Zola, without a doubt.

Girlfriends: A Definition
(for Mia and Mara)

When we’re done shuffling the cards,
and dealing the boards,
turning over red jacks and black hearts,
we sit by the pool.
Day peels itself off-
a poster sky
holding itself together
till the arrival of stars.
Silence is slow
as blood leaving forgotten wounds.
We lie,
poker facing umbrella trees.
(They tell a different story.)
We lie,
our woman breasts heaving,
reaching different summits,
our rummy breath losing all sense of open air.
We lie,
our feet dangling,
slicing the gelatin water,
making beaver-tail splashes
to warn the colony of the heart.

——————————-

This

What comfort there is we find

in this

corner table-

uneven stilt legs,

cold metal rungs twisted,

dutiful and resigned

to a fate of tipping from side to side?

The cups and coasters sit,

reticent, open porcelain mouths

agape in mock surprise.

I grip one by the hardy ear.

We hardly care much about

anxious tables;

nor the dead around us dining,

dead eyes shining as if alive.

Nor cafes

and menus-

they court tastes,

and like a woman waking before the dream,

reject the pocket.

No, not second levels

of stunted high rises,

and open views of a beat-up sky-

blue-black and preening,

in wishful, pretty thinking

of suns and dun gloamings.

What could be more brutal

than a murder of twilight,

death by straggly arteries of wire?

This place is seedy on all counts.

Excepting only, when,

a stripe of traffic light

falls on your hair,

The room molds its body around us.

Coagulated shadows of plastic leaves

heckle and jeckle at the snobbish floor.

“A portrait of the artist

as a relatively young man,” I say.

Your skin shiers above the eyes:

reception’s not as relevant

as the conception.

We thicken the air with smoke,

between us, the cigarette smolders,

where the fire is,

blurring the subtle distinctions

in hands closing over another,

like sadly curled petals.

A quiet grin warps the mouth-

a fault, perhaps, a crack-

a fissure near the temple next-

deep enough to sail a fleet through

to the strafed portions of your soul.

Now,

my silence rhymes with yours.

Here,

in the grumbling thorax of the city

everything screams.

same shit, different day. i wish to finish this post, through hell or high water, i will. things get in the way. all the time. is it too much to ask for deadlines to do what its supposed to do and die for just a few minutes and let me write? gad. i never get to do this anymore.

to be cont….

time to do the math and count my little blessings. i will now prepare for a toothache from the sugary sweetness of my own little discoveries. midmorning, midweek cliche overload about to launch. eitherways, i just need to revel in these little niceties. puking at what i have just said and done is for later.

1.  regular black ball point pen gliding smoothly on yellow paper. you do this kind of drafting long enough and you will eventually be resigned to the fact that you don’t need a computer to get things done. at least as draft, anyway. what i always thought of as an exercise on frustration, is not. anymore. i am still not happy with my own hand though. they look like peanuts strung together. i still want it to look loopy-romantic as would heroines make in their letters to some clandestine lover or some woebegone, olive-skinned he-man. i still need a computer though. if only for making them drafts look like real documents. but for the novelty of writing under the faint nightlight, on a ricketty table, by a heavily curtained window, i will want to catch my thoughts before they drift off with the evening breeze and write on yellow paper. 

2.

again, to be cont. duty calls. this sucks.

she forgot to feed me again. the bitch. she woke up with a scrambling start this morning, almost tripping on the nightstand, atop of which, I, through the slimy inside of an empty mayonnaise jar throw googly fish eyes at her. she cuts me a pair of absent eyes instead. the girl is as dumb as a doornail in the matter of keeping house pets. to add insult to the injury of her nonexistent capacity to keep my piscean angst pacified, she calls me Samson.

I remember how it happened. She was spouting warlike names at me, watching my reaction as we walked along Quezon Avenue. I could not react to anything. She was holding the bottom of my container, staunch at keeping it steady. As if the jumpy way she walks could do anything to prevent my near death. The city lights, the din of traffic, the total agony of being in a small neon green plastic bottle, and the titter totter of my watery world everytime she halts, frisk and tentative all the time, in the middle of the steet foretold my tragedy. We finally cross the street, me shook up and contemplating self-righteous suicide made just by the omens of a seriously ill-fated life, and her asking me through ridiculously red lips: "Are you nauseous, little fishy? You look sleepy. Are you still alive?"

i have always wondered what sad song or story made her say that. Until she placed me in her worktable, next to the speakers of a radio and listened to track 6 of the same CD the girl listens to nonstop everyday. it became apparent that the nauseous look of my droopy eye the day she walked me home reminded her of that guy with the hair made gullible by love. one more to the list of her irreparable acts of animal cruelty which I, against the laws of nature, will remember beyond my three-month memory.   

to be cont…

day 2 of the starvation diet and  marathon walk around the village, yes! must do before my butt starts spilling out my jeans and before i become totally implausible as rita, the lesbo with body image issues.                                     

so i set out the crooked gate of our crooked old house early this morning, gripping  my little towel tight, sure as sure that a miracle will happen.  like the stray dogs on the left end of our street NOT being there like they were yesterday. no miracle at 5:45  today. so i set out the friendlier side of the road, gingerly  quickening my footsteps, so as not to trouble my heart. but then again, worrying about it is the same as worrying for cheese to spoil. no point fretting about what didn’t happen to it already.   

there’s a certain sweetness to the morning air after a night’s rain and the lilt to the neighbor’s voice when she called the kids for breakfast. the little old lady with the ready scolding for "nice girls who smoke" ("i know your mami, sige ka!) was just starting her morning walk in the mommy jeans  (in acid wash with the ridiculously high waist), ninja shoes, and lime green button down  blouse. i wish i were 80 and walk around committing fashion faux pas and still look cute as a button.

i made three rounds of the baranggay, yes! and eight more around the island fronting the church. the one mia and i went to the other day. the one with the cutest set of (married with kids) laymen (girlish giggles) and the firecrackers above it after the Lord’s prayer. the one a block across Auring ’s Store, with the sign, if read from  5 feet off the ground, with the lower part of the font under the gutter, that sounds more like a brothel than an innocent sari-sari.            

the first trip around it, i met old man 1, who tipped a baseball cap at me for good mornings. chivalry is so dead  among  the boys that i hang out with. it would be nice, if only once in a while, they offer to carry stuff for the lady, darnit.  when i ran into him again around the island, there were already three of ‘em.

"hello, good morning again!"

"good morning." 

"hello."

"hi."                               

"you walk here every morning?"

"yes , i hope to do so, sir  ."

"where’d you live."

"no. 2, hunter’s row sir."

"oh, ila ni attorney. kinsa ka man anak?"

now i get it why the old man wouldn’t want me running around or getting home at 3:00 in the morning. everybody knows everybody here. so i walked along with them a few steps around the island, listening in on stories about their wives and grandkids and  who’s graduating and getting married. typical stuff, all in that kind of fluent and " proper" english and the swanky tone my own grand uses. until they’ve had enough walking for the day and piled on to one big van. three rounds is what their blood pressures and creaky joints can allow them, i presume. they pass by me doing my weird run, stop a little while to say, "goodmorning, curly." old men. they have their cute points. they can flirt   and   you still want to kiss their balding heads. there’s something so dignified about pruney faces, white hair and chubby middles. like they’ve been here  longer and done more that they must be respected. any man, can live a life as a full-time son-of-a-___, retire, walk around an island fronting a church and deserve that.    

i think i am gonna go this route again tomorrow.  the one i took yesterday bored me easy with the sneering churls of a dog and big houses that look like the inside of my CR at home. three of my other get-healthy friends bailed out on the sexify mission. the other’s probably in dreams till now (from blogging all night and early dawn), another, out on a search and destroy mission, and the other, probably waiting for that forever belated hang-over.       

                                          

my director needs me skinnied down two dress sizes in two weeks. our playdates are coming up and soon enough i will be playing rita, one of the two really messed up characters in a gay play. somehow, two weeks before the curtains rise, and a month after i am cast for the role, he notices that, since i’ve gone to live here in my little town, i have gained a lot of weight. everything justified and well-timed. to rant and rave about it is not kind; i can only be grateful to him who’s trusted me enough with the role, so i can test waters and take on another venue for creativity. so i will not gripe about having to lose weight. i will only channel kate and other screen goddesses who can bloat and shrink per project.

i think i’ll do what mia told me. zero carbs and nothing but water for two straight weeks. its been 16 hours since my last real meal. i feel a little faint, actually. i was staring at myself in my bedroom mirror lunchtime, while everyone at home sunk teeth into adobo in the kitchen. how did this happen? it looks like all i’ve done here in iligan is gain hips and cup sizes. i still weigh within my normal range. but bart’s voice kept ringing in my ear. i am fat. i have to do this. for the sake of verisimilitude. who’d believe me when i say, as rita: "flat-chested ba ako? figure ko puro angles." even i would think i’m joking. anorexia for art’s sake. i will starve myself until i am a size negative 2.

how in the world am i going to? starvation diet is an option. i can’t turn around and junkie again. losing weight was easy when i was me a few years ago. it took zero effort to slacken down to skeletal. the first time i dropped to a hundred and five was when i got dumped for the first time. i remember crying myself to sleep and waking up wanting to die. pathetic is an understatement. and i was, what, 22? i can’t be 26 and go through that again. one can’t be as old as i and indulge in selfpitypathos. there’s this nietzscheian line mia and i believe with all heart and soul- "pain is inevitable. suffering is an option." i think i got too happy here, its showing in my waistline (which is an inch larger, thank you very much). who wouldn’t be. months ago, i promised myself that i will enjoy all the peace and moonlight i can somewhere, and i did.

but suffering is best for losing weight! i pray for a heartbreak! for being too happy in my new niche, i have to pay the price of looking like a blob next to phoebe (or jiji) who’s what, a size zero?

——————

my sunday itinerary is ruined. its not for lack or want that i have to stay over at my friend’s house but for a million things to do with a computer! and internet connection! its just necessary. i take the former back. it is for lack.

and i am not allowed to. for some ancient unwritten rule that would mark a woman evil or whatnot if she does so. i do not know it is such a moral blunder to … i will now stop … i have very little energy to throw a tantrum or wave a sturdy index finger at anyone. must save the kilocals for pushing pedals homeward.

i woke up in the same bed, in the same sleepdress ive woken up in for decades this morning. i haven’t been home in weeks and the feel of the same purple sheets in my purple room with the real messy beautiful twisted sunshine streaming through the slats that always told me its morning, is strangely familiar and comforting. i cut an eye across the old chest across my bed to see my dolls, like corpses, one on top of each other, gathering dust in their yarn hairs and i felt like im home again. i owe it to manang. she kept my cave looking as it was, when i left, only cleaner.

mornings are my favorite hours of the day. ive never been happier to see my sister. i didn’t realize how much i missed our morning rituals. hers is longer and is the bone of early morning contentions for years. she’s OC, which worries me, really. there is a formula to her peace. there is a specific number of times for when she needs to "go" before leaving the house, and a number of times she has to check for switches turned off before she can breathe. and many such other things that would bug other people but has become very normal for people who live with her. if she didn’t count the number of times she’d have to open and close her bedroom door, or meticulously arranged three sets of anything she would use or wear for the day, id have thought aliens kidnapped the dysfunctional one, blamed them for turning her normal.

breakfast, she was showing me her loot. she’s ten times girlier than anyone ive ever met. new everything in different colors of the rainbow. i ooohed and aaaahed at the stuff she’s got for me too. ive upped the notch of my voluntary simplicity by preaching the virtues of having so little in the past months mainly because i have so little where i now live. i am only very thankful somebody has taken responsibilty over updating all that is mine and worn to ragged pieces.

i miss our mornings together when we banter over how much sugar i put in my coffee or which tv program to watch over our greasy plates of manang’s humba (which she made again, coz im home. i will now cry.) or why she is going out with him whose head is so big, it alone is helmet. not anymore, she isn’t. nothing against the boy she was with for a year but i haven’t seen my little sister so frustrated over anyone’s smarts. gone are the days when she’d pepper our mundane morning talks with how he would always say "duff" for dough or "prejudays" for prejudice. we’d laugh our cruel heads off over the intellectually challenged boys she’s dated and i’d gloat over how all my exes are brainiacs who’d change colors and become asses after a few months.

the afternoon we walk around divisoria sipping shakes and looking at stuff she thinks i should get as i am looking more and more like homeless with the dirty feet and scraggly hair. she took care of everyhting and i laughed and laughed at the tickly things them at the salon used on my feet to "repair" it. i had to leave early though. leaving hurt just a little bit, sometimes, when i’m with family.

another bus ride. i wonder, how many more i had to take and where else fate would take me. i took his hand with a lot of faith and more quiverring in my heart. but with the looks of it, i did the right thing in jumping aboard the bus to sleepytown that is not at all how it looks in broad daylight. ive never been more at peace with myself since i changed locations. ive done this in the agenda to erase my personal history. sort of like rebooting a functional-dysfunctional program i ended throwing in the trash at the end of the day, anyway, which served me good. to be able to keep calm and quiet for long hours used to take hervulean effort as i was alway bounving off walls, flying from one adventure to another. now, i’d taunt myself in different times of day for looking like ive been snacking on tranquilizers. my aunt always took it as boredom and would have me watch as many soaps as i can with her on lazy nights, now i am hoked on ysabella and ju mong. i, on the one hand, call it peace. to find my center, to be able to keep to myself in my room for hours longer than when i’m out, is probably the best thing i have ever achieved. i am now a boring public school teacher who worries about her unupdated class record. i am uncool and i fuckin’ LOVE IT. so sue me!

i think my salary is urban legend. up there with radio announcers with a whole other idea of phonetics. it’s been two and a half months since i started working in the university and i, along with a bunch of other newbies in the deaprtment hasn’t heard of anything coming in as compensation for our coming in and out of classrooms. but i’ve pretty much adjusted to eating noodles and crackers in the morning. and walking the three blocks to school.

i was doing just that this morning. its pretty fun, the growing familiarity that happens in passing by the same guys throwing the same darts on the same hour of everyday, already red in the face at nine in the morning. we say "rak en rowl" to each other. like some sort of nifty handshake to identify us being neighbors sharing the same air and sun and nothing more. our street ends with another sari sari with the same lovable old lady from whom i used to buy a smoke and a moment’s conversation with before my long morning walks. she gave me a curt ilonggo accented scolding for trying to buy a stick. she won’t sell me it. she gave me a piece of gum instead. aint that sweet?

i pass by the corner where the sikad drivers already know where i go home to every afternoon. they call me marimar. ihatod nasad daw nila si marimar unya hapon.  if there’s one thing i learned from my father, its diplomacy, which is basically delaying reaction and jsut rolling with the punches. i dont know if thsoe were punches even. these drivers are almost always nice to me. and they let me get away with being a peso or two short for a ride, sometimes.

walking, lalalalala. nothing matters but the song in my head. until a car speedily rounds the corner, making like the flash.  the one i used to drive. which we had to sell. a few months back. the Sangga Kagayanon sticker i placed near the plate is still on it. something so familiar and it almost hit me. but i am now a fan of the commute (especially on quiet nights like tonight), so it does not matter. i just learned that the tibanga-san miguel-saint mary’s route takes me straight to my street. the tibanga-tambo-gerona route does not. 

—————————–

the girls picked me up late this afternoon and we three went to iliganon for cerveza negras and dinner. we always have the best of laughs together. i almost missed it, having to worm my way out of the house and dadi, who thought i’m going out with guys. i swore i wasn’t. "forget about going out with anyone who cannot recite to me the ______ (some sort of prayer, with a name/s i can’t remember)." what? old people have a way with grandkids i swear, i don’t get. my dad’s really sweet though. this morning, he gave me this gold ring with ensciptions on it (which i also don’t get). but something tells me i cannot cheat on my detox and smoke with it on my ring finger.

   

       

whoever invented grammar must be hanged, on both toes upside down. was just checking the copies i need to submit till my extended deadline tomorrow. i am irked by my own errors. i cannot keep on flinching evertime i meet a time travelling sentence. or bump against a disjointed logic where things are supposed to conjunct! i cannot anymore bother over such niceties as a past or progressive verb. tenses! i am tensed enough already. and only in grammar is one obliged to be perfect. but this, this, and this i do for the pure love and joy of writing. the trouble i will go to, at the compromise of sanity, with an already diseased brain to boot, deserves…bulalo at the central market. heaven in a bowl. those prancing kids in abs are dead wrong. makulay ang buhay with a steaming bowl of that high cholesterol treat. that i will get when i beat my extended deadline. tomorrow.

spent hours at the ipag office this morning and late afternoon till evening today. i am a theater virgin and everytime i sit with the rest of the production team to "clean" up our lines, i keep wishing for bart to be "gentle". which is reaching for the moon, actually. the bug eyes are whiplashes. i think i deserve a lot of it though. i’ve a problem saying "bakit". i always sound like i’m asking for a pail in strained bisaya instead of asking why. my co-actress phoebe, i’m gonna have to kiss her back in one of the scenes. we attempted doing so earlier. our faces were inches away from each other already. i had to stop. i might throw up my dinner. and i cannot afford to buy another. you can call it bad acting. but its two things, basically: poverty and straightness.

i get my highs from my lit classes everday. what better way to start an early day thatn by walking into a roomfull of kids waiting to milk me of things i know (or pretend to know) about the intellectual playground called poetic license and critical analysis. we are a strange looking bunch. we sit around on armchairs or on floors, laughing, crying, or fighting about what layers of meaning there are in the texts we are obliged to read. every once in a while, in their attempt to make gods of themselves and "create", lines like "moons cupping silences" or "the shadow of a feeling once was" stand out among a bunch of juvenilia make me want to cry. seriously. as if ive made my point in constantly reminding them that art and making art matter, contrary to what the material world’s edict is-that there is no money in poetry (but there’s no poetry in money either) and that making things of beauty is just another irrelevance. i cannot imagine not doing this until the other half of my life.   

hmmm…i haven’t done this for a long time. and now, being under-budget (how on earth do you stretch a fifty until the next US AID?!?!?!) and on the clock (can’t go "open time" online unless one wants to walk home and risk getting mugged. again.:) i will blog like its my last day on earth! quick! fast! faster than the fat brown dog can jump over the lazy cat. what?

————————–

sundays in our street can get a little lazy. i knew i had a pile of stuff to write but the weight of sleep anvilled atop my close lids till late mornign. half of last night i spent memorizing lines from the play. my good friend bart’s cast me as the butchy lesbian character rita. rita is a bit much to prepare for. she’s depressed,  angualr and anorexic-skinny. its easier to fake her state of mind and sound low and dopey all throughout half the storyline until she breaks down and shifts into a soembody so distressed she wants to kill herself. but the body type? i am round and bursting in my seams with femininity. which is just a euphemism for me putting on a lot of weight in the past two months.  how do i hide my fat hips, gaddamit.

not only that, i have to kiss a girl. its a must that i kiss the jiji character. how does one prepare for that? i am so straight, it hurts. i can already see mia gagging green puke in the audience when the scene happens. i share her selective homophobia.  its beyond imagining. even i feel my stomach turn at the thought of what i have to do. but i’ve committed to this project and i am not one who wouldn’t see things through to the end.

——————————-

a lot of things fresh and new around my block these days. i have jsut been inducted into the rotary. my good friend ivan felt obliged to wipe the bored look in my face evertime he sees it creeping in, he had to let me in on something important. and very adult, i love it. ive joined a series of meetings already; i haven’t missed a meeting since i got in. it seemed like the perfect opportunity for upping the bench mark on community service. it didn’t seem enough for me to be witness and write about things needing salvation. done that already. i could not go about life feeling my heart wrung and twisted in weird palces everytime i see people in the midst of real need. i need to stick my hands into the dirt and whatever else needs cleaning. or repairing.

———————-

i went to my first "ball" just two nights ago. the classy, glam, and formal kind "adults" go to. i am now an official member, yey. although i felt my legs start to paralyze, (i swear the blood stopped circulating from my knees and below) as the night wore on, i felt like im in on smething with real purpose.  it was hard not to ignore the death by stilletos happening in my legs,(you don’t know pain until you’ve worn high heels), it felt good to be doing something other than my selfish indulgences.

——————-

my plastic, red shoes are dying. ‘nuf said. i grieve. :(   

——————-

water therapy. one of the many things mia and i are trying to stay on the helathy side of things.  earlier, she brought us three cute little plastic one-liter gallons in different colors. the plastic gallons look like miniature aquasoft containers. we are taking our acting debuts seriously, we had to buy appropriate accesories. matching miniature gallons.

—————–

a break in my project detox.  a much unwanted break. i smoked two cigs yesterday. that and just two beers two nights ago.  i realized i haven’t had drinks in quite a while already that i got tipsy real easy in alex’s party. i beat myself hard for it the morning after. hahay, the big boss talks me easy into things. ironically enough, the one person who’d give me the evil eye for when i want to give in and break the project detox, was the one who wanted another rhummy night/morning. ano ba talaga, bosing?

———————–

i’m almost done with all my bukong got-to-do’s. thanks to the evil overlord of palao whose generosity exceeds my expectations. i am a big fan of privacy, i treat my pc like underwear. i think its big for anyone to let anyone use it for as long as i did. van, you’re the best!

—————–

F it. my time’s up. beggars can’t be open-timers.