Minsang Talambuhay ng Bawat Isa

Hindi nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Hindi magkakilala.

Nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Hindi magkakilala.

Nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Nagkikita. Nag-uusap. Magkakilala.





Nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Hindi nagkikita. Nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Hindi nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Magkakilala.

Hindi nagkikita. Hindi nag-uusap. Hindi na magkakilala.

Two Things

I miss my younger days when I would bike all day, pedal my way throughout our small town and the edge of it, sometimes beyond, from sunrise until sunset, my mother the least bit worried for she knew what I was doing on a weekend, on some days returning home with bruises on my arms and blood on my shirt but a smile on my muddy face nonetheless even after an accident, a time long gone when a rock on the dirt road I am speeding through is the only one that would make me fall so hard, and a flat tire is the sole thing in the universe that would break my heart. God I miss those days.

Always And Never: A Study of You

On weekday afternoons, you are the first to breach my wakefulness, because in my dreams you have always eluded me; you never stayed. You are gone the moment I turn elsewhere, for which I would fault myself without fail. Eyes shut or open, the difference is the same — you are nowhere. And as a gesture to compensate for losing you too fast and too soon, I would close my eyes in the hopes of finding you, feigning sleep if I must, the bed becoming my raft to coast the turbulent waters where you might be, my sudden desolation blowing frail wind to push my sail forward by the inch. Adrift in this dreamland, I chase you with my heart in my hand, not knowing exactly what to do with it, though the weight it carries is enough to anchor me for the rest of my days should I cast it to the open waters. And yet I continue to have my eyes fixed on this temporary blindness for here in this dream there is nothing and no one to see.

But all this would be in vain, for then I would be dreaming another dream where faceless people crowd in silence, where I would call out your name but yours would struggle to crawl out of my lips pressed tight, three letters seeking both freedom and refuge in the open space, always, but never to succeed. For the rest of my dream they would just hang there, like a promise unfulfilled still waiting at the edge of a precipice.



"They're just dreams. You have me in reality."







The world is a special place but only because she is there. Take her out of the picture and you could just as well be living in another planet. Being where she is may look like a difficult place to be in, but that is what makes it worth the while, warts and all.

How does it feel then?

Like this: it feels like having to carve a path through a dense forest using only a spoon, or having to pluck massive trees off the earth with nothing but tweezers on hand. It feels like having to elbow your way through a horde with your hands tied, and God knows how the rope digs deep into your skin, but you press on, because that is where men are born.

That is also where they die.

It, too, feels like being stuck in the middle of a dessert with only a drop of water in the bucket to quench the thirst of everyone else, but you stand your ground despite the sand shifting quickly beneath your feet, scorching as it is for being exposed to the sun for far too long. You hold the line because the quicksand will be there to give you that sinking feeling, for better if not for worse, and before you know it you are burried halfway through — head underneath or otherwise, it does not matter — but you stay because there is nothing else you can do. This is the choice you made, and so you must endure the consequences.

That is how impossibly beautiful she is, and how you are way behind the line. There is a popular term for it.

Queueing.







One day you think she has always been there. The next day you find out she probably never was. This is, perhaps, the reality where you have her, which is, really, just another dream.

The Heart-Shaped City and the Girl Who Never Falls in Love

One tells of how the place was abundant with a kind of tree called luyong, now more commonly known as anahaw (Saribus rotundifolius) from which canes and furniture were made. - Wikipedia


To have that singular shot of winning her over, you will have to cross her territory and play her game, one where she commands full dominion, and where the rules bend to her will. One false move is fatal. Either be cautious or be reckless. You cannot draw both cards because neither does she, for she can strictly be as calculating and as precise in the ways in which she conducts herself, or she can only be as heedless and as playful in the manner in which she will make you move. Some lines she does not cross, completely cutting herself off the very moment the ogre rears its ugly head, figuratively if not literally. Other ones she simply bulldozes her way through as if there is nothing and no one standing in her way if only to kill time, because in a land where she is both king and queen, the only sovereign in the heart-shaped city who wields all the power that will ever be, falling in love is hardly her option.

And no one can demand for her time just as well. It is something that others will need to earn, because in the abundance of what she has to offer, no one can ever come close to claiming all of her. You only get what she is willing to give: all of her body but never her heart and soul, or all of her heart and soul but only a fraction of her body. And then there are the men she has dated at a previous juncture in her life, men who can only mull over in their recollection being surrounded by her presence both body and soul, but not having any of it at the end of the day, like being marooned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: all this water but none to drink. They remain restless long after the tide has washed their senses over, the undertow dragging their feet so constantly back to the depths of her, and they succumb just as easily, even willingly, because she is a current too strong to swim against, and you will have to drown first long before she will start to fall in love, or even before she begins considering the idea.

As to why she does not fall in love, the reasons may be few and far between, but all the same they could be just as plenty. All the Einsteins in the world can only stitch their guesses together and still find themselves in a mental hemorrhage. Perhaps she does not want to miss the part where you tell her you are home after you have spent a few hours together, or the part where you tell her good morning after waking up, or good night just before sleeping, because time is at her beck and call and you are not the one to control it for her. She can make your sun set or rise as she pleases, in its stead the moon on a clear evening, or a slew of clouds rolling in on a random hour. And so she does not fall in love. Not in summer. Not in any given hour.

Perhaps she has already married herself to the idea with no chance of divorce that she can never be as good as the partner that the men she has went out with has imagined her to be, and in her mind is the outright refusal to live according to the standards they want to shove down her throat. After all, such is not the way of kings and queens, the ones who issue the laws that the serfs will have to abide by, not the other way around. She probably thinks, too, that she is not girlfriend material, although one can only wonder what exactly they are supposed to be made of and to what extent, certainly not some fancy cosmic stardust raining from the sky, or some flower blossoming from the earth with utter haste so that it can relish in the light. Some people say that those who do not fall in love are made of stern stuff, and it is maybe for the same reason why she could never figure herself as being romantically involved with anyone, though time and again she might drop a line or two saying things to the contrary: that she cries easily, a softie through and through.

Maybe she thinks that even when the days get cold and the nights turn lonely, she needs no help. She is fine and she can get by with life. She is her own company, her own fire. And there is truth to it. She has been at peace with her solitude, and her skin is the only blanket she has needed to keep her warm in a world where people can be cold even while their lives burn away. Or maybe she says her flag is redder than the crimson she wears on her lips you can spot it from afar, the danger it invites being far too tempting to ignore when all your scopes are zeroed in on where she is, and who she is about to become, her banner bright as the blood that will boil in your veins before you completely lose them by the drop. She believes no one, owes nobody any explanation, because truth is whatever it is that she decides to qualify as one, and she shapes everything so that they may fit the course of her life in a city that, although shaped like a heart, is not the one to make her fall in love.

How I Write What I Write

"I want to see you write," she said.

"It's a solitary affair; I will bore you just by watching me," I replied.

"It doesn't matter."





I usually begin with a random word, sometimes a calculated phrase, oftentimes just a silly thought teetering between sanity and insanity, until it blossoms into a sentence — a life sentence mostly — because my faulty hands were given both a gift and a curse called prose, which I have to endure daily like a pile of shit trying to force its way out of my ass when the toilet is so damn near. It is a gift, because where I start to push pen on paper, or hack away at a keypad, is also where the magic begins, the kind that gets you baked without having to snort anything illegal — through your nose or elsewhere is completely your call — taking you to heights unimaginable it's almost like you're going places without having to catapult yourself from a trebuchet. The sky's the langit, as they say. Strangely enough, one can also say that writing is its own forbidden substance that has previously sent writers to nowhere other than jail only to be shot from behind if history is to remind us anything, but that's another story best told by Jose Rizal from his grave.

Alas, by the same token, this gift is also its own curse, because where the magic ends is where the nightmares creep in long before I could finish what I write. If it's about something sad — and for the love of crackers I rarely write about happy ones – the temptation to either downgrade everything into prosaic drivel, or leave it to gather dust as a draft left untouched over the course of a year or two, can be overwhelming. It is my escape from my escape, as temporary and unstable as the shifting seasons, for it will reel me back in sooner than later because in my freedom I am never truly free from anything. Or anyone. I have been writing for so many years and yet I still have to get myself fully desensitized from the emotional doom and gloom that I deftly hide, try as I might, under the cloak of fiction, because the longer I stretch the boundaries the more it consumes me, and the more I become one with what I write the more I reveal myself.

Which, of course, defeats the whole purpose of writing fiction.





"Are you really sure you want to see me write?"

"Yes."

"Alright then."





Someone from long ago said that I have a distinct way with my words, probably beyond playful, dressing everything with such pageantry despite the ambiguousness, to the point that clarity is not something you will want to demand from me. I thought Baby when I write, vagueness is my cup of tea, and I drink it everyday like a thirsty sonofabitch. And if I can make you wet by virtue of this ambivalence I possess, then allow me to speak in tongues forever. But that was just my imagination. Truth be told, the day I become clear may just as well be the day I stop writing altogether. I confided that, quite on the contrary, words are the ones that have their way with me. And so, how I write what I write depends on whether the words conceived in my mind will make me ballistic, or ecstatic, perhaps depressed, sometimes thoroughly unaffected, some other times fully possessed. If you see me sitting by the corner, staring at the wall while splitting hairs, mumbling gibberish, then you have me at my perfect form, about to give birth to a novel.

Which reminds me. Years back, when I was in the midst of attempting to complete the drudgery of writing a novel – which to this very day remains stillborn, my room back in the province its womb – I remember someone telling me that she feels like she is talking to the dead national hero whenever I reply to her. I thought Very well then, Josephine Bracken, my dear judge jury and executioner, touch me not, this filibuster, but should I turn my back now and wait for the bullets to rip through my heart just so that we can call it a day? I wasn't particularly amused with the comparison, because I knew I was far from the caliber of the guy who used to hide under the names Laong Laan and Dimasalang, he who already published two major novels at my age, while I struggled like a slug crawling uphill to even finish just one draft. That was the last time I talked to her. But I figured maybe she had a point without her being fully aware of it. Maybe I needed to be as seditious, treacherous, and rebellious as I could be so that I can finally understand how to write what I write, even if it meant I had to lay my neck on the line, if not the entire corpus of my existence.





"Splice, on cue: I'm a fan, not a muse."

"You are both."

What A Love Song Is Not

Filed under fiction, in the hopes that all this will never happen, if it hasn't just yet.

A love song is not something you will want to remember as you revisit this page five years or maybe decades into the future, which will be an excursion into a territory once so familiar you could stare it in the face without flinching, because here is a place where only your brave and daring self is willing to venture, confusing fact for fiction, and so is the other way around. But you tell yourself, "That was then," to which you respond, "Perhaps," because you will barely recognize that there was a time in your life when you were someone a little different, still borderline timid, heart precarious at times, but far more deliberate with your intentions, although this you will have to debate with yourself time and again, for which a resolution you shall barely reach. You can't even tell what a love song is not, but you will still belabor the point. And for good measure.

Maybe a love song is something that you will want to forget, to squeeze out of the pulp of your sanity, leaving you stale as a proper consequence, a price that must be paid at the cost of your memory of the girl floating away with such finality that the point of no return is all that will ever be. Beyond that, you will never go back, and so will she. All the rules of goodbye will have to be obeyed, because at least for once you were happy, and that is more than what life will allow.

Time is of minor consequence, because a love song is not what you hear on the radio first thing in the morning before you sleep, or late in the evening after you wakeup. It's the one that plays at the back of your mind whenever you remember her, without warning, and at any given hour, like the time many years from now when you will recall seeing her waiting for you for the very first time, seated calmly, her dress black as the night, your knees melting like butter with each step you take towards her, fingers fidgety, knowing fully well that someone so beautiful inside and out you do not deserve, not in this lifetime or the next, because her heart is not one to be trifled with, not even to be looked after, for she has learned not to give it away without mounting the strongest resistance, whether by force or by old age, for which she might lose her teeth first before she will ever lose her heart, herself being way ahead of her age precisely because time is on her side.

And so that night you approach her, and as you do there is a tune playing at the back of your mind, although you know that it is what a love song should not be. Many years from now you will try to reach into this past juncture in your life, your hands barely holding themselves together, the song you can barely remember as you struggle to give it its rightful place in your recollection, but that same night, the one in your reverie, will hold a space so special in your memory you can hardly replace it. You are forgetful, but that evening you will never forget, her embrace most of all, which came all too sudden, brief as it was, before both of you parted ways and you went home. You walked the short distance, and it felt as though you had to anchor your feet on the ground lest you become airborne, your heart ballooning with what Milan Kundera properly called as the unbearable lightness of being.

Then again, a love song is not the one that played over the car's stereo that same night when you were on your way home, thinking how in the world you ever found someone like her, which should have been next to impossible, because she likes to play hide and seek if only to test you of how conscious you are of her world, of what she allows others to see, and those that she decides to leave out, stored somewhere only she knows until someone else finds out, kept almost like a closely guarded secret but not quite, which is why she says she has nothing to hide, especially from you, an observer, almost an intruder, that she must likewise observe, because she blips in and out. One moment she is there, the next moment she is not, and for this she had you on your toes, and still has, to which you must perpetually take caution because you have everything on the line. But you have been reckless since day one, and you soldier on with all the bullets you can fire. In the end, you have always known that there can only be one casualty, and between the two of you it will not be her.

You will be as dead as an exploded ventricle, death by heart shot, by which time you are still yet to figure out what a love song is not.