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Words pressed in found yellow notebooks
I walk into this room every night, tonight of all nights. Something seems different. Like the silent sigh paused on everyone's lips, I prompt myself to feel something other than what I feel now.
A natural reaction: standing in the middle of circular stone patterns, tips of shoes touching, black leather against blue rubber, arms outstretched but together, tips of fingers beacons pointing North or South, East or West.
It all depends on the angle. But from above, you're just a line in the middle of circles.
And so this night, nothing is different because I still feel different. I'm transported, away, and so far in between. That nagging feeling still burns in my head, and my eyes are shifting, aching, and raw.
I do as I always do. I stare into my eyes as the world fades and turns black, first its edges, then eventually the black swallows everything up.
The first night, I held his hand, and it was as natural as tears falling from the sky. Hands always fit.
Something sacred: sharing cigarettes. The floor is cool and so is the beer I sip. The smoke that rises from my cigarette spells a word which is unreadable. You know you can't read cigarette smoke words from where you are. You'd have to be above, or below.
I blink. I'm not in my room: I'm in a minibus at ten in the morning, heady from excitement and lack of sleep, clutching tightly to a hand. The owner of this hand leans his head on my shoulder. He sleeps, shakes, yawns and closes his eyes again. He is tired, I am euphoric. I stare out at the landscape unfolding before me: orange mountains, blue skies, gray smog. I try to write in this yellow notebook, but the bus shakes and disturbs me from doing so. Instead, my lips search for his, and he responds sleepily, all the sweeter. I take pity. "Sleep," I whisper, and he takes my hand and obliges.
But meetings; let me talk about meetings.
He's on time, he's there, I note with relief as I run to cover the distance. And indeed there he is, leaning against the yellow subway walls, drinking a cold, overpriced cola, waiting. His hair is still slightly wet.
"Swimming was great; he was always the faster swimmer, though," he reports with an offhanded shrug, kissing me briefly before taking my packages with one hand and my other hand in his. He gives me a sideways hug as we walk to the escalators. "But you're quite early! I expected you to be an hour late," he teases.
We agreed earlier to meet at 8pm. And we did meet. Oh, it's so easy to meet when you're both within arms' reach. But when oceans and mountains and deserts place themselves between two people, every meeting becomes an exceptional event. Ticking days off a calendar, your cries for the days to hurry become echoes bouncing off tremendously high mountain walls, and you hope the other catches just a note of this echo before it disappears completely and sinks to the earth. Under the ground, where unheard wishes weep.
And so in my room, I stand staring at the horizontal lines the lamp posts grace my floor with. So smooth and so yellow. A yellow horizontal embrace.
First a mic and a half-cigarette
 Le Jul ! My exclusive excuse for not helping put up the Christmas tree is: "But, last year I was electrocuted." I plead this case every year and it used to work. It didn't work this year. As a result, I found a data cd containing pictures I'd forgotten about while looking for the goddam box of goddam Christmas lights in the shed. There are a lot of nice pictures in the cd. The other special bonus is finding my longlost Elliott Smith's XO cd. I am incredible. Bravissimo!
You were right
...because whatever you say about Mr. Gough, I have a weakness for self-depricating and apologetically corny 'wearing-my-heart-on-my-sleeve' melodies and voices that can't quite reach the right note, ah! the badly drawn boys of the world who mention sinatra and Jeff Buckley in their little poems...
grand-grander-grandeur-grandiose
Tristan und Isolde
It was unmistakable, that feeling I woke up with, reminding me too much of the circus: artificial, bright, temporary. Mornings make me long for evenings, and evenings I find that the night seems too long.
After the war, Quezon City was still a flat patch of land stretching like a yawn, houses sparse and far in between. A neighbor at the next street used to play opera on his phonograph for one hour, everyday, at six in the evening, my Father once told me, for the whole neighborhood to hear. No one complained.
And several days ago a musician just moved in next door; for the last two nights someone has been playing the violin, those weeping melodies that are perfectly somber and in tune. The evening practice, the after-dinner exercise. The extension of one's breath. Only to be stopped by irate phone calls, as I am told.
Last night was a particularly long night, and I turned in bed to look at the clock: two-fifty a.m., the green numbers read, and sadly I felt two hours and fifty years too late for those days when people could listen to Wagner without complaining. When did a violin ever become noise? Lately, it seems that no one is willing to listen to anything beautiful anymore.
Inane Conversations
These are inane conversations. Reading this is simply a waste of your time.
Inane Conversation 1
Just comeon!!!
Taking the Shape
Don't you know who exists for you, don't you know blood is not real red? When you incorporate parallels into perpendiculars it might as well be the start of a spiral. Snow White, Rose Red, Purple Rain, My Blue Heaven. It's just a colour, anyway. Start a war? There's a world war everyday in your heart, my dear soldiers, we're all leaders of our commandos, both the soldier and the sergeant, barking orders and following. You are the only world you know of, how selfish an outlook but true, and I won't try to convince you otherwise. Just look around, and everything you see comes through your own eyes, the only voice you must listen to is your own, and the only course of action springs from your mind. Staring at the battlefield has never been more poignant for a soldier in the rain, dropping to his knees, crawling in the mud with gun in hand, helmet strapped to chin... a love letter taped to his chest. It doesn't make you a coward to believe in love. In the midst of chaos, love is a wall to put your back against. Battlegrounds everywhere.
What kills the body, what kills the soul? Bullets whiz over your head. I'm so bored with it: if there's anything I'm not, it's scared. But I'm only anticipating the hit, nothing else. Blood could burst.
That's all. At ease, man. Dismissed.
Workaholics are Alcoholics?
It sure fits the description.
Presenting my friend Flemynne A., drunk of work and alcohol in lethal doses. She has never been the same since she started working two years ago. Here she is lookin' fresh as daisies. Bravissimo!
Aorta
My body, it's upside-down from lack of sleep. It doesn't know whom to listen to: this girl's heart, or this girl's mind. It stays awake even though it's tired, it dances even though its feet are sore. I fell asleep at five in the morning.
Three hours later I was awake, vision askew and distorted. It was still raining then, and the pavement was just too... wet to be walked on, erringly I cancelled all my plans and rolled my first cigarette of the day.
Since my sister is a doctor, I pored over her medical books and found a nice drawing of a heart, penciled and shaded, ripped it up and tacked it to the wall. Left ventricle. Right ventricle. Aortas, veins, and arteries. Do you know what God is? God is a philosopher. He makes the right side move the left, and the left, right. Every step is a step closer to heaven, and every new heaven is falling to the earth.
Now, i can't create utopia from eternal depth, because I don't know how deep I am. Maybe, this day and age, the idea of not knowing where you're heading is the indirect consequence of your unconscious worry of your vein (left atrium's oblique, for example, if ever possible, because I'm no Medical student) bursting, or arteries clogging. It should be of importance, physics declares it should, chemistry demands it, and my mind is just wondering.
So dismiss this, dismiss this as psychobabble, dismiss this as a head-stuck-in-oven mood, call it anything you want, I don't care. Only a girl knows what goes on in her mind, when her body changes and her eyes are layers of mist, because a girl knows what she knows and won't explain it, it's more of a mystery to herself than to others when she lifts her gaze to the bathroom mirror at five in the morning and pinches her cheeks to make them apear redder. Strange. She won't explain it. She can't.
I had a discussion with my friends over a late dinner, and one of them jumped to the topic that girls were the moon, la lune, no light of their own. But dammit, he said in an explosive voice, reclining in his seat and blowing out a steady stream of smoke that was hypnotizing, what infinite beauty girls were, they could make you ache with their yellow tint, hanging out in the sky like they do, they could change their (ph-)faces like geishas, they could raise the tides during the night and you'd never know of their doing, until you saw the wave patterns on the sand the next morning. "And fuckit, they run in your blood like it were the only thing to save you from drowning like the helpless fuckface you are, thinking they're all important and shit... they think they're the goddam Queen of Your Aorta or something, hahaha!... fuck that! But... you know if they stopped flowing in your veins, you're dead, pare, you're fucking dead without the moon. You're a corpse, that's what you are."
I don't think it's just women (I'm terrifically bored with men-versus-women gender debates because my stand is on individualism) who are...well, moons, and I argued with his point till the last drops of our cheap wine disappeared and till we had nothing more to smoke. But this guy was serious about his girl-moon theory, la lune as he put it in his fancy faux-French accent, ang buwan, as he put it in Filipino, calling it this way and that. Calling me, unintentionally, a geisha, a disguise, a tide-shifter, a (ph-)face changer, who turns the sky into Starbucks and draws men closer because we know that the point of view, from the earth to the moon, is as close as one can ever get.
I didn't have the heart to remind them that man has walked on the moon, and that one could perfectly use a telescope for a closer look. In a way I owed them my silence that much, because it's bloody sweet and morbid to be called Queen of Aortas.
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