At this very minute, someone
has decided to die of loneliness. On his last day on
earth, he reads his favorite book and looks up at the sky
when he reaches the line that has haunted him
from the first. I won't tell you what it is because
the tree outside his front door has promised to keep
it a secret for him. At noon, he walks two whole
blocks just to find out what is happening in the world. The
newspaper man tells him what he already knows, Nothing
is new. Nothing is happening. His cat sleeps on
his cold kitchen floor and for the first time, he wonders
if it dreams of him. What color am I in animals' dreams? A
useless query but still, someone somewhere would
pay for that kind of information.
Then he sits on a stool and waits for a god. Aloud, he says, I'd like
to know you better now before I change my mind. But a minute passes
and the truth gently blows on his forehead. He believes
it is time for a kiss. He calls up someone
he barely knows and asks for it. She says she'd like to oblige
but she's too busy making tinola for a family dinner that night.
He, of course, tells her about this recurring dream he has about fishes.
The yellow fish, the one with the smallest fins,
says that it knows the code of a kiss. Why do they know this, he
asks the woman. She tells
him, I'm busy and shuts off the world.
How do they know this, he repeats to an empty room and it's the
afternoon light, this time, that reminds him of the hour, how
it would be better used if he breathed in a little less of faith.

So far, I've only had my heart broken three times. The first time was when my mother died; the second time was when I first discovered that a person whom I loved deeply loved someone else; and the third was today. You'd think that having survived the loss of both my parents and bankruptcy and finally having severed existing ties with blood relatives would make me more adept at losing. You'd think that the sting would gradually change into something more forgiving, less harsh. But today I was reminded that when you lose, it always brings with it a new hurt, so different from all the ones that came before that you'd make yourself believe that it's the first time something so integral has been snatched from you. But after going through the motions of a day that never really ends, you sit and stare out the window and say So that really happened. Jesus Christ.

Which brings to mind one of my favorite childhood memories. My father, who was a crybaby himself, never allowed us to give in to indulgent bouts of tears. He read somewhere that real sadness lasts for approximately 21 minutes. So he literally trained us to cry for a full 21 minutes and after the minutes were up, he'd pat us gently on our backs and would say That's that for now.

So imagine the concentration that I exerted in staring at our office clock for 21 minutes. And all I wanted was to keep from crying. And I did.

It has been roughly 9 hours and so-so minutes since I heard the news. Forgive me, but I still feel so out of sorts. Nobody died, not really. I just feel, I dunno. Disconnected, somewhat. Honestly, what devastates me most is the realization that I do have a very deep need to be appreciated and accepted. This need is something that I've almost always denied in the past. I mean, how many times have I crowed about my independence, my solitary interests, my private faiths? You must know this about me. Then comes this ruinous affair and I just don't know what's what, really.

But inspite of the disappointment and frustration, I am not kneeling. I will keep on, still and always, simply because I have to. Because I am in love with silence's more interesting twin, with the stops and starts between definitions, with the mystery and salvation in the words that exist to defy all these blank spaces.

I am the invention of the people who have loved me.

I've been caught up in a deleting frenzy since Friday. For once, in the three years that I've been working, I cleaned out my office mailbox. I deleted unnecessary mail in all my email accounts. I've even deleted some entries here that made me go Ick when I read them earlier.

Out with the old indeed.

Truth be told, I should spend less time online and more time reading the books I bought. I think I still have 23 unread ones. Yes, I keep track. The book I am currently reading has made me weep with relief twice already. It's not one of mine; my friend Cyril lent it to me. Its title is History of Love by Nicole Krauss. A certain passage I have come across made me stop reading it for a full hour because it felt so painfully accurate and made me say, That's the way it was. Exactly. It's extremely validating to be reminded that I am not the first and the only one who has experienced these necessary losses.

Oh and I've been writing again. Not blog posting, but writing. I started just this morning and have already filled up around 6 pages of my company notebook. Am looking forward to buying a new Moleskin soon.

Also, I guess I need more time to write the way I used to. Need is the operative word. I need to be less focused on what other people might think and concentrate more on what I think. I need to truly write for myself, without pretention but with more pride. I need to be more honest and open. I need to remember why I started writing in the first place. I need to find that strength that has been so evident in me when I was younger, less structured. I need to see things clearly and not be afraid of the things I would see. I need to be needed less.

I need to relearn my life.

Beside the Point
Stephen Cushman

The sky has never won a prize.
The clouds have no careers.
The rainbow doesn't say my work,
thank goodness.

The rock in the creek's not so productive.
The mud on the bank's not too pragmatic.
There's nothing useful in the noise
the wind makes in the leaves.

Buck up now, my fellow superfluity,
and let's both be of that worthless ilk,
self-indulgent as shooting stars,
self-absorbed as sunsets.

Who cares if we're inconsequential?
At least we can revel,
two good-for-nothings,
in our irrelevance; at least come and make
no difference with me.

1. It's nice to be quiet like this. When I wake up, I feel a fine buzzing inside my head. I walk three blocks each morning and three more going home. I pass by many things I'd like to have. The urgency to write like a madwoman has gone from me. Maybe one of these days the bubble will burst and the very thing I know is true will reveal itself. But that's for another, more terrible day. Tonight, it's raining and I am planning on sleeping early.

2. Passing by one of the big hotels in Alabang, I saw two people kissing. I inched closer for a better look but tried to hide myself in the shadows because I am not entirely shameless. They were two women -- the other had short curly hair and the taller one had a small earring on her nose. How nice it is, I think, to experience this kind of abandon, a feeling that I can still remember but am finding hard to mimic now that I've grown older.

3. What I would like is to hear from you. But again, you have dropped off from the earth. Where are the places you vanish to? I would like to know, truly.

4. I miss my mother's chicken soup. Even if she has never made chicken soup, even if she is not really my mother but a sigh and sometimes, just a name that I keep putting in between these self-imposed distances.

5. What does it take for a person to be truly happy in the body s/he walks around in? Is it really no longer a question of happiness but of comfort, a certain acceptance? It makes me lonely, somehow, thinking that.

6. If I am a blur, you are radar. Whatever that means to us now.

7. Last Sunday was perfect. I never thought I could describe any experience in a theme park as perfect but there we were and it was not raining and my brother kept posing next to these obscure, uninteresting structures, saying Take my picture as if his life depended on it and he and Darling's cousin rode the bump cars and I recorded how fast their cars went That ride took about 2.6 minutes Oh and we rode the ferris wheel and Darling's cousin was trembling with fright because it was his first time and you know how it is, that very certain fear, when you do things for the first time ever and we ate a Family-sized pizza because it was a Family Day and what could be better then eating a Family-sized pizza on your Family Day and we watched the fireworks while eating and the colors exploded all over our faces God-cum says P who never knows when to stop being crass and Darling he loved me so much that night I knew it as much as I know the curve of your back because you've walked away from me so many times and we rode every ride we possibly could and laughed at Darling's cousin's nervousness Oh we were radiant We were a flying trapeze, a six-foot heart undone and un-miserable I could not believe that my life looked like this If you took a picture, you'd be afraid of how terrible we seemed and on our way out we saw Cinderella and her prince and I was fine with the way Prince Charming looked at me as if he was about to say something dreadfully, painfully important but he couldn't, what with all that prettiness draped on his one good arm so he walked past me, so quickly that I could've imagined it all, oh well, there goes that. Story of my life.

The Muse This Time

R. Zamora Linmark

I am, at the moment, a patron of the meat market. Profession: a poet on-call because poetry only comes when it wants to; hobbies; listening to Gershwin while looking for Freud in Woody Allen movies; history of the heart: six lovers who wanted to be immortalized.

“Funny,” said my fourth, “you can cook up a poem about bumper-to-bumper traffic, but when it’s time to write about me…” How do you explain to someone who makes you come thrice a week and gives you head and foot massage at bedtime why it is much easier to write about gridlock in the land of diesel than return to that humid night in Makati, where we had met, in a Korean-owned steam room, a misnomer since lust provided the heat.

The fifth and sixth were more demanding. “Screw the acknowledgment page,” said the fifth. “I want a biography that sings,” said the sixth. Completely unaware they were making the same request an hour apart from each other, I told them, “What do you take me for? a mail-order poet? Dial-a-poem?”

“I don’t get it,” said the third. “You can create beauty from a dead fish,” said the second.

“Destroy buildings in one line,” said the first, “but you cannot write about the good ole devil?”

Their words are stinging now as I approach twilight. Truth is: love’s hard to live with. I forget to set the alarm clock, I buy everything on credit, I start making up words, I call in sick to the world. “Are you a poet?” asked the second. “A lover?” asked the third. “Just shut up and write,” said the first.

I can’t. Nothing is entering. Except the voice of my first lover, the one who set the picture straight. “The problem with you is you think you’re Woody Allen in Manhattan.”

Gershwin’s blue clarinet, black-and-white Big Apple, an ice cream parlor. At the counter, Woody is buying Hemingway’s daughter, Mariel, a milkshake before he delivers the bad news. Tears coursing down her cheeks, she asks, “Why? Because I’m too young? Because I don’t know Rita Hayworth from Veronica Lake? Because I’m not Diane Keaton running with you in the rain?”

They split, then a minute before the credits roll, he changes his mind. “I’ll take you back,” Mariel says, “when I return from London.”

That’s the closest to my idea of love: watching the skyline, making out, making mistakes, making believe desire means it’s with somebody else, then breaking up, and, if we’re lucky, forgiveness that comes right before take-off. There, I’ve said it. What more can one want? A lover who loves me as much as the rain. Rain, and, from the opening credits to the closing heart, Gershwin.

There are two things that have made this day bearable. Learning about this and hearing this, both quite unexpectedly:

This is the last song that I've managed to sing to someone without quitting halfway. Would it make you feel good, I wonder, if I told you that?