Friday, April 26, 2013

Quezon City Weather Report

Expect another sunny day, like yesterday and the weeks now gone. Wear light clothes, something that will dignify the humidity pelting your skin and the summer love taunting the rest of your body. The weather shall be warm, which is more than enough to turn some hearts aflame and some others burned by their desires. Act according to the severity of your longing for an affectionate embrace. Tonight, you might just find one in lieu of your pillow, someone who will finally be able to reciprocate your whispers, fondle you, and tell you what you have been praying to hear from the lips you yearn to smother with yours. In a country more tropical than any other, every day is a good day to fall in love a hundred times over, especially if it is with the same stranger. Do so and the months ahead will be as bright as the sun. Summer might just last a lifetime, with little chance of rain.

For the lonely ones, you will miss the rain because of the sun. There will be no clouds to suture the skyline, no shadow to cast itself on your feet. It will be a different universe beyond your doorstep. Consider wearing sunglasses so that the morning light might not reach your heart through your eyes. Close them on moments you do not need to see the world for whatever it brings, like cars when you cross the road or random people when you traipse a random foot path. You are and have always been at home in darkness. The wind, though, will blow in places you have forbidden yourself to go but have gone nonetheless, like the open fields and sunken gardens where people saunter for reasons you cannot begin to understand. Still, you might like how it will soothe you the way midnight gales lash at the candle wick with such brute force it leaves behind nothing, not even a spot of wax. Good for you. There will be no infantile memory to trouble your conscience. You are alone. In your solitude, you are at peace.

If you favor the moon over the sun, stay indoors in the evening. Sleep under the sheets, wrap yourself with a blanket, but go out in the day not because a total eclipse will grace your searching eyes but because there will be none. By day, you will only have to face one sun. By night, however, you will have a million splendid stars blinking in the vast distance, spread out like a carpet of immobile fireflies outshining the moon you wish to pluck from that infinite space with your tender fingers. The night sky cannot guarantee a full moon. There might even be no lunar spectacle to begin with. So take the path of least resistance. Seize your moon between sunrise and sunset when it shows itself, no matter how faint. Where you are in the city does not matter. The moon will find its way to you, even if you are as blind as Ray Charles or the heart that you keep.

Unfortunately, weather forecasts are not as accurate as they pretend to be. No one gets it right at any given day. Even meteorologists stand at the mercy of the clouds they wish to plot on a definite course. In this crude state of predestination, decide for yourself what weather you want to have. Stroll around. Be your own prophet, one who is attuned to the accidents of the elements. Walk like nothing can stand in your way, not even the sun or the moon or the clouds or the wind or your fucking ego. Wear your heart like a pistol. Aim it at no one in particular. Better yet, aim it at yourself. Pull the trigger.



Thursday, April 25, 2013

Hypotenuse



It is not in your best interest to be the hypotenuse in a love triangle, especially right ones; you will always be opposite the right angle. Of the three, you will be the longest side that will never intersect the point where the other two lines meet. You will be the diagonal that will drive itself like a wedge between the vertical and horizontal, preventing their complete unity for as long as you can hold yourself together.

So don't draw the line you are unwilling to erase.



Saturday, April 20, 2013

To The One Who Never Knew



I want to stitch your name on my lips so that from this day onward you shall rule my silence the way you have ruled my life for the last ten years. My lips shall be your slave, my soul your dominion. This muteness is my compromise for solace, and you shall be at this precipice where my voice cannot escape. In my life I may have spoken a thousand names, maybe more, but yours has always been the last word I intend to say.

If memory is the limit of everything, lucky are those who are yet to feel how it is to live with a heart so broken it cannot even bleed. You are lucky. I am not. This I have said and I will say it again: you were born beautiful and you have had your eyes set on forever, a future so bright it blinds all memory.

And this: you are my three thousand days and nights of loneliness.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

The Boy Who Trapped the Universe in Her Heart





She is like a postcard sent to where I am. She is a promise of a better life. In a world where some summers come a lifetime too late, she is the only promise worth keeping.

I will trap the universe in her heart.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Ice Cream Metamorphosis




Grassington Ice Cream by David Work


They say summer is the best time to turn yourself into ice cream: be cold, then let someone taste you. I wonder if this is true.



Saturday, April 6, 2013

UP Film Institute's Likha Adarna



Taralets!


Click image to embiggen


Likha Adarna: The UPFI Student Film Festival is a biannual affair which includes the thesis defense and a student showcase at the end of each semester. Admission is free!

Where: UP Film Center, Magsaysay and OsmeƱa Ave., UP Diliman, Q.C.
When: April 8 at 8:30am until April 11 at 11:00pm
Why: But of course! :)

Likha Adarna is on Facebook!
https://www.facebook.com/upfilikhaadarna



Friday, April 5, 2013

Excerpts from The Politics of Moving On



Guacamayas (1957) by Pedro Ruiz


“To say that ‘I have moved on’ is to make an assertion. It is a statement of conviction and not a statement of fact. It is a declaration of an objective and not one of victory. It is precisely this credo that implies the constant struggle between the Self and the Other or its abstractions, which is why the Self continuously adjusts. It evolves, and its evolution is contingent on this eternal struggle. It sustains itself through this disturbance, this nuisance that impels the mind, and therefore the Self is fundamentally forced to source portions of its identity from this internal war. On this point it must be stated that to disengage is to commit a form of suicide.

“…In reality, the point is not to ‘move on’ but rather to ‘move in.’ The goal is not to ‘move on’ by leaving something behind that is sure to follow us wherever we go. The goal is to ‘move in’ by reclaiming your life. This is the way to assert your Self. In the words of Achilles: take it, it is yours.”



- excerpts from "The Politics of Moving On" (2013). Unedited, unpublished.



Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Boat to Nowhere









Yesterday, I was humbled. I had nothing to show for but the heaviest of hearts. I deserve that day. This acute sense of time will leave me hanging, dry, unfulfilled, and as thirsty as the sun.