Today is April 20, 2005. I am waiting in a mall. It is a Saturday, there're a lot of people milling about. I am fidgety, as if this is the first time I'll be doing this.

This is the first time that I'll be doing this.

You are not here yet and I am waiting by the bookstore. I decide to go to the restroom to freshen up. I hope you won't arrive yet, I need some minutes to myself. I reach the restroom and check how I look in the mirror. There are circles and fine, thin lines around my eyes. My mother just died five days ago. I am unsure about how I look.

I shouldn't have worn this black top. It drains the color from my face. Now, I look pale and my cleavage is showing. I wore it exactly for that purpose but now, I am not so sure about my decision. (decisions.)

I remember asking someone restroom directions. I realize that I need someone to guide me to places.

I enter the bookstore only because you say that you're coming, that you're almost here. I imagine that I could smell you in this place. This is true. In the insanity of these passing minutes, I pretend that I know what scent you wear. When you asked where we'd be meeting, I said The Fiction Section, please. I thought I was being smart, that there was something decidedly poetic about strangers meeting in a section where only the surreal survive.

Someone in the Fiction Section knows me. He was a college classmate of mine. He speaks to me as if we are intimate friends. It always strikes me as funny how people who are on nodding terms get chummy when they meet in strange and new places. I try to look out for you but I don't know exactly what kind of face I am looking for.

Then you appear. The details blur into each other. I remember coming home for the first time.

*******

It is September 20, 2005. I am breaking up with you. I had one beer too many and other drinks besides. I have plans to go to Singapore. I am sitting on the mattress when I open the topic. You came in and out of the room afterwards, occasionally texting some anonymous person and smiling.

I think it's going to end tonight. That was fast, I whisper to myself. But who expected it to last, really?

Tomorrow, I have an interview downtown. I have to sleep, have to get some rest.

*******

Today is September 21, 2005. I am on a bus. I am going back to my real home. I look out the window; I can't stand this sudden space. I leap out of the bus like a woman who stars in a romantic movie would. The bottom line of everything is romance and how much you can squeeze out of it. This is what I really believe.

It only takes me thirty minutes to get here. I wait for you. You make me wait for you. I sit silently, disbelieving this, how I can't stand to be alone even for a day.

*******

Today is November 14, 2005. I look her up, research stuff about her with the same detached feeling that I used to exert in dissecting frogs for Biology class. I ask my officemate to walk me to the terminal because my legs feel wobbly. Truth is, I feel like collapsing.

When my officemate is gone and I am safely inside the rental van, I cry slow, silent tears. Once, I sobbed out loud. I hope the driver didn't hear me.

*******

It is April 2006. I give a quick glance at the room that I'll be sharing indefinitely with my officemate. This is her family's house. I get the top bunk. I strongly suspect this is because I am not a real part of the family. My officemate and her sister shares the bottom bunk.

I eat with her Chinese/ Japanese family. Her mother gives me an orange bathing suit. She hands it to me after our first meal. I accept it, I am at a loss for words. I am at a loss, period.

*******

It is May 2006. We meet at another mall. We were supposed to watch a movie but decided to veto it at the last minute.

We take a jeepney ride home. You've curled your hair a month ago and now it looks unmanageable, is being blown raucously by the wind. It is a windy day. Your hand has reached out, has cupped mine. The lady sitting across us dismisses us, as if we are long-time lovers, something she's already seen before.

*******

It is October 2006. I've brought you fruit and am staying the night. Almost everyone is here. They are visiting you. Your platelet count has gone down the day before and everyone wants to see you, to know how you are. I like acting as hostess; I do it seldom.

By 10pm, everyone has vacated the area. Only I am left and your cousin, who also got inflicted with Dengue. His mother is accompanying him at the other area; we assume that they are sleeping. I am sitting on a small stool. You look at me and say, You are my hero. You feel a bit emotional because a lot of people dropped by today. I smile softly and do not look at you. It is nothing, I say. Don't mention it, it is nothing.

*******

It is May 7, 2007. It is my birthday and we are on our way home. You aren't in the van; we dropped you off somewhere because you had to go to work. I feel down and am not talking much. Besides, I am nursing a hangover. The hotel was beautiful. I wish I were rich enough to be able to spend every summer there.

I arrive home and take a nap. I wake up after some time, I hear you come in the room. You sigh and seem tired. Turns out that your student wasn't at school. You seem so heavy, like a lot of weight is on your shoulders. You hug me half-heartedly. I have a present for you, you say, handing me a plastic bag. In it is a book. It is a book of short stories by an author I do not know. I stare at it, trying to find some meaning in it. Sadly, it had none.

*******

Today is October 16, 2007. I am looking for scissors to cut out the tags from the clothes I just bought. I have draped them all over the mattress. I know that I shouldn't but I look in your drawers. I know that I shouldn't but here it is, something else. Not what I was looking for.

*******

Today is May 7, 2008. It is my birthday. You are home; you kiss me and tell me you love me. I believe you.

******

Today is June 6, 2008. I am trying to remember everything. I won't pretend that I've always understood you. I have to admit that there are some days when I don't even try.

I do not know how you'll react when you read this. I don't think I'll ever know, since you never seem to visit this site, anyway. Which is not a bad thing, really. Odd, but not something that can be completely categorized as bad.

I want to relive you and these years. I want to feel like someone who has reached the top of a mountain and say Hah! I've come this far. There's no turning back, not now. I realize that there are a lot of parts that I've left out, parts when, if relayed, may give a fairer depiction of our circumstances. Forgive the rags of my memory; they can only absorb what has been understood.

Remembering is good. Remembering makes me realize how much I have changed. How much we'll continue changing in the coming years. Here is something true: I am not less afraid now. I am not stronger. There are even days when I wish that our relationship consisted wholly of days reliving that first day, the day we met. Imagine, twenty-six months of going to the mall, meeting in the Fiction Section, then coming home. There are many things that I still feel ambivalent toward, many questions that I do not ask. I want to say, I need to touch you. But I do not. I don't know why.

Both of them tell me that it's important for me to keep a journal. Not the moleskin ones because that would be too expensive for someone with as tight a budget as I have. Both of them have said, at separate times, of course, that it would be better if I kept one of those small ones that can fit easily in the tiny purses I carry. That way, whenever an idea pops up, I would be able to reach in any inane purse I was carrying and speedily jot down what I've thought of, else, it will be lost. One of them said it is possible for these thoughts, these magical phrases to be lost forever.

I've been home for almost a week now and have experienced those rarities flittering in and out, as if they were guests that were too busy. I took too much of their delightful time. There was one moment yesterday afternoon when I thought up a fabulous beginning for an insanely romantic story about a woman with long hair, coming in from the rain. I find the occurence of rain romantic. Once, I imagined a whole stanza for a song. There were, of course, the lilting voices of phrases, keen on maintaining the distance between me and the rest of the text that I was supposed to make them fit in.

People like me --- people who don't keep notebooks within reach, who easily forget the occasional key in certain locks, who neglect turning out the lights --- have it easy. We say, Oh, I've forgotten, when the truth of it is we're believers in the temporariness of things. Seeing a part of some vast and incomprehensible whole doesn't mean that you'll understand eventually. Being the sole witness to a singularly spectacular phrase doesn't mean that it is yours to write about. People like me do not get to own anything or anyone and in return, we flounder; we go through life mostly by ourselves. What we want are witnesses, like the two people I mentioned earlier, companions who will remind me what the essentials are, what things should be accomplished today. I always maintain that each day is vastly different from the day before it. I'm talking Mars and Bigfoot. I'm talking eggs and rainbows. The morning light goes loom and you're different from who you were at 11:59pm.

Everything is so extraordinarily transient. Don't you see? Tomorrow, I can say that I've decided to be a tiger. And that's what I'll be for the day. I'll prowl and hunt and roll around under the sun. I'll talk with my fellow tigers with short but persuasive growls. Then tomorrow, it'll all be different. Tomorrow, I'll be a vase. Then you can put daffodils in me. You can water the daffodils, even put some plant vitamins with it. It's always easier to imagine that you can be something completely different, that simple things like daffodils, water, and vitamins are all you're really allowed to contain.

If This Were Not Love
by Sid Gomez Hildawa

If this were not love,
I wouldn’t kiss you.
My head would turn
the instant your head
would rise to meet
mine, allowing
our cheeks to console
each other as I distract
you with a tight
embrace. My fingers
would comb your hair
the way mangrove
roots sift through mud
to anchor at the swampy
edge of the bay, extending
the land but not
sailing away. My legs
would entwine around
your legs, with my feet
locked on to yours, as though
we were one immortal
creature with many arms
and many legs, but with many
hearts as well. And my body
will rub against your
body, like millstone
to the mill, skin
on smooth skin, grinding
watered grains
into milk, but only
for spilling.

I wouldn’t kiss you
If this were not love.

the truest excerpt in the world

We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy.

But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years.

But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable.

You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real--but you create the context. And the context is everything.

The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.

From Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live.

coming home: parts and pieces 2

Woe is me. I am at home, nursing a sprained ankle. This is the product of a gloriously intelligent decision that I made sometime between 11:35 and 12:01 a.m. last Sunday, the details of which I won't be discussing here or anywhere for that matter. I spent the whole Sunday prostrate in bed, with nothing else to do but read. Okay, so I won't be a hypocrite and pretend that I was very miserable. This is the only time that I've managed to succesfully finish a book in months. Oh, and I watched Unfaithful again, which is something that I've wanted to do for the loooongest time. I want to stress out that it is definitely not the right movie to watch when your right foot hurts like hell.

My brother was so sweet. He went out to attend band practice Sunday afternoon but came home immediately afterwards. He wore such a concerned look in his face that I had to ask him, ever so wryly, So who died? And in the middle of dinner while we were watching a supposedly funny sitcom, I cried all over my hotdog sandwich. He had to listen while I ranted on uselessly about how I shouldn't have done this or that, how I should've been in Laguna by that time, how I may never walk again because my foot hurt so badly. He must've been pretty shaken because he texted all the nurses he knew (he was once a nursing student) and asked about my plight. No, they replied, it couldn't be broken because she can still move it a bit. No, it's not something to worry about but it's best to have it X-rayed.

Monday, I couldn't come to work. It still hurt badly but I could move it a bit. Bro took me to the station and refused to leave and he probably hadn't had I not threatened him that I would not be giving him any allowance if he fails to enroll this semester. So he finally went to school and I was left in the station with Kurt Vonnegut and his dud of a book.

Inspite of the nerve-wracking transpo shifts, I arrived at Laguna in one piece. My boy showed off his new tatts which were very nice but I don't care much for stars because they remind me of something hateful and sad. Since we didn't see each other for a week, we talked about everything that happened during the week that we could remember. One of the nicest things about being with someone sensible (him, not me) is that you never seem to run out of things to talk about.

Today, we're off to the clinic. I opted to come home because if I have it X-rayed and checked here, I wouldn't have any over-the-top expenses. Two words: company benefits.

I am still a bit scared but I can walk using the foot now. It doesn't hurt so much but still and all, it pays to be cautious.

coming home: parts and pieces

It has hard to describe the slowness that I felt, waking up to watch the rays of light coming in from the large French windows. I stretch my arms and realize that it's Sunday and there is nothing to do. It is Sunday and there's nothing to do. One can be smug about such a simple pleasure.

I slept on my aunt's couch, which is blue and long and roomy. It is a big couch. I easily fall in love with big couches. I once told someone that my house would consist only of couches of different sizes and colors. No ratty chairs, no beds. Just couches. But the biggest and softest couch of all would sit in my room. It would be done up in teal so that when friends come over and they say, Oh what a beautiful couch and such a lovely color! I'd say, It's teal. I've always wanted to use that word in a regular conversation, as if by inserting it, it would make the sentence better and more meaningful.

I refused to leave my warm couch and let my mind fill up with lovely, serene thoughts. I remember thinking about how happy I was with my life in general. Nothing is outwardly wrong and everyone I love is healthy. It's good to wake up this way. It is very rare for me to have time to think about things in this manner because most of the time, I scamper out of bed, almost always rushing to take a shower and then head on to more socially meaningful things.

I see a man pass me by. He does not spare me a glance. He is wearing a brown tophat; the rest of his outfit is nondescript. He is smoking a cigar at 7:30 in the morning. This is an action that does not surprise me. My father's friends smoked cigars non-stop, so it didn't matter whether it was morning or night.

The man I am talking about is one of my cousin's old school friends and the couch I have spent the night in is in my aunt's house in Lucban, Quezon. The last time I spent the night here was when I was 10 years old. I remember that I slept over in order to bond with my cousins from Saudi Arabia, all of whom I haven't seen since they were toddlers. Back then, Saudi Arabia was just a piece of paper in the grand design which my 4th Grade teacher called a map. It was yellow and not as big as Australia. I ended my visit earlier than I had intended because my cousin, the eldest and the most Arabian-looking, cornered me in one of the rooms upstairs and asked me to lift my shirt up. I, of course, refused and was shaken. It took me 16 years to come back and this time, I made sure that they weren't there.

Another man passed by, sans cigar. I have already been awake for 30 minutes. I hear voices in the kitchen, men's voices which were gruff and loud. They are talking about stocks and bonds, horse races and the latest car models. I recognize their voices, they are my cousin's childhood friends. But I cannot see them because of the thick, white curtain that separates the living room from the dining area. So I imagine that they are all just mouths, talking and masticating. I imagine that they are the most interesting mouths in the world and people pay to see them talk about stocks and bonds, horse races, and the latest car models.

I stare at the white cat which has situated itself on a stool. It looks uncomfortable. Poor cat, I think, I've robbed you of your throne and you're too polite to tell me off. I proceeded with my morning rituals then headed off to look for my aunt.

My aunt is my father's sister who never married. I believe I've talked about her in one of my previous blogs, but never at length. She is 93 years old and can still chat up a storm. My father once told me a story about why she never married. The man she loved was about to propose one night. He decided that it would be clever to start with a harana (a love song) so he sang loudly and confidently under Tita Nena's window. What he didn't know was that Lola was sick and could not stand noise of any kind (at this point, my father always used to snidely say that the man wasn't what you can call a singer so his voice registered as a caterwaul). So what Lolo did was, he filled a pail with urine and water and poured everything on the man's poor head. The suitor never came back.

I wonder sometimes if she thinks about him, if she tries playing it over and over again in her mind how dreadfully humiliated he possibly looked like at that moment when Lolo dumped the contents of the pail on him. Or maybe, she imagined other, better things about him.

My cousin noticed that I left my makeshift bed and told me to go to the dining room. He and his friends are having breakfast. Today breakfast consists of batchoy and brown puto and an assortment of fruits. I sat with them and ate while deliberately trying to look attentive and interested. I volunteer information regarding what they're talking about and am careful in phrasing questions. My father always stressed the importance of being able to conduct oneself properly and intelligently within groups. He refused to see me looking meek and shy, like someone who doesn't have much to say. He used to tell me that the mark of an intelligent woman is how confident she appears in a group of men. That eventually, if she's witty enough and knows enough, they won't think of her as a separate entity, rather as a pleasant and remarkable addition. This is why I believe that I've always been more at ease in the company of men. I feel it requires less superficial effort from me, but more brainwork.

After breakfast, I go back to the living room and sit beside my aunt. She is watching the telly. We talk about a myriad of things -- past and present situations, what's what and who's who in which person's life. We talk about sad things and fall into quiet reminiscence afterwards. She is clutching my hand all the while, as if I were a bubble that has no other fate but to vanish in thin air. I feel so much affection from her, and belief. I wonder sometimes if a person deserves that much love. But then I realize that no one actually deserves love. When it is given, all that can be done is to be grateful for it.

*an excerpt from my journal, dated June 1, 2008

...

I would have loved to be man. Just so I could fall in love with a woman in a red dress, playing the violin.