And back.

I’ve been back home for about a month now, give or take a few more days. I’ve been putting off writing about it because frankly I’ve been putting off  the act of writing for a while now. I have somehow slipped into this state where I keep on questioning what I want and don’t want, although I somehow suspect that a part of me has already made choices and now I am just afraid to face them.

Living alone for quite some time has taught me many things about myself, and I welcome this knowledge without hesitation. It’s something I’ve been wanting to arrive at for years now, that stage of self-discovery where I’m surprised to find that I am not who I thought I was, or at least, who I’ve pegged myself to be while I was growing up.

So far, my biggest revelation has been that I’m okay. That’s it. I’m okay! It took me twenty two years to get this.

It’s a mixture of fear and disappointment, to know that I’m actually doing fine, despite the depression, despite the shitty things in my life, despite plans not happening, and people leaving me, and not knowing exactly what happens now. I’m okay. I’m actually surviving my one hell of a life!

I still feel new and uncertain whenever I think about it. Sometimes I get really scared. I’m okay. What the hell do I do with my life now? Will all the drama be less significant? Will I turn into an optimist, a cheerful bastard that I love to hate? Will I be less of myself?

I’ve always thought of myself as a whole body with compartments. My heart, for example, has four. Before A, the compartments were designated for three things only: my inner child, my inner ‘artist’, and my melancholy. That other one is just empty, and has been that way for eighteen years. When I met A, the empty compartment was filled with – dare I say it? – happiness. When he left, that compartment wasn’t emptied out. It was only filled with more loneliness. And that’s how I’ve been living for the past few years. I wasn’t unbalanced. Just miserable. And it was acceptable.

Until I realized lately that that small boudoir must’ve been redesigned and repainted with an overall finish of okay. And I’m actually functioning. Living. Not just going through the motions. Not breathing, just a little, and calling it a life – as Mary Oliver put it. I know I’m bad at metaphors, but that’s how I am now. I am actually okay. There are tinges, here and there. But I’m fine.

So what now? I don’t know. But I’m smiling. I think, for the first time in a long time, my heart is finally trying to heal itself.

Dear Heath,

I was a skeptic coming to the theater. Batman was my favourite superhero of all time. All that talk about The Dark Knight being the best Batman film in history made me wince. How can one achieve such a thing? To be able to grasp the depth of Bruce Wayne’s character is something no actor or director has touched yet, ever. So I said I wasn’t going to believe anything until I’ve seen it. And last night, I sat in awe as the credits rolled.

Thank you, Heath. Thank you for giving me the Batman character and the Batman film I’ve always dreamed of. It was all because of you, and you weren’t even the caped crusader himself. And because I’ve no one to talk about it at this hour, I’m writing you a letter in my journal, secretly hoping that the cosmic forces are at work to give this to you on the other side.

You were as good as they said you were. Seeing you again onscreen – I thought I was looking at the face of an old friend. I don’t know if I should say this – I don’t even know if I have a right to say it, or think about it – but I think I understand now why you died. Why you had to pass away at the most inopportune time, why you had to go quietly – where else but in your sleep, something that you needed badly if you have to keep yourself sane. Sleep was your way of keeping the demons at bay, your own ghosts, leftovers from one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen. To be able to do that kind of performance, you must’ve have lived The Joker’s life for a time, studied him, scrutinized him. Christopher Nolan said he chose you because you were fearless. And he was right. You were magnificent.

The only regret I now have is that you won’t see all of this, all of us cheering you on. In fact, I’m still waiting for you to make a big comeback, laughing, clapping your hands, being so full of life – and tell all that the joke’s on us.

Thank you for giving strength to Batman’s character. I loved him most among all the others. I loved him because he was human, and he couldn’t have come face-to-face with the limits of his own humanity if it wasn’t for you, Heath. You made it happen, because you made the film real. And it wasn’t just Batman; you did it to me, to all of us. At every chaos you instigated, you made us look at the people faced with choices and we see ourselves.

And unlike what others have been saying, about how you upstaged everyone else, I’ll have this to say: the film was clearly NOT about your character. Through and through, it was about Batman. It should have been all about you, and had the character been handed to any other person, that might have just happened. But the method in your acting was so precise, that although your brilliance was so stark and poignant, your character was able to round the story up and bring it back to Batman. The Joker enabled Batman to own this film, which is why, at the very heart of it, the film was about you, the actor, and the heart that you put into all of this.

I’ve always believed that a superhero is only as good as his adversity, as in real life — you won’t know how strong and resilient you are until you’re faced with your worst fears. And Batman’s enemy is not The Joker, but his own humanity, his conscience, his choices. His fights are as old as the history of our world: the survival of order amongst chaos, the perseverance of the light against the darkness. And to win the battle, he must be ironic. He needs to dive into chaos to restore order, he needs to fight in the dark to keep the people safe during the day. And this tongue-in-cheek philosophy is what makes me love him.

And yeah, because he’s also an obsessed, miserable bastard. At the end of the day, when he’s done risking his life for the city, the real phantoms, the dark clouds of his past, will be what Bruce Wayne, stripped of the costume, will have to face on his own. Here, he toes the line; here I can say, he is as human as the rest of us.

And your portrayal of The Joker toed that line, too. You made him a person that we can understand, and not just a character that we can dismiss once the story is finished. You made me frightened of him, you also made me struggle as I deliberated on suspending my belief in The Joker as a human being so I can hate him, versus understanding his mind, his own psyche so I can empathize with the person that he has become.

The whole film was an exhilarating journey. Of course, you didn’t make it easy. And of course I love you for it.

There’s a wave of nostalgia now. And there will always be. Thank you for giving the performance of your life. You were gone too soon. I hope you’re in a place now where you can begin again. I’m sure you’ll still be as dedicated, and as fantastic.

Rest easy, Heath Ledger.

Bruise

1.
Over coffee, while the dark was slowly spilling over the sky, I told a friend how comfortable I was with my sadness. I said, I’ve always been sad. The man I loved knew that. He learned how to live with it, that feeling that sits beside me. He learned how to make me happy and never demanded that I trade all of it for his love. Which is why each time that we were together, I have never been happier and sadder in my life.

2.
In my music player I have eight versions of Bach’s Air. When I’m feeling sadder than usual I play all of them, all day long. Once, he asked me, Why do you love it so much, this piece? It’s so simple. Not even a notion of grandeur, what overtures are made for.

I said, Because it is all of the poems in the world put together. Because it is a long walk in the park beneath a sky without stars. Because it is dreamless. And most of all, because of its name: I lie on my back and I feel that I’m listening to air, to the sound of other people breathing, to the sound of your lungs exhaling, the sound of my lungs inhaling. I love this piece because this is the closest I can get to being under your skin. And this kept him silent.

A few nights later, with my head on his chest and Bach on the stereo, he thought he was giving me a surprise. Being half-French, he whispered in my ear, Air is just the French word for Aria, darling, and nothing more.

That is the most cruel thing that he did to me.

3.
When sleep eludes me and I’m too tired to chase it, I sit on this chair and write bruised declarations of a past life. I walk barefoot into the kitchen, open the fridge and look inside it for a long time. I turn on the TV and mute the sound. I stand in the middle of my room and look at my hands. I long for a window that isn’t there. I recite some lines from a Philip Dow poem:

Hunchbacked
by his heart
swollen with dreams
of wings, of girls whose breasts are antelope
trembling beneath the lightning
that seeds his spring: he hears the boes
of their unborn children
growing.
In his heart hut he lives,
a mute
chewing crimson flowers
to make speech, to keep
saying
what does this do
to save my life?

His words stall for time,
slave for the mortgage on his bones:
he knows he is a fool
who cannot solve it –
yet, goes at his heart over and over
repairing: with jellyfish, lame horses,
whistles, white cords of his body, white moths
seeking colors, damp alleys,
odors of knives,
trees, stumped, putting out tiny wings
of translucent new leaves anyway.

Rub the belly for good luck!

I’m twenty-two, little girl blue,
happy birthday, happy birthday
to me.

Open Heart Zoo

There are so many things that’s been happening lately in my life that feels so wrong, and so right. This is the probably one of the pages in my book that I’ll have bookmarked, and in time, I’ll return to remind myself that yes, this is when I had the temerity to say, “I was so confused” and at the same time, “I was so sure.”

Here I am, two weeks shy of being twenty-two, and this is my life. And I am still making grandeur statements like, “This is my life”, as if I was listening to an overture (which I am, by the way, what a laugh).

At twenty I felt like everything was just beginning, but at twenty-one suddenly a lot of things have ended – things that I was certain were in my control and things that sadly were way beyond my control. The beginnings I have anticipated a year before grew into little fears that everything was too late.

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
– Marguerite Duras

Which is why lately I’ve passed time seesawing between wanting to be born years before 1986 and wanting not to be born at all. Every little thing that I feel a connection with are slowly drifting away, and fading. It’s like everybody’s been having a good time while I was still upstairs sleeping. I feel like I’m always late for everything – late for vinyl records, for polaroid cameras, for Frank Sinatra and rock and roll, for ideals, for following your dreams, for throwing caution to the wind, for living life slowly, measuring your days in coffee spoons and all that cliche (apologies to T.S. Eliot).

Nobody does that today anymore. At least, in the world I live in. Nobody lives that kind of life anymore. Everything is just so damn fast. And I know it’s too much to ask, really. When I think of packing my bags and walking off to somewhere, it’s all a dream. It’s so much of a dream that it only comes to me in bits and pieces now, like remnants from an old memory, an old life. Am I still making sense?

Gah. It’s all a bit rubbish, isn’t it? I want that kind of life so bad that it hurts. What can I do with a life that’s confined to my silly little room, with all my thoughts sitting pretty on my bed, running down the walls, tucked underneath my pillow? Let me say it again: I want that kind of life so bad that it hurts, and it’s a kind of life in all its fucking unglorious state: I want to get hurt I want to cry I want a punch in the gut I want to run down the road chasing foolishly after a car that will not stop for me I want to be sleepless day in and day out I want something that will turn me inside out I want to have things to regret I want to be missed and cursed at and be shamed and be loved –

And I don’t know how much that is for a girl of twenty-one going on twenty-two, whose world tries poorly to revolve on petty things like work and money and technology.

Pfft. I don’t know how else to put it into words!

Have you ever just stopped, just for a moment and thought, this is it. This is it: everything happens to me. Have you ever thought that? I haven’t. I did though, have one similar experience. There was this wide-open sky, I opened my arms and said, please let the world happen to me.

If this is the life I’m supposed to live, if this life is it, right here, right now – please, somebody, open my eyes. Because I can’t see it. I can’t see what’s so special with my now, and I want so badly to get up, go out, leave this now and move backward in time to a now that’s in my head. There’s a most beautiful now in my head, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Nothing

the time when we had everything

~

1.
Chopin on Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. 27/1, Larghetto. In four minutes and four seconds I sat quite still while my heart is breaking.

2.
Sharp pangs were never unfamiliar, but I never thought I’d go this way again: it’s been almost three years now, and I should be over it. Over you. But I never forget, so: happy birthday.

3.
I opened my diary on my lap and I was determined to write the greatest love story of my life: There was a girl who only had two great loves – the first was with someone who stopped loving her, the last was with someone who never stopped.

But I’m afraid the happy ending hasn’t happened yet.

4.
Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65. In nine minutes and fifty seconds I stood in the middle of my room and imagined one night when I rested my head upon your shoulder as we swayed to the silence.

5.
I don’t know which is more excruciating: enduring the fourteenth, when everybody celebrates love, or the sixteenth, when you celebrate the day you were born.

I think it is the fifteenth, wedged in between two tragic days: I dance in between not crying and wanting to cry.

6.
I opened a book of poetry and I was determined to read about how other poor souls dealt with such loss. All I could bring myself to read was: “Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.”

7.
Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor. In eight minutes and fifty-five seconds I willed myself to fall asleep. No good will come to thinking about you now. You are somewhere far away, and I have refrained from sending you a postcard wishing you the best of luck. And that is that. The illusion of a warm hello will not conquer the distance, nor the pain.

8.
I closed my eyes and suddenly you were whispering in my ear, “All the clocks in the city”, but you never seem to finish. We were lying in bed with your arms around me but you never did finish what you were going to say. And then all the clocks ran out of time, and then we were over, and your words were lost.

9.
The one who stayed to finish it, was Auden sitting on my bookshelf –

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

And then my heart skips, skips to how it all ends –

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

Carry on, carry on

a small statue at Sonya’s, a heavenly restaurant at Tagaytay

~

1.
It doesn’t surprise me anymore how fast the world can pull the rug from under me. One minute I was having fun, the next I was pulling my hair in frustration.

After a fun weekend at Tagaytay, in which I have probably fed myself enough garbage to last the lives of the children of my children, I have subsequently been ravaged by a strange stomach illness, and then the flu, and then, just last night, I lost my mobile phone, after having prided myself for years for being an excellent keeper of things.

Whoop-de-fucking-doo.

2.
People leave me all the time, but I was always careful of things I own. I have kept the same phone number for four years now, and have kept messages from people who left and came back, people whom I will never meet again in this life, people who didn’t mean to stay – I’ve kept messages from them in a span of the last four years, and I just feel horribly bereft now.

3.
I’ve no attachment to the mobile phone, whose name, by the way, is Michelle Pfeifer, because that little darn thing was my Catwoman. And I guess tonight is when I must declare that her nine lives have run their course. Or maybe, to console myself, I’ll say that it was meant to be, as all the things in my life have been; the loss, you know, was meant to be: that cab ride home, just when I was feverish, about to vomit, wanting the ride to be over, just when I was in the moment when all I was concerned about was myself – some things were meant to get lost that way, I guess.

4.
But I can’t say that I didn’t try. When I got home I turned my bag inside out, I called the cab company, Nine Stars, how unnerving, to report the missing thing, of that little darn cat thing phone maybe wedged between the seats, which kept on ringing whenever I called it, but sadly no one can hear, because it was in silent mode, out of all the days, how fucking unbelievable, how fucking exasperating Fate can be.

And I kept on calling it, oh Michelle, ma belle, my poor, poor little thing. And it kept on ringing and ringing and ringing.

5.
Last weekend my friends and I, we gathered beside the pale light coming from the lamp, and we whispered and talked about old loves while playing cards.

We talked about the pain, and the unexplicable frustration, the non-meaning of what-could-have-been, the ability to move on. We talked about the things we kept from Those Who Left Us, why we still hold on to them.

I thought about your messages, you know, I talked about them. I told my friends how you still sit snugly inside my mind (sometimes), how your messages are archived inside my phone, like you were sitting at the backseat all this time, as I go places. Like I was moving forward, but not really.

6.
My friend said, we really have to move on now, with a determination spurned from a battered heart, a tired heart, I think, too old and too exhausted to try to understand and pry into the meaning of Why We Were Left Behind. He was looking at an old’s love face, too, just as I was thinking about your words, when he suddenly got up and said, I will erase everything.

And then it became that: a night for putting things away, of erasing you from the mind.

I was by the window while I held my phone in my hands, looked at your messages for the last time. Should this be a ceremony, I thought? How utterly laughable.

7.
But I did light a cigarette. I did smoke while doing what I had to do.

8.
This morning when I realised how changed this aspect of my life will be, how a mode of communication was abruptly taken away from me, like reflex, I thought of you.

And then I remembered That Weekend, and what relief, to know that I don’t have to pine for that anymore, because there was a choice before the inevitable happened.

9.
So the chance to rebuild something commences. I’m constantly being fucked by Fate but I don’t really give a shit now, do I. Just carry on, carry on, world. It’ll always be a fuck-you gesture from me now, or haven’t you learned anything so far?

Why not

imagine yourself to be this tiny piece of paper, probably lodged in the corner of your bag, forgotten, until came a random moment where somebody felt like rummaging through it, emptying it of its contents, turning it inside out, and then comes you, floating, weightless, landing on somebody’s lap.

Why not wish that she pick you up, turn you over in her hands, and then slowly, carefully fold you in the shape of a boat, an origami, a remnant of your childhood, remember? Why not hope that she carries you reverently, as she leaves the room, walks outside, and then crouches down at the canal: where you wait, suspended, wanting it to be over, wanting it to happen, whispering, let me go, let me go, let me go now, and then -

she spreads her fingers wide, and you, little boat, little one, drops on water, floating away, floating away, knowing it’s a dream.

But what a dream. And floating, knowing that the quiet happiness you feel is not that of a boat finally meeting with the stream, but that of a tiny piece of paper, being folded, and folded continuously, and folded until you felt that you have gone inside yourself. And that is all.

Suddenly, without notice -

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

1.
My grandmother was cremated yesterday. I know I’m making it sound nonchalant, like it is what is, there’s nothing more anyone can do. But.

2.
There is of course, an infinite sense of loss. I’ve never cried about her, and I don’t know why I’m starting to feel like now is the right time. My chest is tight, and from time to time I’m blinking back the tears. I’m at work, my butt feels numb because I’ve been sitting for the past seven hours, and the skin under my boob is starting to itch. But.

3.
Sigh. Lola, why can’t you live longer, like the hits of the Beatles? Why can’t you be immortal, like Eric Clapton? Why can’t you be lasting, like Rumi’s poems?

When you started turning into a child, did you know how much I hated it? That time when I saw you slowly deteriorating, whining for balloons and colored socks, did you know that I thought, fuck, I don’t want to grow old like that, 98 and yet turning 2 years old by the minute? Fuck. One time I said to myself, you were dead to me even before you were gone. When you started forgetting who we all were, when you would stare into space and clutch that doll to your chest, I thought, Lola, who are you?

When you were in the hospital, I didn’t even hold your hand.

4.
Now you’re in an urn, inside a crypt, alone, dead, turned to ashes. And I’m living and breathing and listening to fucking music while I work. I will never feel so low like I do today. Because I’m living and you’re not, and, everybody’s right, there’s nothing more I can do, nothing more I can, oh fuck, nothing more.

So I’m going to stop here. I’m going to get up, have a smoke, and when I come back I’d have pulled myself together. It is what it is.

It begins, it begins

1.
My uncle gave me a Canon PowerShot S2 IS. I can’t even contain my joy. It’s not even the model – although okay, the model fucking rocks, I was ready to settle for something less, but this, this is really good! However, the source of my wanting to jump off the Macau tower without hesitation are the possibilities, the door that has suddenly been opened, that sudden connection between my life and what I want to do. It’s a very heady feeling. I feel drunk and giddy, and it’s because of a damn camera. But.

To think of the things I could do now.

2.
Last summer, I slept two nights in a hotel. On my last night, it was midnight, and I was in front of a big window overlooking the city. The moon was low, the lights just right. I contemplated what I wanted to do with my life.

I was fucking jobless, my parents were nagging me, I haven’t even published any poetry, and I’m still fucking fat. Oh, the world is ending! I turned down a few jobs because I’m a snob, my teeth is starting to get crooked again because I’ve abandoned my dentist, and I haven’t watched Season 3 of House M.D. yet. What a fucking travesty. I stared outside and thought about suicide, and how it would be a good way to go. With my body mass I’ll probably fall flat to my face immediately after I jumped out the window, and I’ll probably wake the whole city, too, because my attempts at killing myself would result to an earthquake, hence mass killings. I toyed with the idea for awhile, happy to commit suicide if it means I won’t die alone, until I pulled myself back from all my stupid thoughts and realized, holy shit, I’m a fucking nutjob.

I took my camera, then a 35mm film camera, shot some frizzy artsy fartsy photos with the light and the moon. And then it came to me, and it was really simple: I want to write, and I want to take photos. It’s that goddamn simple.

3.
Then again, if you ask me to stress about it, writing would mean getting published, and getting published would mean a lot of things. And if you ask me about taking photos, it would mean having a kick-ass gear, and having a kick-ass gear would mean a lot of things. And all the possibilities of becoming, of what I can do once “the plan” is in place, ran through my mind in a million different languages of want and pure lust, that I sat in front of the window in my hotel room, dazed.

4.
And like a little itch, the bitch that it is, reality set in, and I was once again, the fucktard who has nothing but her dreams, her dreams in her hands.

5.
Until recently when I’ve had a run with a few good karma forces. The writing gig’s been good. Le Muse has been gone a long time now, and I haven’t been writing any acceptable poetry, but leftovers from the past year are slowly making appearances in different places. I am seemingly content upon having started this blog, and other blogs for that matter, spreading myself thin. I have accepted it now: my DNA consists of angst, cheeseburger, jazz, and the characteristics of a waif, among other chemical stuff, and so being in so many places at any given time, or keeping quiet in a corner where nobody knows, is somewhat a gift and a flaw I am now willing to embrace. Anyway, not meaning to run off in a tangent – some of my works are showing their faces here and there, and I’m glad because my writing eggs are dead for the moment. I will have to survive this drought, I guess, and hope that I’ll be fertile enough to be impregnated with words so I can FINALLY. STOP. MAKING. FUCKING. STUPID. METAPHORS.

And then I got a job. There. Nothing more to say about it. I will not say anything about my close encounters with people I really want to strangle badly, or people who make me want to slit my wrists while Beethoven’s music staggers in the background, or the obvious fact that every day I kept asking myself why why why why why why this job. I will tell you though, that I haven’t been so glad to have some order in my life ever since I tasted my very first Dairy Queen ice cream and felt peace. I’m getting tired of swirling in the vortex as of late, and getting a job stabilizes things, and I needed that. I needed to get out of bed at seven in the morning knowing exactly what to do. Meeting new people scares the hell out of me, but once I get past that, being in good company takes back the trail of whys I’ve left behind me.

And now, this camera. Its name is Jacques Cousteau.

6.
For all my meandering, yes, it will come down to this. It’s been a sappy way of saying, Fuck, I just got my new camera, and I’m naming it Jacques Cousteau! But.

My heart is full. Seeing that camera in my mind right now, that camera sitting on my bed, waiting for me to get home. It’s a representation of every thing that I couldn’t even begin to tell you right now. I am inside Captain Cousteau’s boat, feeling that something wonderful is about to unfold.

And then: I remember the big window at the hotel room, and my life, sitting on my hands, waiting to be given meaning. I am again at the beginning. It begins, it begins, this spectacular attempt at chasing my dreams.

“When one man, for whatever reason,
has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life,
he has no right to keep it to himself. “
- Jacques Yves Cousteau

(photo taken from here)

My great grandmother died.

1.
And there is nothing more to say about it. I was on my way home Friday night when I got a call saying she passed away. She was 98. Quite a relic, actually.

2.
Then again, she has turned into a child these last few years. I was glad it was all over. For her sake, at least. Deep down I know, the only reason why my mother’s family kept on bringing her to the hospital time and again when something happens, like when her heartbeat slows down, or when some other major cause of panic occurs, is because of their own damn selfishness. I don’t know if I’m much too jaded, but I think that this is all a part of the “this-is-what-families-do” crap, and I really did think if she was lucid enough she’d have issued a Do Not Rescuscitate order a long time ago.

3.
It’s a peculiar thing, death.

4.
She looked so frail inside the casket. As opposed to the towering figure I used to remember when I was a child. When I looked at her, I thought, no, she does not look like she’s only sleeping, or what other fucktards still say to reassure themselves. She was in pain for the past week, with water filling up her lungs. And she looked like it, lying there, beneath the glass, inspite of the new silk dress, the necklace, everything that was done because of the grieving’s denial, as if to say, “I’m only sleeping, darling, no, I am not dead.”

5.
I wonder how she felt, what she was thinking, lying in the hospital, waiting for all her damn relatives to unplug the tube and just let her be in peace already. It irked me, that week, last week. It made me mad, how my mother’s family continued to prolong her life so her other relatives from all over the world can come home and see her before she dies. This conscious decision of having her in the ICU for days and days on end, while people come and go and look at her like she’s a damn creature on display – it made me really, really mad. What is this hypocrisy for? People left, went on with their lives, forgot about her. And now, now when she is making her way towards death, reaching out her arms to embrace the thing that happens after this life, now people are clamoring to come back. What for, what for?

6.
I tried to understand it. I tried to think about it as I stand and look at her for what I believed would be the last time, a week ago. She was conscious, breathing, looking at something only she can see. She cannot hear me, cannot even remember me now, and I can’t even touch her, no. She no longer is the woman I once knew. I don’t know the person in bed before me, and that kind of dissonance, knowing that logically she is my great grandmother, burrows a hole inside my chest.

7.
And now she is gone.

8.
At the wake, people trickle in, and I was constantly annoyed and amazed at how many relatives she has. These relatives, where were day in the last few years while she was succumbing to the cruel way of nature, sliding back into childhood, erasing recognition, any trace of memory? And how they had the gall to smile, to greet their condolences like someone’s having a birthday party. And what of her own daughters, who continue to fight over who’s going to get the rest of her property, who’s going to stay the night to be with her corpse, who has the biggest flower arrangement of them all. It enrages me so much I wanted to scream.

9.
I’ve only been at the wake for a day. I think it was enough. Everything that’s there, everything was a joke.

10.
And I wanted to protect you, Lola, I wanted to keep you away from all of them. I know we’re all holding tight to our grief, and I know we all have a right to deal with it the only way we knew how, and I’ve never been that person who can hold her heart in her hands without breaking down, and so here is a poem, here is a poem, Lola, here is a poem – because it’s the only thing I can give without having to fight back the tears:

Bluebird
Charles Bukowski

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

I stopped on Page 11

She did not light her cigar. She would wait until the train started. Deferrred gratification is good for you, she told herself. All the little games you learn to play as you grow older, things designed to make life more pleasant, to stretch the little pleasures out like a thin swatch of flowered fabric stretched out to cover an open wound. Smoking is bad for you, so you smoke less and look forward to it more. Obscene, somehow, life measured out in coffee spoons. But what else could you do?…Her students, sitting cross-legged on her living-room floor drinking wine, smoking grass, listening to her jazz records as if the music were an ancient foreign mode. Leaning back and scratching a taut belly, or twisting a strand of long straight hair, and asking, asking, “Dolores, tell me. Tell us.” The question was always phrased differently, but it was always the same question. Tell me, tell me, how can I live without pain?…Impossible to tell them much truth. Didn’t want to. Why poison life for them before they’d barely begun? Weary, she’d send them home feeling full although not full enough (never full enough), and sigh her way to bed alone and lie there feeling it, the pain that was with her always, so familiar and accustomed a guest that it could be ignored for long stretches. It shuffled around her house in bedroom slippers, and made its own tea.

…

God knows there was never a dearth of things to cry about. And she, she was like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at every gong. Hard to say which was worse – the fact that the horrors of the world aroused in her nothing more forceful than a tear, or that every one of its horrors aroused that same tear. Something indescriminate about her. Weeping, of course, really for herself, as Homer knew.

- excerpt from The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French

This Bird Has Flown

1.

2.

“Do you think you weren’t loved enough?”

She tilted her head and looked at me. Then she gave a sharp, little nod. “Somewhere between ‘not enough’ and ‘not at all’. I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it – to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any mroe. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once. If I tried to cuddle up and beg for somethings, they’d ust shove me away and yell at me. ‘No! That costs too much!’ It’s all I ever heard. So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally 365 days a year. I was still in primary school at the time, but I made up my mind once and for all.”

“Wow,” I said. “And did your search pay off?”

“That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”

“Waiting for the perfect love?”

“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. And I say I don’t want it any more and throw it out of the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”

- excerpt from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

3.

I once had a girl,
Or should I say
She once had me.
She showed me her room,
Isn’t it good?
Norwegian wood.

- Norwegian Wood by The Beatles

4.

5.

The lyrics of the song sketch an encounter between the singer and an unnamed girl (or “bird” in British slang). They drink wine in her room and talk into the night. Their flirtation is apparently unconsummated, as the singer “crawl[s] off to sleep in the bath”. When he wakes up the following morning, the singer is alone and lights a fire.

The exact meaning of the title “Norwegian Wood” remains a mystery. The name of the song is mentioned in the first verse (“She showed me her room / Isn’t it good? / Norwegian wood?”) and again in its last line (“So, I lit a fire / Isn’t it good? / Norwegian wood?”). Some say that “Norwegian Wood” may be a pun with a nickname of a strong variety of marijuana. Others claim the final line of the song implies that the singer burned the home of the girl (the apparent official version, according to McCartney) using the furniture as fuel, or burned the girl’s furniture in the fireplace, others claim the word “wood” is a metaphor for an erect penis.

- Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) from Wikipedia

6.

Lonelily

~

1.
And then maybe, it’s just the rain. Maybe it’s one of those days where you think you feel lonely, and after a few minutes, your heart follows suit.

I’ve always thought of it as a weakness, you know. The heart following the mind. I’ve told myself that if I wanted to be strong, if I want to go through life with a spirit that can best all odds, my heart has to be the one leading the throng of wills inside my body. My heart should be the one who will have the courage to make a choice. I know my heart, I know how it feels. It will always be correct, no matter what my brain says. When my heart goes, everything will follow. And nothing else will need to matter after that.

2.
When I was young I actually thought that the more heartaches you have, the better. I moved through my life relishing all the bitter endings of my childhood, all the while thinking, yes, yes. This feels right. Even when I was on my knees, keeling from the pain of my memory which only serves to make actual situations seem more painful than they actually are, a part of me wants to break open my chest, hold that throbbing heart in my hands and tell everybody, look at my scars, look at my fucking scars: I’m in pain, isn’t it the most wonderful thing in the world?

Always when I am at that edge, I swear everything else blurs, and there is nothing else but me and that long, long blackness ahead. I can’t even pinpoint whether my pain is pulling me towards it or holding me back; the agony of what I’m going to do from there is excruciating. And addicting. Maybe it’s partly why I have never really learned how to run away from my problems and forget – because I reveled in it, in a way, the doubt, the tears. It’s something I knew early on. It’s the only thing I knew.

And it really sucks becoming like that while growing up. Because a part of me is uncomfortable whenever I’m happy, like I don’t deserve it. And I know that’s fucking bad.

3.
So I’ve never really been the one for all the happy-joy-joy’s of the world. I’m more of the wallflower kind, I guess. Always observing in a corner.

Today while I was waiting for my friend, along the street of Kamuning Road, I was standing under a shed, waiting for the rain to stop. To my left was something I’d call a drinking shanty. Seedy, with all the smoke, greasy countertops and bad karaoke. A man was there, all alone, drinking. Probably have been there all afternoon. He was singing to Enrique Iglesias’ Hero.

And maybe it’s just me, and the rain perhaps, or the way lonely people seem even lonelier whenever it rains: I felt sad, sad in a way that I’ve never been in a long time. I felt like crying, and suddenly the street before me seems so long. And I felt out of place, like I needed to be somewhere, within someone’s arms perhaps, but then I think it’s been about three years now today that I’ve had someone, and yes I am alone, I am fucking alone again. And that man singing is alone, too, he’s singing his heart out because he’s fucking alone. He’s wailing, I can be your hero, baby, but there is no one looking for someone like him today, everybody’s got somebody witnessing their lives, and we are two people, out here in the streets, losing our minds, feeling our hearts flood heavily with rain.

4.
But not to be too poetic. It’s just been a few months but I’m working hard on trying to stop with all this crap. The bleeding heart and all that. I’ve told myself, man, you have got to grow up, and crying about everything else is not at all something I’ve envisioned myself to do in the many, many years to come.

But I am also coming to the realization that this fucking slump might take a while, like when I tried to teach myself how to ride a bike, or tie my shoelaces, or peel oranges, or, my goodness, write fucking poetry. It takes some fucking time, and I’ll always emerge victorious but bruised. And when I finally learn how to do some things like that, I’m no better off from before, I’m still the same me, and I’ve managed to learn these things in the only way I’ll be able to do it, no matter how much I’ve told myself to try something new: in a way with my sadness clinging, hanging on to my sleeve.

So there. I’ll always be a little bit lonely, no matter how much I’ve wanted to change. There’s always something to be lonely for, in this world, that I think I’ll never run out.

5.
So yes, there will always be brooding. I cannot escape it. There will always be things like that, things that will make my heart tell my whole body, this is what it takes to be sad – knees shaking, lungs contracting, eyes feeling strangely hot – this is what it takes to be me. There will always be things to notice, things to grieve for, and I am still that little girl who wants to break her chest open, show everyone her scars and say, over and over, Isn’t it lovely, isn’t it lovely, isn’t it lovely?

Because this will always be one of the best things I’ve written in a long time:

Overture

written 14 February 2007, 11:58 PM

1.
Because Naya has mentioned Atwood and Horowitz, I bring out the beer stashed under my bed in case of emergencies. And this moment seems to be pressing, somewhere, something is breaking, inside my body. I put on George Bruch: Violin Concerto No.1 in G Minor, and then, this.There is time to smoke, in a while. For now, a poem:

 

I Was Reading a Scientific Article
Margaret Atwood

They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,

each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.

It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate

red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.

I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light

You rest on me and my shoulder holds

your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:

my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colors, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene

its other air
its claws

its paradise rivers

2.
In my Market Research class, we were tasked to conduct personal interviews all over Manila about the latest ad campaign for Coke. A lot of them don’t remember anything now. A lot of them don’t even drink it now.The tea phenomenon is invading the metro. They say, We have to keep the body clean. Detoxify. Keep healthy. Here: it is a temple, where your blood runs like a peaceful river. Like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on a sad night with no rain. This is how quiet the body can be.

I just took my can of beer and emptied it onto the bathroom sink. I put some water to boil, brought out a packet of dried leaves, smelling jasmine, the only thing I’ll find around this house now. I’ve read somewhere that Longjing is a famous Chinese tea. It stands for Dragon Well. Yun Wu is for Cloud and Mist. Chun Mee means precious eyebrows.

It’s a known fact that drinking tea can be good for the body, especially the heart.

3.
Chopin pitter-patters with Nocturne. I tiptoed around the kitchen trying not to make any noise. Everyone else is asleep; there’s no one to stay up for, no one to think about at this time.

Your birthday in two days.

4.
Teacup in hand, I return to my room to find Bach’s Air playing. Ah, but what else can I do but sit in the corner of my room, by the floor:

My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I’m at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, Who smells shit? – small daily humiliations – these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. Other damages I take in other places. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it’s over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes.Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don’t know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees, it takes half a tube of Ben-Gay and a big production just to bend them. To everything a season, to every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

- Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

5.
Franz Schubert casually slips into Unfinished Symphony No. 8. I now feel archaic. Time-worn. Passé. I think I sleep somewhere between forgotten and vanished.