I finally had that perm I’ve been wanting to get since last year. It’s part of my whole ‘new life, new image’ project. And with my recent retrenchment at work after 7 years, I figured this was the perfect time to get a new look as any.
In the parking lot, a mild August breeze brings the tree branches to dance. The earthy rustling of the lush green leaves reaches her ears through the open car window, where she pauses thoughtfully in the middle of [...]
She does not think she could ever forgive him. That was the thought that remained with her long after the other anguished, furious emotions swirling through her with the force of a hurricane eventually dissipated into stillness.
Her first impulse was to quell her reaction, push the ugly thoughts and the tears deep, deep down to a place where she could not reach them even if she wanted to. But the tide rose gradually and brought with it the whole crumpled mess, nudging against the borders she tried so hard to erect. Her stomach ached with the effort of repression.
***********
She opens her eyes. It is that time of the night when the moonlight shining through the window is the only thing the world consists of. That moment between awakening and sleep, she is uncertain where she is, despite the solid weight of the bed beneath her.
Within this silvery bubble of moonlight she feels disconnected from the present, the images she saw the previous afternoon seemingly unreal, like a dream she could forget with a blink of an eye. But even as she tried to convince herself that it was, in her mind’s eye she could see his careless beatific smile, mocking her. Forgetting came easily to him it seemed, and she wishes she could adopt the same.
It was the proverbial stab in the back, what he did. She allowed so few people in her life as a precaution, having learned the price of friendship the hard way over the years. People you thought were friends will hurt you and walk away, not necessarily in that order, she knew that now. She was wary of getting close to acquaintances, no matter how outwardly nice they seemed.
But him. He had been in her life forever. His roots had grown in her heart, twining with her veins and arteries. She loved him like family, despite the time and distance that had set them apart recently. To think he could casually toss her out of his life like a withered fern was excruciating. It was inexcusable.
Maybe his reasons are just the opposite, a voice in her whispered. You know him. Too well, that’s the problem. Just because you refuse to see doesn’t mean it’s not right. there.
Delving deeper into it was too much. She has misjudged herself.
The moonlight hovers, suspended and untouched by the inner battle going on inside her. She takes a minute to photograph this moment so she won’t linger. So she won’t turn back.
She will leave him here, their life’s memories ensconced in the shimmering light of a dream.
She closes her eyes. Now she can begin to forget.
Then there is the one who will impact your life so profoundly, it will cause you to undergo a paradigm shift on the existence you thought previously was resignedly inevitable in its singular mediocrity.
I can’t write when I’m happy.
My friend told me to snap out of this self-imposed psychological hindrance I’m experiencing. He got over it, and look where that got him now: a prize-winning, sexually satiated poet.
Snippets playing out in an infinite loop: scribbling melancholy thoughts in a journal, discussing the inanity of life with friends with an air of apathetic condescendence and cigarette smoke, driving to the mall to slip on a pair of new shoes, a top, anything that will patch the unconscious hole two feet deep, emitting static, empty air even only for a moment. Trying to find answers in poems, in divinity, in the clouds. The partial sum of my eccentricities.
Sleepy sloe-eyed girl with red, red lips on a Tuesday afternoon underscored by uncharacteristically overcast skies. The fax rings incessantly in the next cubicle, unable to pick up a tone, an old grouch in the inner office screams “Goddamn computer!” accompanied by a muffled thud. A frightened mouse scurries across the tiled floor and she lifts her feet up to let it pass. The camera mounted on the wall looks on indifferently. Casting a glance over her shoulder she silently asks, ”Are you getting any of this?”
You are the only one who made me dream of the idea of domesticity: of two-story houses with spacious backyards, diapers and pacifiers, growing older. I have always sustained this irrational belief that being a wife and a mother would strip me of my individuality, my mystery. I would no longer be the sleepy, sloe-eyed museless writer with red, red lips. But with you, it sounds like the best adventure of my life. The potentiality of standing at the beginning of forever with your hand in mine.
My rock fortress is a little boy, I think fondly as I watch you sketch a nipa hut and a barely-discernable dog on the placemat one night over dinner, your head bent in concentration, the blue child’s crayon fragile in your big, capable hand. Hands that have led and guided people for so many years, created and signed policies, contracts and reports of influence and change.
And recently, have infused me with much warmth, security and promise. My love for you is similar to the passage of time, the possibilities in all things: infinite. It is an untruth to say that eternity exists only after death. I experience eternity in every moment spent with you, my love.
Now you see why I can’t write when I’m happy? The words melt into a cliched puddle of mush, slipping through my nerveless fingers bearing streaks of realizations.
A peek into my crazy, whimsical and at times, senseless mind.
