Opposites and Synonyms

It's a storm inside this heart, underneath the chest muscles and the bones, and the self-made fortresses. It's a hurricane in this brain, under the hair, the skin, the skull, the obvious consciousness. It's a mess, this body under the perfectly pressed clothes, under the practiced smiles and lined eyes and painted lips. It's the ocean and the shore, and mountains upon mountains of ashes buried underneath the waves, it's salt and tears and cold whipping winds. 

It's not simple underneath this deconstructed facade, it's death and blood, despair and the moon pulling the tides to and fro. It's lullabies and screaming songs, soft strums and wailing electric guitars, it's red roses in pretty vases and forests of giant trees at the same time. It's the tiniest kitten with the loudest roar, and the battle-scarred wolf with the softest heart, it's opposites and synonyms rhyming all at once and never again.

It's a mess inside this body, it's all bruises and self-inflicted wounds. It's casket upon casket of dead selves with flowers sprouting from breathless chests and hearts clutched in frozen fingers. It's where the world ends and where it begins, and it's the meadows in spring and the deserts in summer, it's the rushing river and the dry river beds. It's the thunder storms and the shining sun, and they're all together and separated; and it's every bit confusing and every bit beautiful and fearsome at the same time. 

It's reds and blues, greens and oranges, purples and yellows, and blacks and whites all together, in equal measures. It's the tempest and the calm ocean, it's flame and ice, it's life and death; and it's underneath our skin, below the muscles, the tendons, the arteries, the blood, the bone, the marrow. It's in our souls and the mitochondria of our cells. It's who we are, who we want to be, who we are not, and who we become. It's our storm, and our hurricanes, and our mess; and it's glorious.

Familiar Smiles

There's something about a smile, the way someone's eyes crinkle or completely get lost when they do so, the child like glee you see reflected in their eyes. There's something familiar about it, something homey, something warm. You realize you have seen that smile before. You have turned away from it and blushed already, once upon another time. You see the eyes, not quite the same, not even close, and yet when they crinkle and disappear behind the smile it brings forth memories of a familiar stranger you no longer speak to.
You can't help it.
You look away as soon as the smile begins, because you can tell when it starts: the eyes begin to sparkle with happy abandon, your heart quickens. You look away, stare at the ceiling, the wall, a piece of paper, anything, just not that face, not those eyes, not that smile, not now.
They don't look alike, at all, this new smile and the first one, the one that made you fall in love and broke your heart at the same time; and, yet, it's there. Uncanny similarities making you feel things you hadn't felt in years, the heart begins palpitating as if it already knows of the huge killer crash this will end in, but does it care? No. Because it's pumping again, isn't it? And a pirated love is better than nothing, right?
So what if they're barely a shadow of the one you fell in love with? So what if they aren't your usual type? So what if the standards have fallen so drastically it makes you want to weep on the bathroom floor at two in the morning with a half empty bottle of vodka or scotch in your hand? It's been a horrible year, and they'll do.
They'll do just fine, for the moment, the week, the month.
They smile again, and you tell yourself it's nothing, you try to convince yourself it's just the memories plaguing you. It's nothing, really. It's nothing at all.
Isn't it?

Hello, Again

I saw the horrible boy who made me laugh today. I was out on the town for business and had to walk a back road through the old churchyard to get myself a cab back to the office because the Park's streets were packed with festival goers. It had been a long day, and the afternoon was not even halfway done yet. I finally got a cab right before the road turned in to the church. As I was seating myself, I saw him walk out of the double doors and turn to the direction where I stood seconds ago. Five more seconds and he would have seen me. I was relieved, at first, like I had dodged a bullet. But a few seconds later, as he began shrinking away in the distance, a heaviness settled over me.

I had half a mind to ask the driver to stop, no, I changed my mind, I need to speak to him. In my head I had already ran to him, a big smile on my face, ready and willing to continue our camaraderie as if the past two years never happened, as if he never broke my heart. In my head, I had snuck up on him and looped my arm in his, only to laugh as he would panic and push me away. He always liked his personal space, and he was never one for random touches. Then he would laugh, too, and it would be like it was before, I would feel nineteen again, alive again. He would ask me how I was doing, and I would tell him of the hellish day I was having, and the problematic people I was dealing with. He would laugh at my troubles, like he always did, and then put an arm around my shoulders, comment on my height and tell me I could handle it in the most backhanded and cryptic way possible. I would have left my cares by the road as we walked down the path he was headed and talked about movies and existentialism, and the coming elections.

But I didn't tell the driver to stop. Why risk opening the floodgates of emotions that you so sturdily locked away years ago? I watched, still, as he disappeared when the cab turned the corner, and I remembered how he used to make me laugh at everything: my stress, my problems, the characters I so loved in the book I was reading, myself. I miss telling him my ideas and watching his eyes light up with a million stars because he was thinking the same thing, and our ideas would get crazier and funnier because our cuckoo minds would meet each other halfway.

He was the thunder to my lightning, and although he judged me, and he judged me heavily, he understood. He was a horrible, horrible boy, but he knew what to say to make me angry, to make me smile, to make me feel. I was grateful for that, and had I not handed my heart so carelessly to him without his knowledge, without his consent, we may still be friends now. Because what he told me when he broke my heart would not have hurt so much. He did not ask me to love him, he did not want me to, but we love who we love. I think that was my fault, I have a tendency to feel too deeply, to love too much.

But there he was and then, just like two years ago, he just wasn't there anymore. I miss him, very much, and that, I guess, is my fault, too.

Remembering Spirits

So I went to the cemetery today, at around 8:30 in the morning, because my computer was down, and the office felt lonely. I went to the grave of my great grand-Aunt (my grandmother's mother's sister) who died last month at 90. Her grave wasn't covered in green Bermuda grass just yet. I was informed, whilst I was trying to light a candle with broken matches, that you have to pay people to put the grass on there, and it isn't part of the cemetery's protocol to cover the brown patch of fresh earth.

After saying a prayer and recounting all the struggles my great grand-Aunt endured as she hit her golden years and wrestled mightily with death two weeks after we took her off life support, I walked over to my grandfather's and his parents' graves. They're on the same rectangle of land, headstones completely different from the rest. Theirs isn't marble, but stone. Well, my grandfather's is stone bricks behind metal letters, while my great grandparents have marble slabs engraved with their names stuck on large stone pieces. I never met my grandfather, he died when my mom was in High School, so I pretty much grew up with my great grandparents for the first three or four years of my life. 

Mama, my great grandmother, was always strict, always proper, always disappointed in everything. For her, there was always something to do. Even when the Alzheimer's began to take her, and her scoliosis started inhibiting her movement so that she was confined to a wheelchair, she needed something to do. When I was a little girl, she'd be outside raking leaves, sweeping the garden, or puttering about the dining room arranging and rearranging the cutlery on the shelves and in the cabinets. I don't ever remember her sitting down to watch TV for more than an hour. But as she got older, and the brooms seemed harder to handle, and the glasses would begin to slip from her hands, she would spend more and more time out on the veranda with my great grandfather. She would still arrange and rearrange all the magazines on the table, or if not, then the plastic flowers. Other times she'd sit there with my great grandfather, chatting and looking at their garden. The swing was gone by now, to make room for their son's and grandchildren's cars, the trees were gone, too. I miss that swing as much as I miss them. Mama died in 2014, Lolo (Great grandfather) in 2009.

Trying to hold on to the past

Lolo, on the other hand, was always, ALWAYS, happy go lucky. He was always ready with a story, a joke, a smile, and a multiplication problem for me. He made me a playhouse when I was two, it stayed there until I was seven, even when we moved to another island and I'd only see them on summer vacations. He would make little wooden trinkets in his small workshop, and always sneak me a chocolate bar or extra candy when Mama was not looking. He used to wake up at three in the morning to go walking at the boulevard and watch the sunrise. Because according to him, "Dumaguete has the best sunrises in the country". I remember, if he wasn't working in his wooden shop, he'd be on his rocking chair, either napping, or listening to the radio with his bright yellow radio-earphones. He was always updated with everything, he knew everyone, plus, he was a WWII Veteran. But Old Age came, like it always does, and he began forgetting the geography of the country, so he bought himself a map. Then when he could not recite the poem "Trees", he'd make me or someone else recite it for him. He liked old songs, and the lamest jokes, and sweet chili sauce; and I miss him so dearly because I never got to ask about the war. I never got to ask about his childhood, and if he always liked track and field. He died before I graduated from the school he and my great grandmother sacrificed the best years of their life for.

When I graduated, Mama couldn't even recognize me anymore. She had no idea who anyone was. I do not know why I am writing this, I do not know if you will like reading about this sad, sappy story of a grandchild who never got the answers to her questions because she never thought to ask, but it's here, and I guess all I really want to say is... do the asking while you can, because ghosts can't answer those questions.

Crisis

You tell yourself, "You don't understand," and then laugh because how's that possible? You're talking to yourself. How can you not understand?

But it's there, isn't it? The thought? The feeling? You like too easily, you care too much, feel too deeply, and YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND.

Then you draw it on your hand, on the back of your palm, you engrave it into your heart and carve it on your mind: I DON'T UNDERSTAND, I DON'T UNDERSTAND, over and over and over again until it consumes you; until it becomes you, until it IS you.

Engrave it so deep until it digs into every inch of your bones, on your tendons, your muscles, your arteries. Let it become your blood and let it run through you like acid until it melts away everything you once thought you knew about yourself; and all these unfamiliar songs that make you want to scrape your skin off with your own fingernails play on repeat in your mind and YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, YOU DON'T.

With every single drum beat, with every unknown baseline, you feel yourself peel away bit by bit, piece by piece, until all you can do is scrape yourself off the floor and drip yourself into a mask and perfectly pressed clothes. You brave the world because they won't understand, they won't, you don't.

You carry on day after day, year after year, and eons pass and still: you don't understand, you don't understand, over and over again.

You stop, try to rebuild, rename, recreate the shadow of yourself before you stopped comprehending your existence, but there's nothing left. It's just goop and bones tattooed with your mantra, and unfamiliar music blaring on broken speakers.

You turn to smoke, to burning liquids, to broken bottles and sharpened blades, empty vessels who offer hollowed out love. You build yourself up again and again, and... No, you don't understand.

My darling, they say, the answer is not in the powder you sniff into your system, it is not in the clear flames you pour down your throat, it is not in the nicotine you immerse yourself in, it's not in the blood you spill on your bathroom floor, it's not in that long-haired boy with the bright eyes and the promises that will shatter like thin ice. It's in you, under the acid and beyond the horrible music.

But... YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, you don't understand, you... you don't...

I don't understand.

The Horrible Boy Who Made Me Laugh

I fell in love once, just once, just the one time. At least it was as close to love as I thought I would ever get, I still think it is. You see, I fell in love with a boy who had a mind full of thunderstorms, hands like roses, and a silver tongue that stung.

He was not like the sunset, although his eyes did turn molten gold in early morning light. He wasn't an Adonis, and neither was he a Hercules. But his wit was as sharp as the arrows that flew from bows in the stories of myth, and his laugh felt like the rain on a day when the sun would shine so hot, the sidewalks seemed to melt. He was a horrible person, really. Spoiled and overly self-confident, he took his intelligence and used it as a weapon. He was underhanded and mean spirited, and made me feel like shit half the time.

But he made me laugh, and that was very important for me, at the time. All I wanted was someone who made me laugh. I felt horrible about myself already, anything he said, or did, did not hurt, at least not so much. He also read the same books I did, and as a teenage bookworm in an age where the boys thought reading was uncool and nerdy, he was a Godsend. He was opinionated, and unafraid to say what he thought, which, most of the time, was what I thought as well. He made me question things, he made me question everything, and he pushed me. Well, he pushed me away in the most hurtful way possible, but apart from that, he pushed me to do things I never would have. He challenged me, literally. When I'd tell him I wasn't sure of doing something he'd say "I'm doing it, so I guess if I get it I'm going to be better than you." He didn't get it, I did. Because he told me to.

He also intimidated me, and that is no mean feat, I may have hated myself, but I knew my views and my opinions and I knew how to voice them eloquently. I could intimidate the best of them, but him, I couldn't. He'd brush it off, and laugh in my face. It was refreshing. He had scathing retort after every scathing opinion, and he hurt my feelings at least three times every week, but he'd come up and wrap an arm around me when he knew he'd gone too far. He never said sorry, the unapologetic bastard. All he would do is sit next to me on the bench, and put an arm around my shoulders, or lean on me for a few minutes, transferring some of his warmth; and for some reason, I didn't need his apologies, I didn't want them. We'd sit there in silence, with him sometimes nudging my shoulder with his, or poking me in the ribs until I cracked a smile or pushed him away. He liked when I pushed, he'd laugh and then do it again until I started talking to him.

He read my poetry, and gave me constructive feedback, he drew at the back of my notebooks, and made me feel safe enough to say what I really felt, in the language that I could express myself best. He UNDERSTOOD. I could get lost in the stories he would spin, the way we talked about books and movies, and people we did not like. Every day would find me waiting for him because for once in my life, I valued someone else's opinion over my own. He slowly started to feel like home, like a white picket fence and a small two-bedroom house. I fell in love with him. I didn't realize it then, but I was.

Needless to say, he broke my heart and it felt like a punch to the gut. I was winded. But I didn't show it. I knew, you see, I knew. I was not his type. I was the furthest away from his type. But, God, do I miss the bastard. I don't hear his laugh anymore, we don't even talk. He's too far away for that, and I've pretty much severed that connection. What was the point of remaining friends if he still made me feel like shit at least three times a week, and he wasn't there to put his arm around me anymore?

I grew up, I guess. I love myself more now, and it's taken me 22 years to do that. I'll be damned if I let some boy bring me down again.

No, My Darling

Orange Sunsets

I've always wanted a guy whose favorite color was orange. I think it's because I am so in love with the color purple (obviously), and sunsets. That doesn't make any sense, but let me explain. See, purple and orange only look good in sunsets, and sunsets are my favorite thing in the sky. Because I'm not just saying wispy, light purple and the peach tones of a sunrise; I am talking about the flash of bright, strong orange against the darkening purple sky as the day ends, the majesty of the sun's exit, how it is all bright and dark at the same time, it ushers in the night with such brilliance every day without fail.

Now to have the color orange as a favorite color isn't really a big deal, you know? I just think it would be a nice... well I just think it would be nice. It's one of those little things that don't really matter, but if it was there, it would make you a bit happier, you know? Anyway, so, yeah, the color orange, and sunsets.

I rather do like endings compared to beginnings. I mean, if you start something, it's so much work, you lay down the foundations, you build it up, revise, attach, create, add, continue slowly, oh so slowly, so that you don't mess up. It's the same with sunrises, don't you think? It's slow, and sweet, and light, then it builds up until it's high noon and the sun is blazing above and making you sweat and swear. But with endings, oh, the ENDINGS! Aren't they just marvelous? Every single thing you have done, you have worked for, culminating in a giant blast of color only to suddenly turn black. The drama, the theatricality, the beauty of it all! And you can choose! It's either bright oranges and dark purples, and Pomelo pinks with tinges of bright yellow, or dark blues with ribbons of yellows and oranges fading into the violet sky.

I like endings. I don't know what that says about me, I am pretty sure there's a psychological something or other about this, but I don't really care and I am not inclined to find out. I just like the color purple, and the way it blends so beautifully with the orange at the end of the day, that's all.