Tag Archives: part of a whole

radikalchick.lit

ingress

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. on the last 24 hours we didn’t have yet, before a flight was cancelled and rebooked, before you try and fit in seven months of self into bags, i watched not with wonder but distance: your back was turned to me as you washed the dishes, 10 beers between us, you tell me to stay put. your word upon word upon word become a slow reveal, weighing heavier and heavier because it took long enough, though it wasn’t the length of time at all, as it was the time it took. to wrap our heads around the weight of us on the bed, at the tables between us, at the photos that captured distance. when you finally sit beside me, it’s a coming out of sorts, in a restaurant with no love, where you insist: a camera would gaze at us and know romance from the beginning. i don’t tell you why i can’t believe that, there’s just no time. instead there’s last night, when we breached distance, in the darkness, the digital clock the bright light counting down, the words: premature / presumptuous / continue / stay the night. we sleep with the discomfort of the following day’s doom, we wake and buy another day. we wonder about promises. it was over soon enough.

radikalchick.lit

considerations

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. over those introductory cups of coffee it was a lesson in first meetings: (1) choose a quiet(er) place, (2) remember to pee before it begins, the better to (3) prepare for a four-hour conversation. measure the time spent sitting across each other, compare it to the time spent in each others arms. get a ruler: how far is the distance between us as we walk the streets? how many minutes to walk from your building to the hole in the wall next door, the convenience store further down, the squatters area accessible on the other side of this street. how many minutes before they are comfortable with the image of us, distant but together, an arm’s length away, a table between us, chairs beside each other but apart, i settle on the couch for one. count the times the waiter gives us a sly a smile, the deaf-mute screams his high-five, the manongs we pass grin ear-to-ear, the guard at your building counts 24 hours. how many seconds does it take for the good friend to tease you about me, out of earshot, more of the pinoy macho thing, you say. more a measure of the distance we choose to keep: i sleep against your shoulder, you put your hand on my thigh. you look down the length of our arms as you hold my hand for the first time. absolutely ridiculous you say. i wonder about coffee as the sun streams into the room i am seeing for the last time.

radikalchick.lit

composition

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. there’s the limits of a text message, like a finish line i refuse to cross, so i stop right before it, and begin again. you call it eloquence. i edit myself. you call out to me through the tiny box that you complain is too small a space, appearing just above your right hand as we chat. the tiny box ain’t so bad i argue, and isn’t it above your left hand? it’s limitless, these silly conversations we have, where we make mountains out of molehills i say, where we know some molehills are actually mountains you say, where we must know that some of the latter aren’t really such. we pare down mountains with words. we cut the world in thirds: here’s what you think, here’s what i think, here’s where nothing can be said. as you put food on my plate before you put some on yours, with no romance for that mountain of your leaving in the backdrop, no love for the facts we do not speak of. for two people who get off on words, we hold impending conversations, a paragraph in your head, a sentence that trails off in mine. you look at me in the middle of a crowded noisy restaurant for the leaving and left behind, to say: we know that what matters is what we don’t say, yes? yes. here, take this box and watch mountains become molehills become nothing but ellipses. here, have a box and fill it words.

radikalchick.lit

exigencies

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. when it can be had about the billboards that riddle the streets, where capital and colonialism, consumption and crises, become par for the course, of that long stretch of EDSA that cradles the car from one city to the next two, as it shifts from quiet residential to sprawling Manila, the dip in the tone, the way that it sounds, onomatopoeic i say, a conversation you’ve been having with your brother you say. which moves us down other cities far from here: shanghai, islamabad, bangkok, and we stop at sin — singapore, towards which you are moving, not leaving, just taking a trip, you insist, i insist, we rationalize. there seems to be no reason to stay in this conversation of refusing to acknowledge the impending distance, from one end of the road to the next, one country to another, one long stretch of time between what we cannot say now and where it might lead next. much like you giving me directions in your part of the city, and i follow even as i might know a shortcut, an easier way, of laying cards on the table, letting it all hang. it’s too soon and sudden, striking but also surreal. and right now what is urgent is only: this stretch of road, a u-turn to make, a right, until everything’s left, you and me on that stretch of road, like the silences that surround roadkills, the swiftness, the transience, when a new set of cars and dangers, noise and victims, take our place.

radikalchick.lit

egress

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. but also the fact that as the evening ends with a quick goodbye, that split second that it takes you to unbuckle the seatbelt and give me a peck on the cheek, the swiftness of that moment is in slow motion: the wall of the squatters area further down sounds brighter, the lights of the korean plaza feel like an intrusion, the darkness of your building a foreboding. of this pending goodbye, the one that stretches to 5, 10, 40 minutes at a time, where the conversation is never about us as it is about the world outside. words suffice for what isn’t ours on that street: the deaf-mute understands what he sees as we are silent on his unsaid; the friend on the phone teases within hearing distance; the policemen behind your building surprised at our temerity/daring/guts to sit at the neighborhood bakery in front of the contained slums. we talk like we’re in front of expensive milkshakes, cups of coffee and pate, cheap banana bread, 15-peso footlong sandwiches, it’s all the same. as we have that same conversation in the car, right before you get off, as i need to get home, and that stretch of time that it takes for us to be uncomfortable, saying goodbye, not for the moment, but for a particular kind of distance, one we do not articulate. we talk like old friends even as this is farthest from the truth: the old, the being friends. here, take a conversation and run away with it. please take a conversation and run.