The thing about storms (what really happened on august 26, 2004)

Waking up in the middle of a storm reminds me of the wonderful chaos of drums. It is as pleasantly confusing as a parade: you don’t know where you are, you feel the noise in your skin, you feel the urge to do everything all at once. You don’t even know if it’s morning already, everything is dark and tentative as dusk or dawn.

If you are lucky, you’d get a phone call telling you that due to bad weather, work has been cancelled. The storm is supposed to force you to stay at home – thus the cancellation of work or class – but then you go berserk and plan your day as if it’s a surprise weekend, a holiday celebrating the death of a hero, or the martyrdom of a saint (or the sainthood of a martyr). What is there to do in a day of ruthless rain? Is it a book of poetry, or plainly the couch, or poetry and the couch? Good food, maybe, or sex? Is it junkfood and tv, or junkfood in the movie house? Sex with a fuck buddy or a stranger? In my couch, or in the movie house?

The rain remains relentless, and your plans are still vague, but then you realize it’s midday already, although everything remains as hazily dim as your plans. You stay in bed, and you let your imagination plan the unfolding of the day for you. When it starts looking like a porn movie, you just doze off to catch the wisp of a dream. Or you just lie in the couch, feeling plain lazy, too lazy, to get up and get things going. You wake up again, and the darkness suddenly seems permanent. You panic a little, but then you begin feeling paralyzed by hunger.

(In the refrigerator, you find: a plastic cup of cottage cheese, a bag of blueberry bagel, bottles of whatever, butter and a rack of other neighborly spreads, and in a large bowl, which occupies a quarter of the available space, you discover a greenish, purplish empire, dusty and primordial; it used to be food, but now it’s a toxic invader spreading as quickly as, pardon the racism, the Chinese civilization. In the vegetable rack, a different universe: everything is literally growing, a rainforest in the making.)

You grab from the ref things that are still surprisingly edible, and you make a mental note to raze the purple and green empire and the rainforest. You eat in the couch while watching tv, and then you switch it off to listen to the news in the radio. A child died today because of the floods, and an old lady was reported missing. The child’s body was found in a creek, and the old lady was later (much, much later) seen inside the mall, looking for love, or beauty, or maybe both.

A black out shuts off the radio and interrupts your eating. With nothing to do, you lie again in the couch. In the darkness, you feel confused: should you start asking how your own life would unravel, or should you pray for the weather to remain just how it is now?

Singularity

Every night my bed grows wide. Sometimes I’m happy about it, sometimes I feel obliged to map out the loneliness of its geography.

There are nights when it becomes a vast continent of yearning. During such nights, I travel the length of its darkness, discovering along the way imprints of familiar warmth. Its emptiness contains a certain absence, and its terrains echo the curves of the body. There were times when its vastness was governed by borders, the bedsheet partitioned into acres of hatred. My bed was a site of rebellion, a conflict that either ended in cold silence or tears. I could still feel the anger; sometimes the pillows turn their back to say no.

At times it becomes an expanding universe of passion. It bursts with stars, sending electric impulses across the cosmos; the void is filled with what substance I cannot tell. Here, matter and anti-matter meet, implosions and explosions occur at the same time. You thrust and even time lose its momentum: lust is the secret of youth. This universe grows or contracts continuously – no one can absolutely be sure – and in its aftermath, you question God and hope that in every falling star wishes do come true.

There are also nights when my bed becomes an ocean of contentment. This sea placates the tired and the restless; it gives birth to poetry and endless nothingness. I am lulled to sleep by its eternal softness, and I envy the pillows that perpetually rest in its horizons – like whales in meditation – and the bedsheet that accompany its pilgrimage of silence. I’d like to get drowned in its warm waters, be toyed by its playful sunlight, and in my solitude wake up with a smile.

The Heron Woman*

Once, a poor fisherman saved a wounded bird from dying in winter. The kind fisherman took care of her until her broken wing mended. Throughout the time of healing, the bird came to trust the fisherman’s pure and simple heart. When she could finally move her wings to fly, she decided to
transform herself into a woman. She came back to his hut and offered to stay by his side as his wife. The unsuspecting fisherman was overjoyed by his great fortune, but, being poor, he soon found out having to feed two mouths a problem.

One day the woman offered to weave a cloth that he could sell in the village market. But she made him promise that he would never ever look in on her while she wove. The fisherman gave his word, and after many days, the woman handed him a bolt of fine silk. The cloth fetched a good price; for a while, the fisherman and the woman were happy.

Soon, their food ran out and the woman offered to weave for one last time a cloth he could sell for a very good price. Again, she wove for days and afterwards handed him a second bolt of fine silk. But she had grown pale and thin for the work of weaving had taken so much out of her. He gave her
his word that this was the last bolt of silk she would weave. He went to the castle to sell to the noble household the finest cloth anyone had ever seen. The lord of the castle was pleased and paid him enough money to provide for him and his wife throughout their lives. But on his way home, one of the merchants who had seen the exceptional quality of weaving that if the weaver wove another bolt of cloth, he would help the poor fisherman sell it for a much higher price to the emperor’s household.

The fisherman, dazzled by the idea of having more money than he could imagine, told his wife to weave another bolt of silk fit for the emperor. She was astonished and asked him what he would do with more money than they would ever need in their lifetime. But the fisherman insisted; she could not dissuade him from his obsession. She sadly closed the door of her weaving room and spent many days and nights working on the third bolt of cloth.

As it was taking longer than usual, the fisherman decided to find out what was happening. Forgetting his promise, he opened the door and saw instead of his wife a Great Heron plucking out of her own body her fine feathers that she used for weaving at the loom. It was a horrifying sight and the fisherman fainted from witnessing magic.

When he came to, he heard the Great Heron beside him sing her true story. She sang her sadness at leaving, but because he did not honor his promise and had looked in on her pain, she would now fly back to the wild and be free.

The third bolt of silk was the finest any human or eye had ever touched or seen. It was delicate as snow and stained with flecks of crimson.

*The Heron Woman is an old Japanese tale

Mindanao musings

What struck me most about the entire trip was the uncanny loneliness of the whole place. Mindanao is known for bloodshed and conflict, the cacophony of its forests replaced by gunshots and war cries. But traveling around the island made me feel its isolation; it is inhabited and yet primodial. I completely felt like a stranger; a visa would have been fit.

From Cotabato City, we went to General Santos City, then we left, via Davao, for Cagayan de Oro City. We then took the ferry in Misamis Occidental to go to Zamboanga Sibugay, and finally, to Zamboanga City, where I took the flight back to Manila. It was more than work: it was too moving.

In Cotabato City, a sleepless town, we went to a Christian university where the toilets for men are virtual advertisements for blow jobs (where you’ll also meet Istadz: a name you can’t trust, but a name you can crust crushed). The city – a proud site of rebellion against the Catholic Philippines – is made up of cultures so diverse that the people decided to speak the language of Luzon, bastardized and cannibalized, to understand each other. In General Santos City, we got off the bus in front of a barangay hall in the outskirts of the City, where gay boys were decorating the stage for Ms. General Santos City, taking turns in sashaying on the ramps of the stage, as if by doing it several times, or through the shrill of their voice alone, they would undress Mindanao of its muslimness.

In the border between Bukidnon and Davao (called Buda Pass), we were asked to disembark and step on some chemicals that would prevent the spread of the dreaded foot and mouth disease. I was so dizzy and sleepy from all the traveling that I didn’t notice the elevation of the place. I would have fallen off in the farthest corner of the country while dreaming.

And when we arrived in Cagayan de Oro, I was amazed by the city’s buzz and movements. There I met cross-dressing gay designers who professed their disdain for cross-dressing parloristas. They brought me to a beach a few minutes away from the center of the city, where the shore didn’t seem to end and the water didn’t seem to deepen. We hitched in a seminary’s van to go back to the city. Just before I left I met a man – generally, a rather rare incident when I travel – who, in his computer shop, made bold moves to get my number.

Time stopped and was subsequently discarded when we went to Zamboanga Sibugay from Cagayan de Oro. There, a hostility against order and promptness was the norm – buses and vans took their time because things just can’t be done sooner. It was even more slow when we reached Sibugay, and the isolation of Ipil, the capital town, which was attacked and razed by a group of atrocious bandits a few years ago, made me feel surprisingly claustrophobic. I wanted to leave the town the moment we were done and I felt so glad we did.

Finally, in Zamboanga City, I was accompanied by gay muslims and gay Catholics who gave no shit about what the Pope and Mohammed said. There, in a city known for its poverty and sharp divide between the rich and the poor, the Catholic Church built a cathedral that looks like an international airport and cost about 80 million pesos. My friend, God (or whomever he praises these days) bless his soul, was busy organizing the first-ever province-wide Gay beauty contest in Basilan, a few hours from the city and one of the most muslim places in Mindanao. It is also the bailiwick of the Abu Sayyaf, which is known to behead homosexuals.

Suddenly I pined for the constancy of my place in the mad streets of Metro Manila. And just when I thought I’d finally be free of the bizarreness of Mindanao, a street vendor approached me in Zamboanga City’s international airport. He offered, in the following order, some Hollywood movies (pirated, of course), straight porn, m2m porn (this he nonchalantly offered after I declined to buy the first two items), and later, erection-sustaining lotions.

wanderlust, or why as the beginning

The idea came to me a few weeks ago.

Write, said this voice inside my head. But what was there to write about thousands of miles above the ground? I was once again going back, going home, and I wondered why I kept on leaving in the first place.

There is only homesickness, in the company of clouds, amidst nomadic whales, or in the middle of a crowd speaking in multiple tongues. We are, in the end, all nomads, driven by what we do not have. We search for home, even inside our own rooms, in our bed, inside our heads.

And our journeys are always solitary. Loneliness and homesickness share the same skin, both an agony of the restless. We are lonely precisely because we are haunted by the possibility of settling down, of wanting to be stationary. There are nights when we wish that our heads would stop thinking, just so our minds would stop from wandering too far.

In the end, I decided to heed the voice anyway. I write because of the same fire that beckoned others to wield the pen. I write because there are things that are better left to words, instead of pictures. Because there are experiences so moving that they deserve to have souls. And there are others that are simply worthy of the metaphors of heaven and light.

my first poem

The earliest memory that i have is about a particular moment when i was still in pre-school. It was probably summer, or a weekend: that morning i felt too eager to play, having no classes I must go to. There was this wide lawn in front of our house, lined up with shrubs of hisbiscus in a procession of green and red, where my siblings and i played with the rest of the neighborhood kids. It was still early and the feline wind felt cold as it wrapped its tail on my bare legs.

I saw it flit from one shrub to another, taking a taste of nectar from this and that flower. It seemed delicate, its yellow wings looked as if it was about to melt in the morning sun, like the scrap of butter I spread on the warm pandesal I had for breakfast.

This spread of butter, though, looked more enticing than breakfast. I immediately grabbed the red-and-yellow mesh bag that we use to buy items at the wet market. It smelled of fish and salt and it felt coarse in my hands, as if it were made of fine, irritating sand. Its mouth appeared wide enough to catch the butterfly.

I held the bag with excitement and hid right behind the bushes. The butterfly just went on with its business of nectar and dancing. I jumped at it, and suddenly everything was a blur of red and blue and yellow and mud brown. Before I landed on the ground I saw the butterfly panicking, surprised by the attack; it looked too fragile and delicately beautiful.

It was the last time I saw it alive.

Butterflies never left me since then.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The men who had kissed me in the nape never noticed how their lips unlocked electric butterflies down my spine. When I see beautiful and familiar napes, while walking around strange cities or while sipping coffee, butterflies congregate in my stomach. Their delicious fragility descends to my knees, and the things that I touch explode with their colors.