Friday, December 27

A List Will Help

  1. What does it say about me that I'm less reluctant to write about these long lonely bus rides than I am what happened before and after? 
  2. These people advertised themselves so recklessly it's justifiable to repost their personal ads. Whoever you are, Maika, someone loves you enough to carry a permanent marker on their person. I wonder what someone has to think, what someone has to feel, to write these names out. What does "qwatro" mean?  I wonder if these numbers still work.
  3. I was on my way to visit my grandmother. It was in the early afternoon, a little after an extended and unplanned conversation with Gail meant I missed three of my father's calls to tell me my grandmother had begun vomiting black blood then red blood then just water and that she had seen her eldest, deceased, sister pulling her leg. She was religious, my grandmother. Maybe even the ghosts were prayers. More like they were the products of her imagination, something the body does to ease itself into decay. How past and present bleed within memory and your entire life floats up as the dams burst. The more she toed the line between death and survival, the less it mattered how time insisted on its steady march forward into futurity. Something in the chemical composition in her brain, in her mind, must have given up so that time collapsed, first, within her and that stasis echoed outward into our lives. I've never known such an extended Present. The bus ride took me from one era into the next in the space of an hour, maybe an hour and a half.  
  4. On her deathbed, Lola became uncharacteristically democratic. Ryan, my 19 year-old cousin, recited our names by order of birth and after every female name, Lola jabs a finger into the air, exclaiming: maganda! And after every male name, the same: guwapo! As if congratulating herself. 
  5. In retrospect, the thought that she was alone--with her memories--comes as a relief. Because there was no act of abandonment from our end. She simply left, stopped walking with us. 
  6. That won't erase years of not being there. Here is what I cannot articulate: we stopped visiting a long time ago and for no good reason. We left you alone with people who made you feel hideously and unnecessarily grateful and then debased and then, even, unappreciated.
  7. Aside: the culture of gratitude we abide by shouldn't exist on a fragile tipping scale. Gratitude shouldn't make you feel less valuable, yourself. It makes people mean when they equate tulong with lost pride. Real help should take nothing away. You can be grateful and be proud. Do I need to learn this, too?

Short life update

I'm in the middle of a few long-term projects directly related to fandoms and I'm glad to be back (sort of).