Tag Archives: quick essay

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.

here, for good measure, is mine. when I speak of the RH Bill, these are some of the more consistent memories that I battle with, that I live:

(1) an act of infidelity brings me to a room in the middle of nowhere, as the other woman needed a friend while she got herself an abortion: i was her only friend. (2) I skip a pill, and think nothing of it; let me overdose and do the-day-after-thing I’ve read about online. I do not know of its probability of failing. (3) I am pregnant with a sick child and told that the dangers are unknown, it is unclear if it is safe for me, but I have no options. (4) I am pregnant and in pain and in suffering and in even more pain, I am told by doctors that they want to do a caesarean operation on me, forgetting to say that it will mean even more pain for my body, less chances of survival for my baby. (5) I am speaking to doctors who talk about my body and my baby as if we were machines that they can fix, as we were just broken and in the name of their science can be fixed, by golly! we can be fixed. (6) I am in the delivery room and I don’t feel a thing, but I am trying to get the baby out with all my heart and soul, that which every woman on that delivery table must have done before me, and I am thinking of this: please do not let medicine touch my baby, do not let one needle, one piece of cold metal, to touch her. (7) I am alive, it’s been two years, my body’s still battered by the painful pregnancy, by the even more painful uncaring words, said about me and my body and my being woman seeing as abandonment can only be contingent to the death of a child.

when I speak of the RH Bill I remember all these, not necessarily in this order, but always in quick succession, each one a death in itself, each memory I imagine possibly less about pain and loss, if only there were mechanisms in place to protect me — and every other woman — as a woman; if only there was a system in place that would treat my body as worthy of much love and care and respect, because it is mine, and I deserve it.

the street of my childhood

is victory avenue, quezon city. where a big house still is, owned by family but barely, a space i haven’t seen in years, a street i haven’t even gone into in as long.

but on that street where i grew up, my notion(s) of the world began to be formed. between the padlocked gate, and the poverty beyond it; the old beetle that we played around and not within, and the huge garden that Lola loved; between the death of a rock star and my own cousin found hit and almost dead by one of our trusted impoverished neighbors beyond that padlocked gate; between who we were there, within family and the strangest kind of love, and what we became when we left, with all our things, a time that i remember clearly.

i would later find out that in fact the move was about the daring to strike out elsewhere, on our own as a nuclear family.

seeing this street of my childhood as i was getting P200 pesos worth of gas, because that’s all my wallet had; coming from many things and emotions of the past two years, but literally from five hours of volunteer work in a public school in one of those streets i will forget soon enough; worrying periodically about money and consistently refusing to worry; with much love, too much in fact, for the world; in between celebrating a birth and a death in the three and a half months of every year since 2008.

this street, a full two decades after, has to be serendipitous.

as it is a challenge, showing me what i want, what i need to do, where i must go, and how it shall be done. as it is about the past, even more so about the future. and the now of knowing to see the possibilities of daring.

that street is exactly where i’m at.