Meeting.

Last Friday, I tagged along Ma'am C and hopped on a bus to a meeting for what we refer to in our nightly Twitter support group as that which had temporarily stolen our little lives from us. The coaster was small, probably a 20-seater, and of course I thought about what would happen if this bus, full of chitchatting culture experts, would well, you know. This is Manila. I think I said a prayer. A convo via SMS with M:

G: Andito sa bus si Betsy, editor ng broadcast volume.
M: Bechay! Hehe.
G: Sana hindi ko siya matawag nyan.
M: Mag-ingat ka.

On the carpeted walkway to the meeting's venue, Nic T. said hi to me. I pissed myself a bit; as a young gay boy who spent some time in Plaridel Hall, I had wanted to take Sir Nic's classes, but, well, I was a young gay boy. I didn't know any better. What took place in the meeting ought to stay private (I suppose), but perhaps can say that it was the funnest seven-hour meeting I've been to. And genuine laughter. Meaning, I actually laughed because I found things funny. Not because the six-figure contract is contingent on how loudly we collectively chuckled. Maybe it's presumptuous to claim to belong to this milieu--was probably the only one in that huge hall who isn't in the academe--and of course it's a political exercise, the canon-making and the fallible, arbitrary whimsy that informs it. But there was also well-intentioned effort in that room, a self-awareness, and a concern for the same things that I love, or at least hold dear.

I am putting it here because it is September, a historically fascist month along with August. On a stolen yogurt date with M, she said it might be rooted in indigenous culture after all--August being the leanest month for rice--not superstitious guesswork or convenient scapegoat. So will focus on good things: thesis successfully, if anticlimactically, defended; representation contract with agency signed (more or less); and direction for manuscript more or less settled. A talk/reading is scheduled in two weeks, and had chipped away at Everest of CCP deliverables. Nearing 30, had gotten used to the constant alarm, but think have been making headways in appeasing it, mostly along the lines of do-not-rush-it-G. During the meeting, couldn't help but occasionally gawk at the people around the table. Cases in point, laughing and making fun of all the frivolity and absurdity. It's OK, it tells me, it's fine.

Patience.

On the first day of the year, I woke up with a debilitating hangover, the unglamorous kind, in which an acidic taste not unlike shame brimmed in my mouth. I plodded over to the common area and found the other residents in a more or less similar state, which is to say, the beginning of a famous John Cheever story--"It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, 'I drank too much last night.'" I mindlessly popped an aspirin. The shortness of breath came minutes later, then the vague swelling of the face, then the weariness. I knew I was fatally allergic to ibuprofen, and, well, I'm stupid that way. The administrator, bless him, thankfully had antihistamine--asthmatics of the world unite!--and oxygen, after a while, became easier to come by. But I was feeling so weak, so I asked to be taken to the nearest hospital an hour or so away. At the ER, a judgmental nurse saw the chipped (aquamarine) nail polish and bobbled her head, after which she told me to turn to my side and pull my pants down. By the time we were on our way back, it was near dusk, and I had only one thing on my vegetable-adled mind: KFC.

Flash forward to six months later, a couple of friends and I decided to head over to Baguio for the weekend. We spent it the way I preferred my vacations to be: lazy, libated, and devoid of plans. On our last day, we left our bags at our hotel and hopped over to nearby Vizco's for lunch (where Netty made a surprise appearance two days prior). Full and not so keen on returning to our little lives, we walked down Session Road hours later and saw fire trucks. A curious thing, and--getting closer to our street, seeing the crowd--I thought, No, it can't be, it just can't. When I saw thick white smoke billowing from the ground floor of our hotel--the lobby was on the second floor, customary in the mountain city--I realized that, well, what a year. We watched as one tiny water delivery truck after another zoomed along the cordoned road to help douse the flames, which would've been cute and quaint for an observer, and absolutely depressing if the fate of your bag, which contained your laptop, which contained your backup-less thesis, depended on the paltry amount of water they could carry. When we heard that the fire was under control--our bags in the lobby safe, if, like us, smelling like smoked tinapa--I just wanted to get out of there.

There's been a broad pall over the complexion of things lately, prompted by the obligatory assessment during the year's midpoint. Maybe because we were all approaching 30, a friend points out, and everything was necessarily worse off than we had imagined--we were not as rich, not as smart, not as happy. Maybe the ultimate wisdom is patience, then, I had told her. And she, being rah-rah and all, pointed out that overcoming through perseverance ought to be there, too. Of course. In asking around, I came to find that my displeasure with 2014 is something most friends share, a consolation, a happy-sad occasion, but maybe also a hapless, needless explanation.

Allies II

After a long silence in the car, Ma'am C stirred and said, "Your sensibility, not typical CW, 'no?" I chuckled because it was familiar territory. After another long silence, she observed, "Lots of fat characters in your story. Noticed that?"

Because we are both so murderously busy (right), during the past couple of weeks, we could only squeeze consultation into her Saturday commute between Manila and Angeles, where she has a weekly errand to attend to. Which means, when my shift ends at 1 AM on Saturday morning, I sleep for a couple of hours, head to Philcoa where she picks me up at 6, then try not to doze off in the two-hour trip. She does what she needs to do and we leave at 4 PM, again consulting in the longer ride back to the city.

The week I started my day job, I received a couple of acceptance emails. The stories/chapters had been slaughtered by Ma'am C, and I am thankful. I would like to think we deeply share something in common--aside from an insatiable dependence on coffee and anti-social tendencies--if only because once or twice a silence would pervade in the car and when she opened her mouth, the thing she'd say was exactly what I had been thinking.

In between literary gossip and writerly -- brr -- wisdom, there were silences, and more and more I am inclined to share, well, more, like the template story I wrote which was received spectacularly well in Silliman, the novel excerpt the folks at Iligan told me to bury underground, and my great, great need for validation.

The lessons in craft were too many to enumerate; I will be hardpressed to remember them, except intuitively, but many years from now I know I will go back to this routine, this magical time: to every Thursday, when I would check the envelop outside her room in FC and find my drafts and a new Booksale find ("You can have this" written on a post-it), inside the envelop I would put a new set of drafts and something from my own book collection, my humble contribution to this exchange, which she would retrieve on Friday.

In Angeles, there is a restaurant where we would end the day. She with her palabok and coffee, me with my mami and tsokolate. How else could I persist without this.

Sex.

If you were, for one reason or another, driving along the national road in Isabela two nights ago, and you chanced upon a tiny motorcycle carrying three guys, trust that they got safely to their destination, which was a garage room in a drive-by motel, and that they had fun, and even made plans, when the Manileño - by far the biggest among the three - offered to host the other two in the event that they find themselves, for work or leisure both, in Manila in the future.

Forgiveness.

All things given, and factoring in self-awareness and remorse, how much forgiveness are we allowed to exercise on ourselves? This morning: an idleness that is not connected to New Year's Day and its parade of self-same illusions. Have stumbled upon old email of 17-, 18-, and 19-year-old self and came upon pages upon pages of sobering correspondes, both personal and professional; sobering because have never realized until today full extent of one's (1) neediness, (2) dismissiveness, (3) pretentiousness, (4) sense of entitlement, (5) penchant for inappropriate smileys, and (6) horribly florid prose (some things never change).

I am a horrible person. I'm now inclined to think that all of the disappointments in my life - rejections, failures, the occasionally impossible luck - had been just and fair - deserved - not so much as punishment but as a pull on the reins to a different (not necessarily better) direction. Would wish to forgive younger self. Badly. Really badly. Would like to offer excuses: youth, a desire to fit in, a creeping suspicion that one was not special. But things had been said. Already. Apologies could console no one but oneself, and that, have long figured out, is meaningless comfort.

--

Muscle Memory

All wounds begin with coldness, moments before lacerated skin simmers—affinity with pavement,

rock and mud, soil littered with discarded cutlery, unused electronics, all manner of foreign sharpness. When the chill disappears, the mind considers pain

finally. Instructions for the body part to feel—intense heat, some prickling, a childhood in a silent playground. Chains. You pushed until my feet framed

a sluggish cloud’s tail-end. A dusty kick. Flight was a moment. In the fridge, a pair of wedding souvenirs lay entombed beside a jar of tomato jam, a can of beer.

The days return quickly, as soon as you say

The roast beef is rich and creamy, or The bride’s dress resembles a lavender seashell. Inside the boxes, bright-colored candies—peach, yellow, a strange shade

of blue. When the chill disappears, the feet remember: right food forward, then left. Neither is left behind. Endless walking. Naked footsteps. In a walled city

I trace an ancient lover’s frantic escape. She walked here, too,

barefoot. She may have thought of the same things—a childhood, a nuptial, her days returning vigorously. Muscle memory: the body knowing

ahead and more. Desiring to tire. When habits replace thankless consciousness. When what we know surrenders to any frail thing, even wounds

that begin with coldness. Closer to earth, the heat here assembles.

Dreams.

Last night I dreamt that a doctor spoke of worms somehow finding their way into your brain, and you were not yourself anymore, and as you lay on the hospital bed, you asked for me. I heard it: you said my name.

India.

I am going to India next year. Melane, who took this photo as we were traipsing along the walls of Intramuros recently, noted how high-pitched her voice had become after hearing the news, and would like to know why my face is still in its typical, pinched scowl. I have to admit. Typing it here - I am going to India - made it sink in a bit more, although I would be hardpressed to say that it has me tearing up my hair and beating my chest a la Trojan women, except in joy.

Which is to say I ought to be more excited. I am going in November, so the year-long wait may have something to do with the lack of figurative (and maybe literal) confetti (far from the agonizing way one couldn't sleep the night before a school field trip to Nayong Pilipino). Mostly, I look forward to the distance. Melane, who herself went on an Eat-Pray-Love tour of Indonesia, said she loved most the newness of things. At about the same time, I was in Sagada, and we both readily took back what we said about ourselves and our inability to escape them. Maybe you can't, but perspectives change, and that's almost the same thing.

When I read some accounts of past residents, I couldn't help but think of Silliman and the other workshops I have gone to: how it gave me a glimpse of the life I want to live, a world without, essentially, the need to think about sustenance, which is to say, money. Yes, I will invoke my distaste for capitalism here to rationalize my laziness (the refusal, for one, to take on a full time job for almost two years now). I know that I may very well be just postponing my entry to the "real world." I'll be 27 in a few months, and 28 when this residency ends, so I can say, at the least, that I gave it a good fight.

PS. Now re-reading Midnight's Children for a paper. I tell myself I am hitting two birds with one stone. Learning about India and trying to take that INC off my records. Sure.

--

Bumalik sa batis kamakailan, kung saan nawala isang gabi at kinailangang hanapin at sunduin ng unipormadong Los Banos police bitbit ang kanilang naglalakihang flash light. Madaling baybayin ang lumipas na panahon sa pamamagitan ng mga balikong linya, putol-putol, minsa'y makapal at minsa'y 'di halos makita, mga sala-salabit na kasaysayang pilit na itinatali hanggang kaya. Maraming nagbago. Maraming nasira. Sa pagmamasid ngayon sa rumaragasang tubig, napansing may mga bahagi ang batis na payapa. Mahirap isipin: na pahihintulutan ng bara-barang pagkakaayos ng mga malalaking bato ang ganitong espasyo, na ligtas, na sagrado, habang sa paligid ay puno ng galit, nagmamadali, ang tubig. Maraming katahimikan sa muling pagbisita, mga siwang na pinupuno ng mga 'di na dapat sabihin, at malaon nang naipaliwanag, naisaisip. Kahapon, waring isang linggo ang lumipas sa loob ng walong oras. Marahas-masaya ang mga pangyayari, mga bagong karanasan, mga bagong pinagsaluhan, at sa gitna: isang oasis, isang dakong luntian at buhay sa ilang. Sa tapat ng ospital, may nasumpungang tahimik na kapihan. Uminom ng gatas. Nanahimik. Walang maliw na kapayapaan.

Pagsakay sa bus.

May dumapong bigat kanina sa akin habang nakasakay sa isang bus na puno at siksikan. Nakadungaw ako sa bintana, habang nakadantay sa braso ang kamay ng katabing babae. Mayroon siyang ikinu-kwento sa kasamang lalaki, na bigla na lamang inilingkis ang kamay sa balikat ng babae sa kalagitnaan ng byahe. Malamig ang kamay ng lalaki. Sa pagbaba, pinili kong maglakad pansamantala sa halip na sumakay sa jeep. May nadaanan akong isang lalaking lasing sa ilalim ng tulay; nakahiga sa semento at waring ninanakawan ng dalawa pang lalaki. Walang nagawa ang paglingon ng mga dumaraan. May kantang nagpabuka sa aking bibig. Mabilis ang byahe kung tutuusin.

Tonight.

Today, an unexpected wonder. From a hotel in Malate, a scenic route to Quiapo Church. Old buildings, marketplaces, the sea. Melane was there to get a camera for a three-week sojourn to Indonesia. I asked her not to inconvenience any monks along the way. I am going somewhere not as far, to endlessly walk, look at eroding terraces, and sweat. Philline says she will be waiting at the bus station.  What are we doing? Mel and I asked each other. Andy quoted from Gina Apostol's Gun Dealer's Daughter: "Is forgetting all you need if rest is all you want?" This is Mel: "Pwede lamang tayo paguhuin ng mga bagay na sila ring nagtayo sa atin, tinuntungan natin. Hala." Last time was in Quiapo Church, was with Alaysa, from China Town, and we crossed the overpass of the dildo sellers. I have forgotten this.

Flight.

Leaving for Cagayan de Oro in a few hours. Have long detested stress of early morning flights, but disaster of missing a late night one months ago (due to, among others, grave naivete re: military time) had rendered whole thing utterly scary: unpredictable traffic, scary-antiseptic airport environs, thought of documents jumping off bag to stay in bed, etc. So will be in CDO for a grand total of 22 hours, owing to (most likely) sadistic assistant who made travel arrangements and deemed it too much for lowly writer (moi) to have at least a few hours to, I don't know, sleep at the hotel? Funny when you recall that also flew to Cagayan in October last year, a lovely sojourn that included, among others, staying in Philline's durian-smelling solar-powered house and driving to Bukidnon to live with Lina Sagaral-Reyes for a few days. Think there shall be no solar energy or poetry in this trip; only cooperatives and credit bureaus (don't ask). Now, germane (and criminally emo) conversation with Andy, spread over a few days since we're so subhumanly busy:

A (Mon AM): Let's leave, G. I want to live somewhere else. I want a new life.
G (Mon PM): Hi, A. I want to disappear. Now.
A (Wed AM): Why the choice of the word 'disappear'? Why not 'go away'? Or is that my mind on overdrive.
G (Wed PM): Because I've been feeling that I'm ready to implode at any moment. Location can't change that. Hence, disappear.
A (Wed PM): Yes, because we bring ourselves wherever we go.

I think, I think, you never know when it's that bad until, well, it's that bad. What I'm doing now (in school, and career, and relationship, and life) is essentially trying to avoid all manner of regret once things are over, prevent any Revolutionary Road- or Incendies-type breakdowns later when one realizes things are lost and irreparable and like a 6 AM flight to the south: stressful, seemingly important but really just something that deprived you of sleep.

October.

I welcome October with arms aching because they're so outstretched. With the yearning of an upside down umbrella. The smile of an open manhole. The one-two punch of August and September now hopefully over, and so today: errands (drop off letter at Chancellor's office, look for lost library book), acads (start with Gemino paper, revise Charlson story, think of topic for Tope paper), love life (re-watch/blog about Hable Con Ella, download prescribed films, think about him), work (say yes to a raket in Cagayan de Oro next week, transcribe two interviews, write one press release), writing (send Charlson story, plus one more, to bunch of magazines), and self (think about point of everything, text random people about how writing and literature no longer, at this point, bring happiness).

Lately have questioned soundness of long-running thesis re: Awful Months (arbitrary, illogical, convenient), but how do you knock it when the first day of October brought such astounding bounty, in producitivity and prospects alike. (Of course, can be self-fulfilling prophecy, and Mobius strip-type tautology is useless argument). That said, kind of relish the celebratory mood October brings, if only to pick self up from proverbial rubble in the aftermath of August and September. Someday might find real reason for the invisible weight, i.e, other than retrogrades and ghost months. And if it really is bogus, what of it? We all tell ourselves such lies to survive. In this light, have obviously lost ability to be straightforward. Yey.

Delusions.

This morning, memories of high school, when, after a quiz or exam, teacher would call the roll and class would need to shout grade one by one. How stupid: imagining the 14-, 15-year-old's holding their breaths for Diaz, top of class and typically highest, when they were obviously not, not remotely. A legend in own mind. A veritable clown, more like. A clown with a big bag of jokes that ricochet as quickly as they emerge, into nowhere else, into no one else's backyard, back.