august 25th. 2011

the image of a blind man being sang to by a girl about the galaxies and its wonders has been stuck in my head. it pops up like a recurring dream from my childhood.

lately, i have been having flashbacks of moments from my childhood back in manila. it’s been haunting me and i gladly sway my arms and head back and forth gracefully enough to push me..back to her arms.

i’ve missed you.

whenever i smell the sweet hallucinogenic fragrance of sampaguita, it cradles me back to that day, one of my days of innocence, where the sun peeks right through the fluffy gigantic clouds of that dreary city. i held no money in my pocket but my feet were enough to take me everywhere i wanted. it took me everywhere. the sun followed my footsteps and lit the dusty air contaminated by corrupted minds and their breathing. filling, yet sickening, i just now realized how horrible my childhood was. 

back then, i saw more crimes than i saw my own parents. i greeted the same sky above me for three years with horrifying screams as i pull my pants up from being molested with the bare hands of life. with my cousin constantly strangling me with ropes that leashed me like a stray dog, i looked up with the same sky with the same sun peeking through the same fluffy gigantic clouds screaming for my mom’s name as if she’d come down from heaven to save me…and for once touch me and cradle me back and forth like dreams i’ve woken up from. 

i’ve missed you, i’d tell her but

she never showed up. 

i 

i i

i i i 

remember waking up around 4 in the morning when i was 5. i woke up to the sounds of talk radio and scratching screeching voices of vendors march around the neighborhood screaming, screaming, screaming…it never really worked for me. i screamed so much when i was younger but i don’t remember a time when i was heard. 

i remember entering this room in our house back in navotas where i was greeted with flying plates and swaying fists faster than bullets that lit the room like they were fireworks during new years. i never knew that each fuck’s, cunt’s and shit’s and fists against faces will make everything better. i was pushed in a corner along with my cousins terrified and shaking. we were so young but their bruised fists punched the innocence out of our beating hearts and delicate ribs.

when i was five,i learned how to spell family but no one ever told me what the word meant. instead, i found the streets— lit by the scavengers and lonely stray cats and their masters— that taught me family meant closeness, comfort and love…they taught me that i never had nobody but myself. 

my mom left us when i was 4. i brushed my own hair and asked my dad how i looked before i go to school and he’d say that i was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. i’d walk through the hallway to the bathroom and come back to his arms where he’d whisper to me that i can be the next supermodel…just as long as i’d take care of my legs and sit up straight. 

7 months after my mom left, my dad left us as well. he pretended to leave for a quick phone call and said he’d come back right away. i waited patiently. i waited for him to come back and put back his bags down and stay. 

and until to this day, i never heard him speak although we’re separated by thin walls and under the same roof. i’m waiting patiently for him to come back. i’ve waited patiently.

outside our house in the streets, people walked with crooked legs and bent backs like dying flowers on pavements. i was one of them. i modeled the most inefficient building running through clutters of dust formed by sandstorms and newspapers headlining about the murder down the street. the streets taught me that there will never be peace without gossips and rumors. 

a kid running around with a piece of wood with rusty nails stuck at the end of it waving it back and forth to greet his friends in the face.

a mother cheering his son as he beat his friend up with hia 5 year old fists playing against the sandbox of his friends eyes. pushed him to the ground, inhale and exhale, inhaled the corrupted air, and ended it with a spit of his face. 

the girl being raped in a classroom after band practice. her teacher told her she didn’t have to pay any admission just as long as he gets to touch her breasts.

a boy having the cops called on him because someone found out that during lazy afternoons of summer, he’d take of his friends clothes off of her and play with her touching her violently just like how he saw it on the movies. 

the image of my cousin sitting on the staircase of an abandoned building with his forehead bleeding so hard i could hardly tell it was him.

what is childhood? because if childhood means innocence, clear conscience, and purity.. then i guess, i’ll never learn how to spell the word. my eyes didn’t see what the world was supposed to be for a young delicate sampaguita, my eyes didn’t see rainbows and butterflies like the murals back at school in second grade, but just the same sky and the same clouds and the same sun that peaks through the fluffly gigantic clouds.

once i’ve learned to untie the rope the suffocated my throat i sang..i sang to a blind man about the galaxies and told him that we are made out of star dusts and whenever i find nightmares down the street, i look up to the same sky

from two years ago:

I dreamt of you this morning 

and for some reason, my chest felt so heavy. It’s as if someone had put their full weight on me 

plus all their worries,

and all their tears,

and innumerable anxieties they fill their nights with. All of it. I had absorbed not only the tasteless emotions but also the resentment I had the night before.

I couldn’t stop talking to myself about you. I couldn’t stop because I knew even at the beginning, there was no such thing like stopping to love you. I knew the moment we couldn’t call each other that night that it was the beginning of my conscience eating my soul away.

I hurt you and you left to sail to your safety. From then on, there was nothing else but for me to hurt. 
Twigs, leaves, raindrops, clouds and the sidewalk.

Miles, gasoline, miles, gasoline

Hands, your hands, his hands, my hands.

a re-post from a year and a half ago

I know exactly what’s going on with me. I realized this in a room filled with smoke leaking from painful lungs of acquaintances. Everyone seemed to be in pain but they claimed that they were enjoying themselves. I smiled and it

came to me.

Insidiously greeting with each second passing, it finally hit me

that I am happy and I never noticed it until now because of my lingering obsession of depression and the comfort of never failing or falling down. I’ve been in denial for the last few days because,to be completely honest, I have abandoned that feeling and threw it away along with the days it came with. A foreign feeling, I made it feel like.

And there was I—sitting on a pygmy skateboard shared with a stranger that I’m currently infatuated by—confused and disarrayed as if I’ve detached my limbs and heart years and years ago and forced-pasted them back on. And the stitches make me even more vulnerable:

I’m afraid to be happy.