray padded seat, accented by stripes of orange and darker shades of gray. On it, it was easy to imagine a father seated, a newspaper spread out with both hands. Or perhaps, a mother almost done with a crochet.

Instead, there were him and her. They were far from being these people, who already had slid away from youth, had most of their lives figured out.

Theirs were uncertain. They were callow, and the only world they knew had changed almost overnight. It suddenly lost everything: its grip and beauty, its idealism and rage. Later, historians would call it as the turning point. The past few months sunk with the signs: a decade died, Erich Honecker removed from power, parts of the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall chipped away, and the IGB almost lost its significance.

But that summer night, Berlin, amidst ruins, seemed like the center of the world. They sat along the battered edge of a floor, where the fourth wall should have been. From a distance, one could see marrows of the destroyed edifice, layers of cement and concrete from the remaining walls and floors. From a distance, one could see the room, the wallpaper, the wooden furniture, the portrait, the luminescent lamps.

What remained of the room became their backdrop. He had his blue striped shirt on. She had a red shirt and a black jacket. Her brown hair, at times auburn against the light, was loose, which meant she was in a good mood.

They brought beers, they were alone. At one point, she asked about his mother and he said it might be best to keep things the way they were. Which, in a way, was a question — what should one do when everything familiar collapsed?

Which, in a way, was a matter of choice: past or future. Old or new.

He knew he wanted to move with the changed world. He took his first puff, and he coughed. She looked at him, smiled. She took the cigarette. He looked at her, smiled. Perhaps there were some things that didn't need immediate answers. The camera panned away. At that point, everything seemed dubious save for one. She laughed. He laughed with her.

Despite

2011-07-03T08:17:00.002+08:00

He cracks his fingers, joint by joint, and strains become sound. He dusts off the fallboard with bare hands, lifts it. His movements are slow, deliberate, as if rehearsed, as if he has gone through this before.

He stares at the long alternation of black and white, the stark contrast, the dark and light, and remembers how the world becomes just these couple of colors, these set of chords.

He lowers his hands, lower, stops before hitting a note. He can almost feel these keys, their faint coldness. The room seems to expand with such stillness, and a surge of calm intoxicates him. He closes his eyes, and his fingers begin to run through

her skin, soft, supple, the first note, the progression,

there is this faint smell of apples whenever she is near, second, there are little moles all over her body, a Leo Minor on her back, a Spica at the back of her left ear, Procyon and Gomeisa on her leg, third, fourth, and her hair is the deepest night, fifth, her subtle iridescence in low light. His tempo hastens, his fingers sink deeper into the melody as he has told her, once,

of his recurring dream of a white room inside a house up above a cliff. Everywhere white, pillows, sheets, walls, windows and curtains and floor, punctuated only by view of the clear sea. Always, he was alone. But she was there one time, sleeping on the bed, and he was looking at her, looking. He woke up, his hands shaking. Who knows what it means exactly,

only that there is always something of or about her he does not understand but accepts anyway. Only that she has gone to a lot of his inner rooms, despite neither of them knowing. Only that she is music, she is reverie, she is light.

A Strain of Bones

2011-06-06T15:22:00.003+08:00

At times, what makes sense is to be a completely different man. Own another body, another mind. An other: excluded from my own edges, eclipses. Go through being taken away and erased. Arrive at some other life.

She Was

2011-05-24T18:25:00.002+08:00

1.

I have never been that close to death. Casket, cemetery, embalm, morgue — there was no euphemism in our vocabulary and there was acid in my mouth, black and bitter. He went straight to business, which perhaps was a form of consolation: such times require focus, a sound mind, informed choices. He detailed differences between wood and metal, light and no light. I listened but thought of some furniture, a cabinet, a bed frame, and eventually went with respectable. He reacted cordially, but his eyes gave away. There were better days for both of us.

In a different room, another man started to undress her. That alone was enough for a riot just hours before. Certain changes came abrupt, inescapable, permanent, and at that moment, as he went through her, skin, muscle, bloodstream, all I wanted was tenderness. Him to look at her and find beauty beneath the decades. Father said she was the loveliest woman in her hometown, the kind that begets jealousy, gossip, rage, and I held on to that secondhand image of her glorious youth, and I wanted him to touch her and revive her elegance, her grace. But she was only work, a container of formaldehyde.

When he lifted her up, I saw her back flat as the table where it lied. She became an effigy.

And I was its firstborn's son.

2.

At this moment, it feels as if something has been robbed from me, a part of my body, and its absence, a sudden extra space, seems to be filled with grief. I grieve with a sudden, complete understanding of loss, one that is irreversible, fuck it.

Within these hours, I swing from storm to sun to storm again. It doesn't always rain, but given, how it does.

Up North

2011-05-07T10:15:00.007+08:00

1.

Only the ocean saved: its infinite blue, the strong warm wind it gave away.

Otherwise, drought. Otherwise, a feverish terrain, a looming absence: crop, livestock, farmers. Patches of unused soil that cracked with heat, a landscape almost barren.

If you were there, you would need only to be God. To water the earth with the ocean. To find sense, despite everything.

2.

Our vehicle sped past a nipa hut in the middle of a clear field. I decided to visit it.

We were already in another town when I opened the door and entered.

I took another life — I woke up hours before sunrise and slept by dawn, my skin the color of earth and my hands articulate with it, plow, sow, harvest, my life tied to its fertility, to humility, to only praying for food on the table and strength for another day.

I saw my father, in his youth, a gleam of escape, of distance in his eyes.

In this other town, I drowned in guilt. How ungrateful I have become, and deeply.

History Lesson

2011-04-22T16:26:00.009+08:00

History is thing of adhesion. Arguably stray events become congruent, and later, causal. Let me tell you a story from my childhood. I pedaled a bike on a steep road and days after, I carried a cast. I had a fracture. Years after, I became skilled with wounds. Neglecting them, inflicting them.

History offers a way to forgiveness: the irreversible, irrevocable, could be rewritten. It takes perspective: to see a different bridge after crossing it, to get there, to get by.

I told a friend I hoped for his peace, but what I meant was my own. I remember with clarity, once, the sun seeped through the windows and his shoulder became a puddle of light. Strands of his hair brightened to almost auburn, incendiary, while his face, blank, misled. He had always been a thing of fire.

Now I bask in the ambiguity of the subjunctive. What I would have done. What I didn't.

As It Happens

2011-04-11T15:18:00.005+08:00

These bourgeois nights glitter with hysteria. For example, Victorian chandeliers, gold trimmings on pearl walls. For example, words like panache, insouciant, flaneur and soliloquy from casual conversations that fill the carpeted halls. For example, drapes of linen that suggest that the first order for this dinner is to sit firmly, back straight, feet adjoined and lain flat on the floor,

like the boy who always waited silently for his supper, chewed politely and left nothing on the plate as he was told, as was said of proper conduct. Proper,

like how one must cautiously unfold this carefully bleached and pressed table napkin under the table before placing it on the lap, like how one must eat from the exquisite china with the correct utensils, with this spoon for the hors d'oeuvre, the fork and knife for the mutton and this other spoon for the soufflé. A waiter approaches and cordially asks, and one says Malbec, with such tenderness often mistaken for love.

But of course, there is no love. There is only the program that begins in a few minutes, there is the actor from the intermission play who includes Trufautt in the punchline, and there are people who laugh, although the joke, as it appears, is something else.

Redemption

2011-04-05T16:50:00.002+08:00

I dream of the restless wave, persistent, anguished. Besides air, only water must not be contained. It lives for the land, to flow, to pour, to seep, and the wave knows all this, the motions, the paths, the transit, all of it written on its body, like memory, like instinct.

Understand its rage then, its loneliness, when it learns, soon enough, that it is bound to live in the middle of sea, too far from the shore, with only the sky, its mirror, as company. It doesn't even have to figure out what it needs to need, only the lack that must be filled, the depth, the urgency, and the madness necessary to save itself.

Tell Me Of Error

2011-03-29T18:40:00.002+08:00

Except what we act against, take
tantamount to sin. Tell me of sin

when we choose silence
over slipping, over incoherence, and a thorn

grows within, multiplies. Tell me of fear
as you skim off my ambiguities, find clarity

despite the inadequate vocabulary of my body,
my hermetic tongue. Tell me

please: There is forgiveness,
I can withstand knowing.

Ang Maging Isang Alon

2011-03-18T19:29:00.002+08:00

Natatanggay ako ng agos ng mga bagay — ang lumuluksong oras, ang mga ingay sa kumakaripas na lungsod, mga bumubusina at rumaragasang sasakyan, trisikel, jip, mga taong naglalakad papauwi, mga sigawan ng kalakal. Sa rabaw, madaling paniwalaan na may tunguhin ang lahat.

Kamakailan, nakita ko na naman ang dagat. Ang halos payapa nitong mukha, ang kalawakan na lagpas sa aking tanaw. Humampas ang mga alon sa aking paa, sa aking binti. Pumalaot ang dating mga asam.

Iba ang dagat sa aking gunita: marahas, mapuot, nangangalit. At sa ngayon, ako ang alon sa kalagitnaan: ang nangangarap ng pampang, sumasalpok sa kung saan-saan, lumulundag at bumabagsak sa kinalalagyan.

Nais kong itapon ang lahat, magsimulang muli, maging malinaw sa aking tahakin. Bumukas ang pinto, narito ang lahat ng iniwan ko noong gabi. Ang mga silyang halos hindi ko inuupuan, ang mga basong hindi nahugasan, ang mga librong hindi nabubuklat. Sa bahay ng isa, maigting ang pananatili, ang himpil, ang pinid na araw-araw.

Nais kong marating ang mga sulok ng mundo. Nais kong kumilala ng mga taong payak sa asal at bukal sa dunong at walang pagmamalaki. Nais kong umuwi ng pagod at puno ng galak, sapagkat sinubukan kong iusod ang mundo tungo sa kaunlaran, kahit gaano kaliit, kahit gaano katagal. Nais kong kumawala sa mga pangil ng lungsod, komersiyalismo, globalisasyon, mga imbentong pangangailangan ng merkado, sa pataasan ng ihi. Nais kong lumalim.

Nais kong gumawa ng sarili kong agos, humulma ng sariling dalampasigan. Dapat, hindi pa huli ang lahat.

To Love

2011-02-27T15:55:00.002+08:00

1.

A sadness enters as you leave. Your absence transforms into something concrete, something I can almost touch. An empty side of the bed. The dying smoke of a cigarette on an ashtray. Walls becoming bigger with silence.

Afternoons, when I awake and time snails before the night and I am hollow. I endure the wait, the distance. I recall your embrace to get through, how you try eagerly to fit into my body, your head on my shoulder, your chest against mine, your hands on my back, your fingers meandering along its length. We stay silent, fastened, and I become whole.

2.

And vulnerable, as consequence. The part of me you own is brittle, and I have long permitted you to hurt me if and as you please. Now I understand the fear in the eyes of past lovers — that foretelling of a certain death, one where only a part of us dies, completely, irrevocably, while those that remain wobble and ache for a lifetime. That is my fear.

3.

I lie in bed with some of your ladies. We have them to a minimum because there are neighbors, and you tell a story as one of them moves from first line to chorus. I haven't been to Barbados, she says, and it was after a gig in a bar and there was some fan with some fetish, he had a gun and asked her to sing and raped her.

You play another, relate it to two other tracks, also about sobriety. They seem like a trilogy, you say, one continues another until a sad story becomes whole. I am fascinated with how much these songs mean to you, how you see through line after line, decipher, attain clarity. Sometimes, I feel you do it to me, break me into fragments, take a closer look, and piece me up again, and I see myself in a different light, I come to understand myself deeper.

4.

With you, I have learned that love is finite and immense, as the ocean, the sky, and I have learned to carry this expanse, with your distance and proximity, your music and silence, in the light and dark of things, and despite my frailty. It has been like a shadow, I suppose. I have it everywhere I go.

To Have A Home

2011-01-24T12:49:00.002+08:00

I dream of walls. Of colors, olive, that shade of melancholia, of autumn, and ochre, that shade of past, withered leaves of books decades old, letters sealed and unsent. I dream of space, its vastness, its utility, I dream of somewhere as my own. I want to know this freedom, I want to take a walk in the middle of the night without worrying about practical excuses, I want to sing without being scolded, I want to have cigarettes for breakfast, at any time, in my bed, in my kitchen, in my bathroom, I want to watch movies loudly, I want you to sleep beside me on any given day.

Beside a window, there is a picture, a screenshot from a favorite film, its colors a nod to the motif. A girl eats strawberries stuck at the tip of her fingers, and at that moment, only eight are left. A dark wood frames it. A few more pictures, some poseur attempts at photography, scatter on the walls. Somewhere, there is a wooden table, and on top of it, a lamp, a few books to be finished, and a recent draft. Writing thrives in the luxury of solitude, of silence, and there is no deeper gratification than to avail of it, even if it means certain inconveniences of independence, bills, DIYs. I want it as it is.

The window opens to a view of the city. In the morning, there is not much to see, save dust, smoke and cement. But imagine it at night. The stars descending unto the earth, the scattered lights punctuating the still black. There is a trade in everything.

Autumn

2010-12-06T06:45:00.002+08:00

Your hand falls from the doorknob, now locked, now the world is away, now it is only us. You look at me, and words fall someplace else, on some pit of silence, as they become unnecessary, as you take a step, another, closer, the low echo of your footsteps I count in reverse, seven, six, five,

and, in anticipation, I fall, into the bed, into a time when I was naïve and optimistic and eager to be touched, four, three, two,

and your lips, then the whole of your body, fall into mine. There is something about you that sadness cannot withstand, something that makes my body easy and light, like a leaf falling unto earth.

You are earth. I fall and you claim,

I crumble and seep through, to be a part of you.

35: On autopilot the past few weeks.

2010-11-02T08:57:00.004+08:00

Days run swift and easy, something that needs getting used to. My default is everything else except chill, and this has got to change.

The topic of transitions come to mind often recently. Something changes within us as we move from one place to another, one disposition to the next. I take this as adaptation, or better yet, congruence. I used to hate long travel hours. Now I do a couple everyday. I used to avoid blogging about myself. Now, this.

Maybe this is life, a constant movement from one state to something else. It doesn't have to be better, just something different after a while. Nor does it have to be an overhaul, since a few minor adjustments here and there go a long way.

Speaking of overhauls, I am doing one on my closet. My wardrobe is oldskool. I need a few more cut-offs to have it recognizably revamped, but I have covered some of the basics. I am happy.

Funny how easy it is to talk mundane. Oh, and gratifying too. The wiser ones did not inform me earlier that depth is a bore sometimes.

34: Suddenly, I have a life.

2010-10-14T03:28:00.003+08:00

Deadlines, interviews, papers to accomplish. A few hours from now is first to a new work, and I slept at seven, only to wake up, completely energized, roughly four hours after. Call it excitement. I call it a busted sleeping schedule.

And just so we are clear. No, I don't consider work as remotely equatable to life, and no, I have nothing against people who do. It is just that now, I have concrete and conventional bases in saying I am preoccupied. Because I really am, in a way. I am more focused too, in a way, more oriented about the future, its path and its stretch.

Lately, for example, I have more time with my Julia, thanks to things worth celebrating. A birthday, a recovery, a job, a month. This does not happen often, at least not in the past, and I don't think people will see our dates as spectacular. I don't. Often, they are just simple dine outs. But they mean to me, and they mean a lot.

If there is something I learned from him — yes, Julia is a code, you are not confused — it is to take things easy, to find worth in the conventional, the expected. That there is something valid and valuable in living life uncinematically, in being two people doing completely normal things, watching a movie, eating dinner, talking about the mundane details of our separate everydays. As an afterthought, what made certain past relationships pass was this consuming need to explode, pun intended, to live love as a form of madness, feeding and feeling each moment as if it is the last, until it becomes so.

There is no saying how long this will last, but there is a strange assurance in being sane. Though I have not been thoroughly accustomed to it, it makes the distant future more conceivable. I always had this belief that the people who remain are those who made you consider the opposite. Now, ladies, I have proof.

33: There is something I miss in writing.

2010-10-05T00:07:00.003+08:00

In particular, the sponteniety allowed in the Narrative of the Everyday, the Quintessential Personal Blog Post. I have been, for a time now, laboriously writing about other people, fictional ones. And despite sounding mawkish and irrational, I have this suspicion that they are alive, somewhere, far from where I am.

Speaking of distance, I have come to believe that what makes an effective post, or literature in general, is its capacity to bridge the gap, to open up some space for intimacy; the posts I have thoroughly enjoyed were those that made me feel as if someone was right beside me, speaking.

I remember a scene from The History Boys, a film by Nicolas Hytner tailored to those who like their men illegally young and unusually intelligent. It involves Posner, one of the high school students, having a class with Hector, a teacher. They were talking about a poem, I forgot what, and the conversation lead to the older one saying

The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

the hand being, sadly, more figurative than literal. Maybe I am oldschool, but this holds true for me in blogging. It is being shocked, then awed, after stumbling upon something so familiar, something almost like a secret, there written by someone you haven't even met, possibly never will.

There is comfort in that, of course. One that, I suspect, comes from having fulfilled this need to connect, to feel less alone. A few days ago, I came across this article about a planet in a neighbor solar system resting on what astronomers call, endearingly, The Sweet Spot: a distance not too far or near a host star, just right for life to exist. It fascinated me that certain scientists have spent their lives trying to answer just one fundamental question. Are we alone?

I see blogging, or writing in general, as a different approach to the same issue, the same loneliness. Here in my room, in the middle of the night, life is almost absent. But I have Word open, I have words. And I brim with hope that someone, on some distant place, will read this and call it his own.

Julio Takes the First Step

2010-09-27T02:48:00.006+08:00

Had it been any other man, it would have been easy, natural even. But him. He, now the patron saint of the muted, what is there to be done? He looks east without moving his head, painfully slow, his eyes like feet tiptoeing in the darkness. Then they stop. He becomes a statue.

He holds his breath. He doesn't see her. He estimates her distance. Three, maybe four tables.

A small crowd, three, now four couples, gathers at the center. A woman laughs as she pats her partner at the back for his daring. The gramophone begins to play. A band — a piano, a violin, perhaps also a clarinet — bursts into life, each instrument singing its own keys of longing. Pairs begin to move along an imaginary orbit, except for a couple who, almost fixed at a spot, swing sideways, softly, both already dazed, lost in their embrace, lost in the song,

Me acobardó la soledad

y el miedo enorme de morir lejos de ti

the lines echoing within him as cruel reminder. It was not more than a month, she was buying oranges. It was the first time he saw her, the first time he was savagely reminded of his mortality. She was holding a fruit, squeezing it, and at that moment, he became pulp. Flesh at the brink of exploding.

El corazón me suplicó

que te buscara y que le diera tu querer —

He stands up, fights the wobble on his knees. He faces her, looks at her. In an instant, she becomes light. The rays of sun waking him up from sleep, the flickering fire of a candle that guides him against a charcoal night. He closes his eyes. Exhales.

When she is still there, I will come to her. Slowly, he opens.

Y ahora que estoy frente a ti

Parecemos, ya ves, dos extraños

She sits still, her head bowed down. The chairs across her are already empty. She looks at her hands resting on her lap, hums with the music.

Señorita. She looks up, finds a man, dark, his hair brushed back, his right hand open for her. He stands straight, composed, but the fear in his eyes gives him away. For a few minutes, they remain looking at each other. Her eyes are the color of shadow, luminous under the moonlight.

Ofelia, she says.

Allusion

2010-09-20T19:00:00.015+08:00

What happens between us remains a secret, since only I can ever know your hands and only you can ever know what this means. Everyone else is foreign to your tenderness, your fingers barely touching the small of my back as it slides towards your home, and how I claim you, solely, this way. It is within these little things — along the discovery, the finite gap between us — where we have come to understand the part of us lost in the other, the part we continuously reclaim and give back, out of love.

I have told you once that I find it difficult to pen the present and immediate past, to distance myself, to move into an imaginary plane or future to find contrast, and consequently, perspective. I have been used to expounding an afterthought, distilling the actual. There is crudeness in that, I realize now as I make this, since I tend to let go of things that made something beautiful, even if just for a time, for the sake of consistency or logic.

At this moment, only remembering is important. The early morning, the thick, white sheets, the sun slowly peeking through the curtains. The glass door, the small balcony, the numerous fixtures of light within the room, how I play with them for a time, while you sleep — how calm you look, how breathtaking you are when completely unaware that someone is looking. How you are me and I am you, how kissing and fucking and cuddling and talking are all the same, ways in which you can be nearest, near enough, as I need you to be. How all these are things of now, because I am never ready to let them go.

The Difference

2010-09-16T01:27:00.005+08:00

For a book of 180 pages, it was easy to suspect a strong amount of restraint from Jose Eduardo Agualusa in A Book of Chameleons. And there was, but it came with a compromise.

Agualusa included a wide variety of themes, from reincarnation and the memory of past lives to the sociopolitical climate of the '90s post-colonial Angola, and from the life of Jorge Luis Borges to the correspondence of dreams and reality, even to the fluidity of identity. And given the length in which he decided to jam everything, it came as no surprise that most of these themes became more ornamental than integral.

Take the nature of the narrator. It was a gecko, a house pet of the protagonist Felix Ventura. Which isn't a problem in itself, save it sounded more like a literary expert than a reptile, with its casual references to, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Shakespeare. Agualusa, the smart aleck, mentioned why:

It's been nearly fifteen years that my soul has been trapped in this body, and I'm still not used to it. I lived for almost a century in the skin of a man, and I never managed to feel altogether human either.

It was unnerving, not because it was an extremely articulate animal with a level of self-awareness and literary understanding uncommon even to humans, but because the discord raised questions of purpose: Why, then, a gecko? Why not, say, a tarantula or a fly? Or why not just use an omniscient narrator? And why on earth does it have to talk about Paulo Coelho when it was supposed to be Jorge Luis Borges?

Allow me to explain.

Agualusa mentioned in an interview that the gecko was a reincarnation of Borges. Borges died in 1986, a year before The Alchemist, the book that catapulted Coelho into international acclaim, was first published. Granted, the character mentioned that he has never read a Coelho before, but history alone would tell that he never could have. Granted, it wasn't exactly Borges who nonchalantly name-dropped but his reptilian reincarnate, which, at least in the universe of this fiction, could have heard about him in its life, but still. Something remains hideous and suspect about all this.

And this is so because the novel fails to form a cohesive whole, with each integrated element serving an individual and essential purpose. Most of its thematic components, though quite interesting in theory, remain thinly explored, and consequently, wanting in their raisons d'être.

At its best, A Book of Chameleons is clever book, if only because it somehow manages to reason out, to reason away its dubious aspects, as exemplified by the quote above. But it is not brilliant. In the latter, the flaws make the story.

Allusion

2010-09-06T08:43:00.008+08:00

I know only that I know. It was how I have imagined it. And now, calmness. A silence not wanting. There are so many things that could be said. Particulars. But this is enough. This is exact. This morning, I sleep with clarity that needs so little words.

In The Company of Strangers

2010-08-17T05:18:00.007+08:00

I have the ticket in my hand. The train moves along. I begin.

Near the door is THE SKIMPY YOUNG MAN WITH LARGE GLASSES AND ULTRATIGHT JEANS who buys books he will never read. It is his little secret ritual—

He removes the plastic, peels the ugly price sticker at the back, delicately, rubs out the little that remains of the adhesive. He opens the book in the middle, glides his right thumb through the fore edges, and the warm smell of paper wafts. Words and phrases leap from the leaves and beckon.

He likes that act, that prelude to reading, because at that point everything is beautiful as a promise. He has come to know that expectation is a double-edged sword, and that open-ended films aren't so bad after all. At the end of the day, what counts is how you make things work for you. He keeps the books, barely touched, stacked nicely in a shelf.

Across him, THE SMALL MAN WITH UNKEMPT HAIR AND A SHIRT THAT SAYS I'MPOLITE leaves notes in books as a hobby. He is indiscriminate as to where: on libraries, on thrift shops, on bookstores, on kiosks that sell cheap, romance pocketbooks. His only requirement is that the book must have already been opened. Removing the plastic takes a lot of time, adds too much inconvenience to a simple, two-step process: find a page, leave a note. For instance,

IT'S OKAY IF YOU READ

NEITZSCHE. THE SAVIOUR

STILL LOVES YOU.

I REALLY HOPE YOU LIKE

THIS TOO. THERE'S TERRIFIC

SEX ON PAGE 127.

which are quite good examples of his sarcasm. He is bent on fiction, novels in particular, since they usually outnumber everything else. And because he likes imagining the authors—a man, a woman, some youth—each of them slumped on a desk, with a white paper, asking too many questions, silently, by themselves. What happens next? What now? What beauty it would be to live inside the minds of these people, to live inside a world that revolves around a plot.

Sometimes, he sees the notes as his own bread crumbs, the way blood stains are to a serial killer. Long after he has left, someone would lift his head and scan the scenery—who could have done it?—and believe that someone has already been there, inside that fictive world.

In the seat near the opposite end of the carriage, the one attached to the conjoining tunnel that remind of bandoneóns, is THE WOMAN IN A SHORT GREEN DRESS WHO LOOKS STONED. She likes raising her hands against light bulbs, the shapes they make on walls. Once she finds the perfect spot, her fingers begin to take a life of their own, frequently as animals. A stationary dog waiting for his owner to come home from work. An eagle in the height of flight, looking down on a clueless prey. A deer with massive antlers graceful by just standing there and looking at a far distance.

When she was 8, her mother took her to see a shadow theater in a local fair. The play was about the beautiful daughter of the sultan, held captive by a big, ferocious beast in his island lair. At night, it was said that the lady would sing her mother's lullaby, partly out of loneliness and partly out of hope, that a young, brave fisherman would hear it. But no one did. Centuries later, fisherfolk who live near the island still attest to hearing a faint voice in the middle of the ocean, sweet but sullen, calling in the stillness of the night.

Maybe it was that story that lured her as a little girl. Or the strings of dim light bulbs that looked like fireflies, little glowing holes in the dark. Or the intricate cutouts reflected on the white cloth, and how everything was reduced to black and white: silhouette against screen, good against evil, love against seclusion.

Or maybe the shadows were enough. Those beautiful stains on a surface, those dark images that are from her, tied to her, that are her, but are also something else, something that lives between light and shade—aren't they enough to captivate a child?

THE MAN WHO JUST CAME IN, WHO HAS PALE PINK LIPS AND A SHORT HAIR HEAVILY TRIMMED ON THE SIDES is a stealth photographer. And for good reasons: his obsession is to capture the uninhibited and the mundane, like those of animals in their own habitat.

There is a room in his apartment that is kept locked, specifically from women who spend the night. Most don't notice, but some of those who've stayed longer, long enough to meander and discover, ask. He always answers

I'M GONNA HAVE TO SHOOT YOU FIRST BEFORE I TELL.

which, almost always, is half a lie. Save a few whom he eventually saw as misjudgments, all of them have already been shot—in the middle of the night, while they were sleeping. They populate the walls behind the closed door, naked or half-naked, in different pretzeled positions on his bed, tied to the sheets, oblivious to his camera.

But there are others. Everyday employees rushing to work, crossing the street, hailing a cab, taking out the keys from their shoulder bags, waiting for the next shuttle, in high heels and eyeliners and heavy lipstick and power dresses. Lookbookish women laughing or reading in between sips of macchiato, on cafes that typically play soft, jazz music. College students in small flocks, looking at the incoming train. Beach girls, armored with suntans and swimsuits and shades, who make the heat a little more bearable for him.

And every once in a while, a thing of exquisite beauty, a woman who unknowingly makes his hands tremble as he takes her, with a click.

Then, my stop. The doors open to a pop and a hiss. As I go out with the crowd, I think about the person I become in the story of someone else. I wish I could tell him that I want to be someone who once looked for a hole on the wall of an ancient, Angkor temple to confess:

because outside fiction, I am nothing but a fearful man.

Lost Things

2010-07-28T00:39:00.007+08:00

It was a game, one with basic instructions—

Closer. Put your hand here. Come, hold it.

I was obedient; it was the charm of permitted misdemeanor. I looked him in the eye, took what was not mine. For a moment, I had him in my hand,

and years after, the world I knew collapsed. This is why life happens: causality, irrevocability.
Touch move—

I only knew that it felt different. Slow. His fingers quivered slightly. It meandered. We were within the grip of each other. My instinct was against continuing. I should have walked away.
Instead.

I began to learn the body. Its nuances, its vocabulary. His fingers brushing my hair, down to the neck. The length of him tightening. His closed eyes, his open mouth. All synonymous with my tongue, slithering

as I, years after, have done on others. On occasions, I carry on knowing that every man is a repetition. I take it in, deliver,

the hours after school, the smell of wood and cement, the liberty and rush from not knowing, his silence— remained

in silence. Soundless, my thigh between his, his arm beneath my neck, he slept not knowing.

I met him inside a theater. Cheap, ruined on parts, but vast, elaborate. Beautiful and forgotten. I feel that way sometimes— to have lived past the glamour, men coming in out of need and convenience, to choose this over absence. He followed me outside, invited me over.

It was my first. Inside an unfamiliar home, on a bed, almost naked, a man by my side. A stillness, a wave of tranquility. His steady warmth. The slow rise and fall of his chest, his stomach. Everything.

How do you approach the sublime without blindness? How do you confront such beauty without crumbling?

The morning after, he cooked breakfast. I saw a picture of his own family, before I left.

Soon, I learned about his daughter. They named her Elianne, the daughter of the sun. He would sometimes walk past my house, see me, smile. Brief exchanges.

He had his light. There is not much left to say.

To Lost Things

2010-06-08T02:45:00.017+08:00

Forgive my memory, beloved; it is not built to persist. It is an ant, miniscule, blinded, guided only by what needs to be accomplished for the moment.

In other words, it is present, but never past, however immediate. Yes, I went home and slept, the keys unplaced inside the glass jar, the door left slightly askew, your repeated reminders already a faint echo in the morning. But if I can argue against your now inflamed remarks, all you need to know is simply,

I thrive where time and space are poetry: never linear, never the safety of order, as what remains missing

is the one essential.

Default

2010-06-03T05:45:00.003+08:00

You are me, in this regard. You followed the format:
(1) Take a snapshot of yourself. Know your angle, the proper lighting. Tilt your head to accentuate and hide the necessaries.
(2) Get bold. Literally.
(3) Focus on your target market. Specify:
a. Favorite films include: Central Do Brasil, Cidade De Deus, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso,
b. Favorite books include: History of Sexuality: I, II, and III, M. Foucault; One Hundred Years of Solitude, G. Marquez; Orientalism, E. Said; To the Lighthouse, V. Woolf,

because you need someone you who knows these things, someone you can talk to, who understands. But what is out there, Mr. Complex? Save all these messy, little details inside your head — some become stories, some status messages, some a waste of language —

Those pictures, those profiles. This is how you must feel like, as you scan all those men: a child outside a candy store, peeking, but never having the guts to get in.

Or simply: you are there and I am here, nurturing our individual solitudes.

Triptych

2010-04-13T03:14:00.032+08:00

I: HOMAGE

What if we had met there instead?

Where exactly? I was all over the continent. Name a city.

Something less conventional. You included Vienna?

Yes. Last September.

Suppose I was rich enough too.

Well. It probably was on a train. You took one of the adjacent seats.

Don't cheat. People don't meet out of adjacency these days. It's too easy, too fairy-tale.

I don't settle for anything less.

Okay, kill me now.

No, seriously.

Okay. Considered. What was your A game?

I made a compliment. That worked.

No, sorry. Did you just get a haircut? was just lame.

Funny I'm here right now.

We were in a bar. I was drunk. And I was desperate. And I don't act easy on some Euro—

Desperate. What's that suppose to mean?

I waited for you to look back. For five hours.

Wow. That seems believable.

Fine. So we met on a train. But change the pick-up line. Something more compelling. Perhaps something romantic, to go with the setting.

Thought you weren't a fan.

Still not. But at least we get to be coherent.

Wait. What has that got to do with it?

It's a hypothetical. We need coherence.

Well, how about us reading? I could have asked said something about the book you were on. You know, feigned interest.

I thought you don't read?

I do. I just don't open much about it to strangers. Last I did we ended up too depressed over Celan to fuck.

Oh. My condolences. When was this?

Probably a couple of years ago. Big mistake.

Why do it to me then?

Cause we're fiction. We could choose a happy ending.

Ilahas

2010-03-15T12:02:00.008+08:00

Laging tali ang ganda sa isang dahas—ang mundo sa bigwas ng Kanyang salita, ang tula sa pagkadurog ng wika, ang obra sa pagbulusok ng kulay sa katsa. Mula sa kanyang silid sa sanatorium, tanaw ang langit na tadtad ng mga matang nagmamasid sa kanyang karamdaman, asul ang mundo: asul ang papikit na lungsod, asul ang mga burol na nakahiga sa hindi kalayuan. Malalim ang pagod sa lahat ng kanyang nakikita, liban sa himpapawid na umaalimpuyo, na parang nangangalit na dagat, patiwarik na binabagtas

ang lalim ng gabi. Minsan, umupo ka sa aking tabi at umalma ang dagat sa aking dibdib, nilamon ang payapa. Halos nadurog ako ng payak mong mga galaw: ang tikom mong pag-abang ng masasakyan, ang pagtanaw mo sa mga bus na dumaraan. Rumagasa ang mga kataga sa aking isip—

ibig kong humupa, ibig kong lumapit ng hindi nagigimbal, sapagkat pinid ako at mangmang sa iyong harapan, ibig kong uminom sa mga bukal ng iyong mga mata, ibig kong matulog sa iyong talukap, magising na isang alikabok na nakahiga sa iyong balikat, o sa iyong kamay, sa basal mong kamay—

na pinipilit kong amuhin, pinipilit kong iusal ang payapang bumabalot sa'yo, ang dalisay na tahimik, ang walang malay mong pagkamkam ng ganda, nang hindi ginagamit ang sariling mga sumamo, mga pangangailangan.

Kinailangan ang tao upang amuhin ang lahat ng ilahas. Ang mga isda sa dagat, ang mga ibon sa himpapawid, ang bawat nilalang na gumagalaw sa lupa. Sinakop niya ang lahat gamit ang wika, pinaloob sa kanyang mundo sa pamamagitan ng pagpapangalan: isa kang isda, isa kang ibon.

Isa siyang hibang matapos putulin ang piraso ng kanyang tainga upang malimot si Gauguin. Ngunit anong pinagkaiba ng literal sa metaporikal—ang pagputol ng sarili mula sa nakaraan, sa isang alaala?

Naalala kita habang binabagtas ko ang kahabaan ng daan papauwi. Ikaw ang ubod ng mundo, ang nananalaytay sa binhi ng mga bagay: mula sa mauugat na kalye ng lungsod, sa matatayog na gusali sa hindi kalayuan, sa mayayabong na kamay ng gabi, sa hitik kong pangungulila.

Sa gitna ng kaguluhan, tulad nitong sa akda, naroon ang ating hangad na matagpuan ang ayos, ang saysay. Nabuo tayo upang lagyan ng balangkas ang magulong mundo, ang lahat ng bagay dito. Nabuo tayo upang dakpin ang mga lagalag na hayop, at malaon, ang lagalag na ganda. Ang ilan sa atin, pilit binibihag ang bighani, gamit ang isang tula, ang isang pinta. At anung labis ng hagupit, labis ng pait, ang pagtupad sa ganitong takda, ganitong akda, ganitong pangangailangan.

Minsan, nais kong maging isang ibon. Ilahas, buhay na sa paghuni sa umaga.

Do.

2010-03-12T09:42:00.008+08:00

The final act of leaving is not the goodbye or moving away. It is the silence that grows until it is absolute, until one is replaced by an empty space. For a while, I eagerly believed I had left. Completely, without a trace.

But I keep coming back. I need a constant, one I can revolve in, evolve in, love. I have found that in writing, the kind that trespasses the self. One that is flawed, inconsistent, repetitive, and immensely honest. Who am I to let it go?

But there must be some changes. I must go back to the start, to my initial reasons. I have transgressed, I have transformed into a magician, pulling cards out of my sleeve, making spectacles before an audience. I have written to impress, and there have been consequences. People were awed, people gave me credit for an act, me needing more because it became an obsession, and because I grew hollow. And I deserved it, because it was what I asked for.

I have accepted that writing thrives in the sheer selfishness of the individual, entwined with certain grand assumptions of necessity: this must be written; only I could write this. But I must unlearn the impulse of wanting anything other, if I am to write for the pleasure of it, write with honesty.

The Ache of Opposites

2010-03-02T22:27:00.004+08:00

In the view of my architect, I am the other: a body for contrast, to better understand his own. How it moves against or gives way to another in confined spaces. How it responds to touch. How his fingers quiver, though slightly, while he measures my leg from ankle up, until he arrives at the crossroad, teasing the rain to come, to drip: on his tongue, his lips, his hand. He likes me moist when he is here.

Otherwise, he is elsewhere. The city needs him in the morning. It needs to rebuild itself, to move on, to feel new again. When he asks, I tell him come when you can, because I understand. But I fix the bed after dawn, wait for the usual sounds: the engine dying down, the keys shuffling, heavy feet against wooden staircases, knocks on the bedroom door. Then, an opening. Something going askew.

In a distant room, he looks at the lines articulating the plan. Precise measurements, specifications, intersections. One thing must attach to another, without error, without gap. Here, when our bodies lock, when he presses himself against my back, the fit isn't always quite: thus force, thus hurt. He looks at the draft, tells the other man in the room that section A needs revision. I must tell him certain parts of me can never be repaired, once he comes back. I can fix it, he says.

Geography

2010-02-23T15:23:00.015+08:00

I loved traveling when I was young. There, between the covers, I went from one country to another, staying longer on certain favorites: France, Switzerland, Côte d'Ivoire, Maldives. And since America was MTV cool back then,

on all its 51 states, listing them down on a piece of paper, alphabetically, keeping in mind that Dakota had a North, Virginia had a West, and Arkansas had a Kansas, but without the last s.

In my book, Serbia and Montenegro was still Yugoslavia; the German wall had been destroyed, the halves already a whole; and the USSR had already collapsed, Russia bearing new boundaries as an aftermath–Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan. How easy it was to see things as facts, and not fiction; as names and numbers, and not detailed stories about conflicting ideologies, Holocaust, Gulags, genocides. The earth was flat, its pages glossy, the pictures without so much as a hint of violence, as was deemed befitting a child.

Unaware, I became brutal to the world, dividing it: per continent, land area, population and population density, per capita GNP, my young mind only particular with the statistics, the ranks–China was the largest country, Switzerland had the highest per capita GNP, Mexico had one of the densest populations–blinded by my own ignorance about their implications.

But even without much understanding, even with barely knowing love and war, I was able to conquer it. There, in our tiny sala, I had the whole world, in my hands.

II.

What saved us were these little games of adventure and make pretend. Somehow, we never really got over Peter Pan and Indiana Jones and The Never Ending Story, that we became each other's tunnel to a lost world. I need your hand to be my compass, I said.

You're a map, then.

No, I'm a labyrinth.

But you're too easy to figure out.

That's because you always view things from the top.

That's because I am.

Somehow, we also never ran out of reasons to fuck language until we're dry. It was always a ménage à trois, just the way you liked it. I liked it too, because I always had to be versa: you topping me and I, the dirty talk. You dragged me east of the bed, spread my legs like you owned them, and went deep, like I was a tunnel

to a lost world, some place you occasionally visited and brought me to, while I brought on the cuss and the names and the adjectives and the onomatopoeia, which made sense to both of us

as sounds that departed from syntax, as a crude articulation of some sensual imagery, much like poetry, but without the meandering, the mulling. I told things as they happened, or as they should: there, deeper, harder. Yeah.

We could have conquered the world with our words, you and I, but we were much too busy naming one of our own, much too busy knowing each other's topography: you have five moles on your balls, I have one on my left, a tiny scar on my ankle, your right ear slightly bigger, your eyes that remind me of Peter Sarsgaard and hurt me when you cry, my dark nipples that you like to eat when hungry because they remind you of bitter chocolate, and I laugh because we could always be like this, lost boys who've found a neverland.

Don't.

2010-02-18T13:09:00.003+08:00

What I fear, came. I hurt people. Hurt, as I am. My hands have become articulate with pain, inflicting it, scratching where it burns the most.

I told you not to come close. It was a direct forewarning, not some coy strategy that meant otherwise. You caught me at a bad time.

Granted, I miss me, the younger, more optimistic, more naïve. But I miss a lot of things, just because I can never have them back.

Know that I am novelty, some new shiny plaything that piques your interest, fits your hands. So when that wears off, which should be anytime now, you would see me as I myself: a pocketknife, handy for the killing.

Lullaby

2010-02-15T11:15:00.014+08:00

I have come to know tenderness through the hollow of your hands, the little gap on your open mouth, your evening hair, earthen skin,

while you lay still, your eyes closed, unaware of how light you have made me, how immense, how fragile. Like a solitary cloud, I skim through the landscape of your body knowing this expanse is mine, and mine alone. Only the wind

knows what to make of this: wherever it goes is home,

is an escape from gravity, similar

to how I have eluded reason just now. Suddenly, I am nowhere and everywhere, I am center and I am north, as you rest between my thighs and along my torso, and further, into the height of my stillness, my breath. I am buoyed as you sleep on my body, calm as this minute is almost silent,

almost purified of words. I trace the trench on your back, from below,

like a salmon swimming upstream, immersed in that flight, that sudden burst of life, shortly before dying. Except, I do not. I persist, towards you.

Arnold,

2010-02-08T10:28:00.007+08:00

I miss you.

It has been a long time, hasn't it? If I remember correctly, we last saw each other 12 years ago, during graduation. I vaguely remember a few instances of correspondence, me being informed that you were already taking up Psychology.

But how are you now? Who are you now? Or–because some of us don't really change as people–what has transpired between then and now?

If I were to be asked that question, I'd probably resort to some cliché, saying something like a lot, which means nothing, really. I am essentially the same, though certain dispositions have changed. For instance, like how I interact with people, who I interact with. I believe I'm becoming more of a misanthrope the most recent months, my growing disdain of people an offshoot of my increasing need and want for solitude, and beliefs such as I already have all the friends I need and I'm ready to live and grow alone.

I remember you being the more insular, back in high school. You always had that quality, I believe, because you seem to have (1) recognized your individuality, your eccentricity, at the time when being a part of the herd was all that mattered to most people; (2) understood that talking to people, explaining yourself to others was exhausting and almost futile, as it required courage, patience, respect and open-mindedness, values that most people can't easily provide themselves; and (3) enjoyed the peace and quiet solitude had provided you with.

I also remember how intense you were. That you would crumple your draft after committing even the slightest mistake on your essay or painting. That you had a hissy fit once, shouting at our classmates (and even throwing chairs, if my memory was precise) when they humiliated another. That you idolized Jether because he had the right amount of cool and suave and nonchalance, qualities you didn't really have.

Back then, you already had the temperament of an artist, a deep attachment to certain things that frequently caused anger, disdain, frustration. Do you still have all of these in you?

On my end, the aspects of myself that remained, those that have sunk into my core, have appeared differently on the surface. I still am a sentimentalist, still am passionate, still love poetry above everything else, and still write every once in a while, but I am not as transparent about these things as I was before. Though I frequently find myself nowadays hardly touched by things, those that affect me, affect me deeper than before. I don't write poems anymore, but somehow, my aesthetics (my need for lyricism and concision) has found its way into my prose. Poetry has caused so much inner turmoil in the past, something I'm not willing to endure anymore, at least not as of the moment.

Right now, I am very much satisfied with the peace and quiet that is constantly here with me. It is as if I am currently at an emotional rest, my reclusion providing me everything I need. I don't know how long this will last, but I really hope it does.

How about you? What are the things I must know?

Hope to hear from you soon.

X

A Man as a Memory

2010-02-02T02:44:00.008+08:00

She began with losing things, purposively. First to go was her mobile phone, which proved to be an efficient way of kicking things off; her daily, trivial conversations were immediately reduced to a bare minimum, the more determined ones calling her landline.

There was, however, that inconvenience of feigning a little sadness every time a friend, or worse, an acquaintance, casually inquired about the loss, which wasn't much really, compared to her newfound liberty. She even enjoyed the theatrics involved on a number of occasions, most especially during her chat with Lisa on a café near the office.

She pulled off a few, seemingly controlled sobs, her eyes watery from the supposed resurfacing of pain. It had so much memories, she said, breaking off once in a while for emphasis, then sipping some water to punctuate the thought. It was a surprising deviation from her usual style, enough reason for Lisa to eagerly spread the word later, adding a perspective along the way. Someone told me she never got over him. She looks at all his messages again whenever she's depressed, which meant every night. She sobbed like a cow. Though I must say she had it coming. She knew he was a jackass. Poor girl.

Then it became her need to go online.

Her last login was three months ago, her last Facebook status message, a quote from Anaïs—I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self—now buried under a heap of horoscopes. The most recent of which, amazingly, offered a quite relevant, though desperately poetic, advice. Today, you must go forth and swim the ocean of solitude, Cancer, to taste its immense wealth. Prepare yourself to seek an inner depth. Her primary was still the summer photo of last year, the one where she looked abysmally smug against the august auburn sunset.

She stopped blogging as a follow-up, citing her need to live life offline on her farewell post. Loyal visitors—perfect strangers who found their way into her quite provocative description of otherwise mundane events—expectedly wrote their regrets. Some even convinced her to continue, but she wasn't able to read them, to reconsider.

From then on, this withdrawal grew as a habit, a vice. She picked on other things, eventually. Like the snapshots. She burned one everyday, until it became a part of the morning routine, next to washing her face. She started with the peopled photos: old class pictures, trips to Aklan with friends, family reunions, her sister's wedding, company events, her pictures with him. Then moved on to what remained: shots of her cat, of the old wooden box where she kept his picture, of his cigarettes, his perfume, his fingers. It fascinated her how the past—an image of it—can be destroyed with such ease. When the photo albums emptied, she burned them too.

Her pyromania eventually reached her expansive collection of memorabilia, ranging from letters and birthday cards to receipts and movie tickets. She realized she had so much junk, so she burned them all in one go. Everything must turn into dust. If not later, then now.

She also broke things every once in a while, when the impulse was too strong, and fire wasn't enough to contain it. On certain evenings, the plates she used for dinner. Her sole collection of expensive china, the scattered shards making her feel whole again as she picked them up, one by one, wrap them with layers of newspaper, put them in the trash can. The ballerina figurine he gave her, when he came back from Michigan. She liked that one best, so she pulverized it with a hammer.

She stripped her apartment barer and barer, until only the essential remained. Until the walls seemed to breathe in the largeness of space. Her bedroom seemed bigger than it already was.

But she felt the urge, still. So she moved on to her body. She went out on a Friday night, to a nearby bar, wearing nothing underneath her tiny black dress. She met a man, in his early 30s, shaved head, large brown eyes, his wit reminding her of him. She laughed at his jokes. She took his hand and placed it on top of her legs.

Then they fucked. He was exceptional, knowing exactly how and where to taste her, knowing how hard and deep she wants his cock inside, knowing where to go rough and where to be gentle. He licked her ear, fondled her breasts as he fucks her savagely. She says his name in return, with all the hurt and sensuality she had kept for months. She was ecstatic. It felt like she was so close to her body that she was away from it, like she was a voyeur to her own casual lay.

And she was in complete awe of all this. Awed by how this lovely, lovely man, had provided her exactly what she had asked for: so much emptiness, so much pleasure.

Break

2010-01-23T07:02:00.016+08:00

It is as casual as pretending to buy cigarettes at four in the morning, when the leisure of getting laid is almost out of the question. Of course, where I'm at is suburban, and four a.m. means, almost always, no one else is looking. But I'm a sucker for the improbable, the bigger pleasure after the bigger odds.

So I took the keys, and headed to the nearest convenience store. If you must know, apart from my sweater and the shirt underneath, I only had my boxers on. The cold outside was biting, but the tease in me was burning, to care.

The flip-top, I corrected. He returned the one he had in his hand, and obeyed me. Sometimes, I fancy these blue collar boys, the things they do for money. I'm not really one for paying, but the idea is too relevant to be dismissed. His big hand, his thick fingers—used to physical labor—rough and tough on my body, as if I am a tool. He grips my bicep like chisel, he hammers me like wood, and he does me without hesitation, without patience, without comfort. You see, I like it brutal. I like it when pleasure becomes only an echo of pain. I like it when I am forced the big and hard reason to scream.

The price of vice. I handed him some bills before I left.

...

He stabbed me without compromise, going deep on the first lunge, severing, severe, within, underneath, reaching all those infinitesimal, fragile places I knew existing but was uncertain of on how or why until this first cut, deeper, the wound hurting like it would never heal anymore, like it was irrevocably destroyed, and I struggled to hold on to anything intact, shifting from one hard surface after another, the wooden drawers, the metal knobs, the length of his back while he goes deeper, piercing through me, slicing me from below, before withdrawing, suddenly, then back again, the pain never complete but ebbing, farther, until fragments of me scattered inside, fragments I could never reclaim anymore once he is gone, once the distinct connection between rupture and rapture becomes hazy, cerebral, regressing into an idea, an afterthought, along with the many smells of our bodies, clay, copper, earth, iron, musk, salt, smoke, along with the recurrence of knots, tangles, moans, aliases, repositions, throbs, shoves, friction, sweat, euphoria, along with my sudden, numbered, small deaths. There was heaven. I looked up, and the light exploded.

...

If you must know, I am selfish that way. Self-preserving, if you're euphemistic. I have given you everything except a memory. You didn't even have me by my name.

A Study of a Boy

2010-01-20T00:01:00.010+08:00

He looks at the face, the body—no, the figure, the sculpture—and to a certain extent, recognizes. Perhaps, John's kid. Perhaps, the brat with the bike on the other street. No—

The dark, slightly unkempt hair. Those blue eyes, intent, staring, discerning. The pubescent body, confused, midway between the soft and plump of a child, the vigor and sinew of an adult; the crude synthesis. And the other details. The reddened elbows, knees. A pinky, oblique, shy.

Everything colossal, larger than life. Created, as the curator informs, out of silicone, fiberglass, resin: chemical, manufactured. This dead thing.

It could be my son.

Outside the Story

2010-01-13T03:50:00.005+08:00

1. She writes about him, despite the ambiguities. In her new collection of poems, Acute Allegations, there is a recurring notice to the one who waits: don’t. As if, and here is where the ubiquitous premise begins, she has seen him across the street from her office, looking at the windows. Or further, in the cafeteria she heads to after her four o’ clock class, taking a hot coffee and a Glück, inconspicuous tools for his agenda. Also: in the parking lot, in the hallways, inside vacant rooms, in her dreams. Suddenly, it becomes indefinite as to who is the one waiting.

2. He writes about her, despite the agony. What is writing but pain, a constant ache over the ineffable, the indefinite, the irresolute, his mulling a meandering segue to the act of. He looks at the blank page, desperately waits for the first few words to arrive. It is always the beginning line that cuts him, that first transgressive act. The mind is more beautiful than reality. You will never know the God you are as I love you, excessive, in your absence.

3. What is a metaphor? She calls out. Most of the responses reek of old college textbooks, their precise and trite definitions of the technique. Technique—the very word sounded scientific, methodical, as if there is a definite process to follow. She mentions another name. The student says transport, his tone hinting its etymology. She is immediately reminded of trains, the one she and Stan used to take together as they head to work. She looks at the student, his disheveled hair, his unironed shirt, how different he is from him. She begins to remember.

4. She sees him reading, his cup steaming and unnoticed. She takes the cup, drinks from it. Her student keeps his eyes on the book. I wrote that, she says, quickly surprised by her audacity and her want for a conversation. What is a metaphor, she proceeds, her voice drowned by the whistle of the train signaling its departure. Inside the train, in the table in front of her, where her student rests his elbows as he reads her book, is a little figurine of Buddha, the one Stan didn't buy. She sits beside him, takes another sip. What is a metaphor, she repeats, this time louder, eager to break his focus. She wakes up, finally, with a taste of bitter froth on her mouth.

5. He writes to her, without her knowing. Afterwards, the letter became a story, a contingency between another woman and a man. In the story, there was a woman who didn't come. A woman who always brought oranges, then one day disappeared, and sent him her friend instead. But she is also citrus: her yellow skin, her sudden explosions on his tongue, the tangy sweetness of her juice. He thinks of her as he fucks the fruit from behind. He thinks of her as he writes the instance of her infidelity, his deep need.

6. Fiction is an elocution of experience—the worldly, the concrete, the complex. It is also simplification: there is narrative, there is causality, there is perspective. Certain events, at least the most poignant or traumatic, eludes explanation, goes beyond our understanding. It is no wonder that for some, fiction is the necessary escape.

7. He hands her his initial draft. It is a letter, he says. She looks at him, then looks at the page, bemused. She reads the first few sentences, decides against crumpling the page. Other people are looking.

He Was Here

2010-01-10T08:18:00.003+08:00

Then he leaves, as simple as that. We follow the routines: the last hugs, the conclusive words. He still wants me to pursue grad school, makes himself very clear about that. Then he steps out, waves for the last time, closes the door, disappears.

The hardest thing about leaving is everything beautiful that preceeds it. It is where the weight comes from. I can only imagine what my mom feels. She is the one who sleeps alone every night, the one who goes with him to the airport.

We console ourselves into thinking that he will come back. We get used to the idea, to the acts of goodbye. We learn to forget the sadness in distance. I smoke, brush my teeth, turn off the lights, go to sleep.

Journal

2009-12-18T20:08:00.003+08:00

The city is kind to me today. It is cloudy outside but there is no rain. There are many people than most times, and this makes me happy. If there are many people, I think when I sleep other people also sleep too. It makes me sleeps good.

When I go home after the party, the lady who sits next to me inside the jeep says stop near my house. Most times it is hard to stop the jeep so I keep quiet even if I see my house and wait for someone to say stop for me. This time the lady says stop so I only walk little to my house. I tell her thank you for stop at my house and she looks at me and I smile. Then she looks at me with bad eyes and tells me fuck off fucker which I do not understand and she walks away.

At the party at the office early ago, people talk but not listen. They nod, but I tell them some secrets and they nod again, like they hear it before. I tell Brian this film I see last Friday where this little boy walks to a wall and is gone and nobody sees it. I tell him I cry because I feel he is me sometimes, like I get near a wall and nobody sees me. Brian tells me he has to go somewhere and see you later dude. But I see him later and he not sees me anymore. I check my back if I am near a wall and I am. It is white like my shirt. I pretend like I am a ghost or that I wait for Brian because other people are busy with other people and I want to be busy too.

Then Dianne comes to me with a surprise look. Dianne is a pretty lady. Her hair is long and her eyes are black. Like the sky sometimes when there are no stars. She tells me she thinks I not work at the office anymore. I tell her why and she tells me she do not see me for a long time. I tell her I work here always because I need a job. She says of course.

Then she tells me what I am busy with. I tell her I wait for Brian before but he is busy. She tells me no what I am busy, what I do when I am not at the office. I think about the movie about the boy but I do not want to tell that I cry. So I just tell her I see movies. She tells me on a date. I tell her no I am not on a date because my hands get wet when I hold hands. She smiles. So she holds my hand on the left for a long time. Her hands are soft. I become scared and I take away my hand but she holds it and I cannot take it away.

She tells me are you a virgin. I do not know what virgin means so I tell no. Then I say yes. She says of course you are. She lets go of my hand then she laughs. I am surprise that she laughs. So I laugh too. I never feel so happy. I make someone laughs, for the first time.

Once Familiar

2009-12-11T03:06:00.005+08:00

1. His unfinished story, fragmented like drafts of earlier manuscripts, survives mainly through the details. A made-up room. Its light blue walls, the singular window overlooking a frequently empty street, the white curtain that separates it from the adjacent room. A train, painted in green, left on top of a wooden chair. A young man riding the subway at 7 pm, an open book in his hand, looking out of the window and into an afternoon, once, when everything was home.

2. Mother calls out my name, her voice a soft, Sunday music from the kitchen. Geronimo, she repeats, and I remain in my room, holding the wooden train, responsible for its path, its destination. I continue playing. I want to hear her one more time.

3. The narration of diaspora, of the exilic experience, the author begins, his soft voice pitched for storytelling, is always one of reconciliation. With pasts and places that are never fully one's own, with an identity that is always in flux, flowing in and out of foreign and familiar grounds. The author pauses. His eyes, now looking at a memory, continue where he left off.

4. He suddenly remembers her. Her laughter, light and infectious on easy afternoons, the slight tilt of her head as the punch line kicks in. Her natural elegance, a certain softness that always surrounds her, a certain lightness of air. Her tenderness, as she folds her clothes, as if they are silk or satin, and puts them in the suitcase. Her stillness and poise, as her eyes scans the nearly emptied room, the vastness of blue walls. Her grace, as she slowly lifts a hand to say goodbye.

5. There were pictures of before, kept inside the wooden box on top of her cabinet, never to be looked at again. She once said that photographs do not capture moments; they just make the past appear more recent. It is us, she said, so choose what you remember.

6. I looked at photographs of an abandoned city, its remains mossed with nostalgia. I could have lived at that time, in that place and feel exactly the same way as we leave. A boy looking at everything familiar, for the last time.

7. I was certain the moment I saw him as he scans for a safe seat, hurried, but awkwardly and with much hesitation, his eyes unaccustomed to skins of other hues. There was no fear in his eyes, unlike mine. It was more of a slight irritation from a temporary inconvenience. He walked towards one of the chairs nearest the window, eagerly waited for the instructor to arrive.

8. Then he told me, after all those weeks, a smile on his face, that his father, already in Johannesburg, is expecting him by the end of the week. He handed me a white book, the title in gold, and informed me that the elegies are considered the poet's magnum opus. He recited lines about beauty and terror, that one is the beginning of the other. The verse encapsulated. I was silent. I shivered as he walked away.

9. Suddenly, I realized that it is gone. A country that existed in photographs, mentioned every once in a while in sullen conversations triggered by a distant relative's death, in infrequent emails of early friends, in the news. Now, it is fiction, a thing to be imagined.

10. Trains used to be toys, things for the imagination. I remember owning one once, I remember playing with it while Barry Manilow was crooning on the radio and not really liking the music that much, I remember fantasizing about far destinations, mountains, seas, the sense of conquest when returning, I remember my innocence with what distance really means. Now, trains are just metaphors, things of the imagination. Life in transit, one heads on from one destination to another, and, in between, watches everything go by.

11. The train halts, the doors open, the multitude bursts out. He comes out carrying the same book, the same old ticket inserted between the poems, but his hands feel as if they belong to a different man. He walks past cafeterias, some diners, a butcher shop, a closed bookstore, blocks that could've been half a world away. Then he stops, takes the keys out. He is home.

09: Bitch

2009-12-03T11:53:00.004+08:00

The old belief about the waking up on the wrong side of the bed came to mind and decided that it didn't apply: you were in the middle, faced up. A few minutes into a new day and you were loathing like hell; everything was stale, repugnant. Some random guy in some social networking site bragged about his buff buddy lay and you were genuinely disgusted by the whole charade. Your aunt gave her insight on some trivial topic and you eagerly, but politely, ended the conversation. EZTV was down again, damn it, when you badly needed a SYTYCD fix.

The world is one big inconvenience. You are a grumpy old man.

Felix,

2009-11-26T23:17:00.007+08:00

Writing this letter, this response, is harder than the first. There is, of course, the burden of what you have mentioned in your reply. But more than that is this disbelief; I didn't exactly expect you to write back. To be honest, the previous letter was a blind attempt; it felt more like shooting the moon, and I frequently found myself at a loss for words while drafting it, too critical of every word, every connotation, every possible interpretation. I wanted to feel assured, even though the very nature of it was a risk.

But this, this is like eating the sun.

Before I go on, I want to thank you for the reply. Silence, I find, is a ridiculously ambiguous thing; what saves, frequently, on occasions wherein the multiplicity of meanings become too much for one's paranoia is clarification, a string of words that settle in, and settle the mind. You provided exactly that, the words I needed to hear.

In return, trust that I will hold on to what you have said, partly because I trust you, and partly because I cannot choose to do otherwise. Expect, as well, that I will do my side of the bargain, whatever or however painful that is.

You see, even though I deny it, we both know that there is a part of me that expected too much, too soon. Though there is the rational side of me, the one that frequently pulls me back to reality, I am still very much a little boy, wishful and naïve and ill-tempered. It was clear from the onset that you were different, that you amazed me to no end, that you have compelled me to look deep into myself, ask the hard questions, and tell things as they are. Most importantly, you understood me; on certain occasions, you have even proven that you saw right through me.

There is a part of me that is angry right now. Angry at you, angrier at the circumstances, angriest with myself. Sometimes, I wish the events that led to this didn't happen: that you didn't send that friend request; that I didn't accept it and respond to it; that you didn't read that bulletin post and comment on it (which, by the way, was the moment when I became certain that you would understand me, and that you would blow me away), etc. Had anyone of us chose to do the opposite at any point before our initial encounter, things would've been completely different. You would be just a concept, a stranger, another random friend in my profile.

What ticks me the most is that if I were to choose, I wouldn't have it any other way.

And to be honest, I find a great deal of comfort in us not pursuing what could've been a romantic affair. I wanted it, of course, but I feel like my life is in a limbo right now—I resigned from a post that I didn't particularly like but was proud of because it paid well enough for me to spend recklessly without fearing that I would run out of money, and because I worked my ass to get there; I wanted to forget this guy who shook my world for months, without him knowing it, or at least the full extent of his control over me; I have no money, and I have this growing feeling that I am running out of options on what to do with my life—and I fear that I will use you to put a structure into my own hot mess. And that, I feel, is unfair to demand from someone, anyone other than oneself.

I just feel like I'm too scared to face a lot of things right now, to make really tough decisions and stand by them regardless of their outcomes, as what mature and sensible and responsible people do, and I feel that I needed someone to help me get through this. I have this belief that I will be a different man when I am with someone; that I can move on to much greater heights, simply because there is someone beside me along the way. I know this is likely a false notion, but I haven't been presented the opportunity to verify if it is.

Regardless, I know that I have to work this out, to patch myself up, before I enter into a relationship. And I am grateful that there is still time for me to fix it, to fix myself.

There is one thing that you must know, that I was so afraid to tell you before, believing that this might likely put an end to what I have wanted quite desperately: I will be going to Hawaii in the near future. My father has petitioned us a few years back, and a letter concerning my visa arrived just a few days ago.

Our immigration forces me to feel as if my time is running out. Starting a new life, living in another world, leaving the people and the places and the life I once knew, I once had, finding myself all over again, this time in a completely new place—the idea of it exhausts me. Until now, I haven't accepted the fact that I would've acquired a different citizenship one or two years from now. I just can't.

Maybe this is the reason—above all other reasons—why I wanted to find someone right here, right now. I know it will take sometime for me to adjust to the conditions there, and much more time to meet people, to actively seek a partner. I am afraid that my youth, the only beautiful and fragile thing I have left, is slowly being taken away from me. I fear that by the time I am ready enough to enter into a relationship, my first and hopefully the last serious one, I will be old and ugly for anybody's use.

This is probably also the reason why I wanted to help you; I badly need help too. Your insecurities, your flaws, your health—I want badly enough to ease them, to appreciate them, just as bad as I want you (or anyone willing) to do that with mine.

But this is not how the world works, of course.

So for reasons that are just and responsible and sincere and mature, I wholeheartedly accept the friendship that you offer; I can't settle for anything less. I hope we continue this correspondence. You are too bright and articulate and sensible, and I can't stand not hearing from you every once in a while.

I hope you get to visit the doctor soon. Don't be afraid to ask for help from your family, financially or otherwise. I'm sure they'll be more than happy to help you out with that. It’s best to have your condition checked, for your own peace of mind.

X

Syncopated Blues

2009-11-20T04:45:00.003+08:00

Suppose this hand is not mine as this man, in the film, touches, his body the articulation of my desire. He becomes eloquent as he goes through the points, one by one—the side of his neck, the length of his shoulders, his nipples, erect, dark, tactile to what could've been my mouth, my hand

follows, his lead now taking me to his torso, long, firm, his skin is smooth as mine is; to the pelvis, the bone of it, hard

as I am now, that he touches as I head for it, grasp my subject, sensitive, now becoming larger in its scope, the matter now out of my hand

and into his as he touches the tip, flinches a little, spits in his palm, and proceeds to start the rhythm that I heed, I need, I speed unto

the physics of it—the push and pull, the friction, the work and heat, I feel the heat of my palm, as he does, our energies have been created and now being consumed, little by little, brought about by a persistent past: I remember you, last night, massive, forceful,

relentless, as I want you to be, you enter and I gasp, the pain a pleasure to keep, inside, deep into the core of my inner animal, driving me senseless, again and again and again and again and again and I look back at him and the pronouns become hazy, you are him and he is mine

until I reach the inevitable conclusion, the rush, the gush, the lush explosions, the hushed staccato of a singular vowel—the short a, a, a, a, a, a, a I wanted

someone else to hear, here, beside me.

A Man as a Memory

2009-11-12T06:11:00.003+08:00

You liked the word ineffable, and you were right in saying that certain things are, in paper. We delicately, deliberately find our way in and out of these things, as certain parts of our individual pasts are not fragile enough to crumble in the mind, too fragile to be touched again. You believe there are certain stories that cannot be fictionalized, and you enumerated them, one mischance after another. Your honesty was harrowing, and you looked me in the eyes and you demanded me to not look away. It was 4 am, and I was the only one there to listen. The pain was raw, familiar, unnerving, and it was almost my own.

When the bruises go deeper than the skin, there is no telling when they will heal. I longed to touch your body and ease it, I longed for vulnerability and you were there. You terrified me, so much so, and I wanted you the more.

Waging the War Within

2009-11-06T01:00:00.004+08:00

The most painful demands of writing are solitude and honesty. To attack alone a faceless enemy, your body as the battleground, in the middle of the night, destroy the serenity lying just above the surface of things, to bomb the basements of your past, the subways of your pain, the watchtowers of your fears, to obliterate the grandeur built on top of the foul and wretched soil of your being, and finally, to own the extent of destruction through documentation, to assign an image, a metaphor, a name that makes the devastation so much more visible, tangible, alive. It is the Hiroshima of one's own, and one picks up the pieces, harvests the words, knowing that there is nothing else left to hide.

To do this, again and again, terrifies me to no end. But I am here, now, ready to keep the battle going.

Amidst Others

2009-11-04T06:25:00.008+08:00

There is always a part of us we leave, as we touch certain things, reach certain places, love certain people. We give ourselves away, little by little, as mementos; scatter what has remained of ourselves within the memories of others. Still, I get surprised when I see myself refracted somewhere, every once in a while, a piece of what seems to be my own image

partly visible, quite literally, on one of the huge glass windows of a popular café. Or, on other occasions, in the eyes of a handsome passenger on a train. On a Winterson page. Within a Wong-Kar Wai scene. In a Kings of Leon stanza. In an island on some postcard that says Aloha.

Right now, however, all I want is to be my own. The things or words or actions that I am, mine enough to withstand the shadows of everybody else.

A Man as a Memory

2009-10-28T21:56:00.007+08:00

There she is, inside the studio, guided by the guitar strums, confessing. A line after another, submerged in the sound of pain, the chords slip off of her, precise, cutting, clinging, calling out a man

Caucasian, drugged for a lifetime, his hair messy as his choices, naked in bed beside her. It was Sunday, it was 6 am and the sun seeped through the blinds, the tiny things in the room gained their shadows. For instance, the alarm clock on top of the wooden shelf, his plaid boxers on the floor. She looked at him, his eyes closed, everything was at peace. She knew, right there and then, that that minute was one for the taking, one for the telling, one of the few better ones, and she is right

to proceed onto the next line, the next chord, without hesitation. The song has already taken its own life, took it away from her. A few months from now, someone will open the radio, will slip a different meaning in it, and her man, with all his chaos and beauty and fire, will be outside it, nameless, his once distinct features now blurry.

Soon enough, she will sing it for a large crowd. The aches of their individual pasts will surface, will linger, and amidst it, she will feel absolutely nothing.

The Summer Effect

2009-10-27T21:18:00.007+08:00

The film ended and begun, almost immediately. A few minutes into the film, the narrator clarifies: you should know up front, this is not a love story,

and we are suddenly thrown into a boy's memory of a girl. We follow him, and there's a Smiths song in the background, sometimes a Regina Spektor, as we piece together his nonlinear narrative, the projectile from meet-up to break-up, and all the little events in between. He and she go through the motions, the signs are given, taken, misread,

the cinematic maneuvers making everything a little more poignant: the calendar jumps, the noir, Ameliesh movie dreams, the dance sequence, the juxtaposition of expectation and reality, the same shots described in different ways,

things that we have seen before, but never get tired of. He takes her hand, draws the skyline of the city on the back of her arm. They are sitting in a bench, in a park somewhere. Sometime after, they will see each other again in the same spot, as different people. The boy must move on, the story moves on, and we leave the theater, his heart already our own.

Return, Pt. 1

2009-10-21T22:51:00.015+08:00

I saw Happy Together again after more than a year, and was fascinated with how different the movie appeared, how hazy and incomplete my previous memory of it was; the only scenes I was able to recall were of the two men riding a cab in the middle of the night, and of them dancing to some Tango song in a white-walled kitchen.

Wong Kar Wai's nonlinear plot, crude and angular cinematography, brash romanticism and sense of emotional chaos felt more tangible, accessible, than it was the last time I saw it. Maybe the film, much like a poem, required an approach that is less cerebral and more visceral, which could only be achieved through a similar experience. And I, a heartache wiser, have seen the difference.