one unfortunate truth about kindness

Kindness is a finite resource and I think I'm damn near tapped out.

Last Friday, some friends decided to celebrate the end of the week by meeting up for a few drinks at a small bar in the city. I would've preferred an empty room, a warm drink. I liked the wooden table, the quaint, warm lamp, and the bat carved out of some lightweight planks and mounted on the far wall.

Bars, I found, were occupied not by people but by their human noise. A Caucasian woman standing in front of the restrooms in five-inch heels and a black, lacy top reached over and laid her warm, damp palm on the small of my back as I picked my way to the water-closet. Her uneven, bruise-red lipstick coated her laugh. The stage--a platform painted black and shoved into the far corner--serviced the L-shaped dining hall, not large at all, only a few meters across and crammed full of long tables. The seven-man band's lead singer's sounded like he recorded radio canned laughter. Sitting at a table in front of us, five women bent over one of their own, commiserating over Sally's newest sob-story. Not that they could hear her.

It was the noise I despised.

What is the point of being together--and traveling through two cities in Friday rush hour traffic--if the most substantial subject you broached in our three hours together was your preference for a particular kind of cigarette and how long it took you to finish a stick. With the same slim hand you crumpled the empty Lucky Strike boxes and flung them against the table, violent with some inarticulate outrage. I've never known you to parade your scorn so openly and so proudly.

Watching you made me tired.

The most I can do when I run out of kindness is to be silent and still. 

I arrived in another room another city with pockets weighed down with the same growing poverty of kindness. I shared a table with several strangers and a few acquaintances. From now on, I will assume that in the company of adults, no one is required to participate in conversation. I'm so tired of feeling responsible for other people's comfort. I have to learn my limits and to be more judicious with the way I spend my energy and time and words, because these are all so difficult to take back.

For a long time I've wanted more restraint. I think what I wanted was to run out of rope and to reach the end of my patience and all the utter bullshit from people I have to keep forgiving. Ayoko na. Kayo naman ang makisama. 

Before Monday

The few hours I scraped together between checking and preparing for next week I spent relearning how to breathe. I forgot, even, that I was supposed to be writing a story. Writing, in fact, several stories. And an essay. I would show you a photograph of my list but I don't want to embarrass myself. Instead, Hemingway (hardness, clarity):

the terrible business of anticipating happiness

1

Doubt belongs right up there with all the other mortal sins.

2

It wasn't the first time I found myself walking in circles. Too ashamed to ask the cab driver to turn around and fiercely certain I could find my way on foot anyway, I swallowed my fear and got down in front of a faceless, unfamiliar building. I saw a convenience store in the lobby and headed in that direction but the guard on duty--an unassuming man in a wrinkled, off-white barong--stopped me at the door. When he didn't recognize me, he turned me away, explaining with the business end of his kindness that civilians and non-employes had to walk around the building instead of walking through it.

3

After months of dating, Eya met her boyfriend with all the whirling, unfocused energy of a storm meeting land. This was how I imagined it took place.

She watches the wall of turnstiles fifty meters away. The tiles of the floor and the low, white ceiling reflect giants and the blunt spires of cathedrals where there are only slumped passengers and their misshapen bags. Of course the group of women stand in a clump, heads bobbing on their strained necks, trying to catch a glimpse of someone they've only squinted at from the screen of Eya's smartphone.

But no sound announces his entrance into their lives. They almost miss each other they are looking so hard. How do they know? Do they recognize each other from a distance and then do they feel each other's arrival, like gravity or heat?

There is no running. Or maybe there is. In this iteration, Eya cannot run, there are too many people, the straight path to him disappears. She must pick her way across an ocean of bodies and across the long moment of unrequited recognition, the confusion before he sees and knows her.

And then is there relief?

I will imagine their (re)union brings relief and gratification in equal measure. How often do our plans succeed? She conjured his whole body, intact and full of wonder.

4

"Hindi ka hiyang sa pagtuturo, ano?" Hannah asks, watching me catch smoke with my mouth. I stand in the middle of the little cyclone I exhaled.

"What makes you say that?" My throat is full of bile. I will never be a smoker but I enjoy holding the stick between my fingers. Every rebellion I've ever staged has been against my own body: self-harm, body dysmorphia, bulimia.

"I know what the opposite looks like. My other friends thrive under the pressure."

I forgot that I hid nothing from these people; what I do not say remains only unsaid, neither unreachable nor inaccessible to them. 

I prepare for a barrage of questions and do not realize that Hannah spoke only for my benefit, because she knew I had not seen myself in a mirror lately. She doesn't talk for the same reasons I do: to argue or to draw out explanations the same way you would suck poison from a wound.

Fear is knotted with pleasure. There is no way to hold one without the other. Every angel is terrible and terrifying. I have that tattooed on my rib.

"How are they?" I ask.

"Not awkward." 

Face-to-face (FtF) communication works so well because more than 90% the information necessary to facilitate pleasurable dialogue is communicated through body language and non-verbal signals instead of spoken language.So despite Sony's halting English and his tenuous grasp of conversational Filipino, he is verbose. And Eya stops snapping her fingers at the dinner table after he gently explains--sotto voce, face turned away from us--how Europeans considered the gesture extremely rude.

"Don't do that," he says. Almost apologetic.

5

I talk to myself when I am lost. I've been talking to myself in silent classrooms all semester.

What the Body Told

Rafael Campo

Not long ago, I studied medicine.
It was terrible, what the body told.
I’d look inside another person’s mouth,
And see the desolation of the world.
I’d see his genitals and think of sin.

Because my body speaks the stranger’s language,
I’ve never understood those nods and stares.
My parents held me in their arms, and still
I think I’ve disappointed them; they care
And stare, they nod, they make their pilgrimage

To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry.
I look inside their other-person’s mouths
And see the wet interior of souls.
It’s warm and red in there—like love, with teeth.
I’ve studied medicine until I cried

All night. Through certain books, a truth unfolds.
Anatomy and physiology,
The tiny sensing organs of the tongue—
Each nameless cell contributing its needs.
It was fabulous, what the body told.

Lot's Wife

Kristine Batey

While Lot, the conscience of a nation,
struggles with the Lord,
she struggles with the housework.
The City of Sin is where
she raises the children.
Ba'al or Adonai--
Whoever is God--
the bread must still be made
and the doorsill swept.
The Lord may kill the children tomorrow,
but today they must be bathed and fed.
Well and good to condemn your neighbors' religion,
but weren't they there
when the baby was born,
and when the well collapsed?
While her husband communes with God,
she tucks the children into bed.
In the morning, when he tells her of the judgment,
[that is, God's decision to destroy the city]
she puts down the lamp she is cleaning
and calmly begins to pack.
In between bundling up the children
and deciding what will go,
she runs for a moment
to say goodbye to the herd,
gently patting each soft head
with tears in her eyes for the animals that will not understand.
She smiles blindly to the woman
who held her hand at childbed.
It is easy for eyes that have always turned to heaven
not to look back;
those who have been--by necessity--drawn to earth
cannot forget that life is lived from day to day.
Good, to a God, and good in human terms
are two different things.
On the breast of the hill, she chooses to be human,
and turns, in farewell--
and never regrets
the sacrifice.

What Lot's Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn't a Pillar of Salt)

Karen Finneyfrock

Do you remember when we met
in Gomorrah? When you were still beardless,
and I would oil my hair in the lamp light before seeing
you, when we were young, and blushed with youth
like bruised fruit. Did we care then
what our neighbors did
in the dark?

When our first daughter was born
on the River Jordan, when our second
cracked her pink head from my body
like a promise, did we worry
what our friends might be
doing with their tongues?

What new crevices they found
to lick love into or strange flesh
to push pleasure from, when we
called them Sodomites then,
all we meant by it
was neighbor.

When the angels told us to run
from the city, I went with you,
but even the angels knew
that women always look back.
Let me describe for you, Lot,
what your city looked like burning
since you never turned around to see it.

Sulfur ran its sticky fingers over the skin
of our countrymen. It smelled like burning hair
and rancid eggs. I watched as our friends pulled
chunks of brimstone from their faces. Is any form
of loving this indecent?

Cover your eyes tight,
husband, until you see stars, convince
yourself you are looking at Heaven.

Because any man weak enough to hide his eyes while his neighbors
are punished for the way they love deserves a vengeful god.

I would say these things to you now, Lot,
but an ocean has dried itself on my tongue.
So instead I will stand here, while my body blows itself
grain by grain back over the Land of Canaan.
I will stand here
and I will watch you
run.

Wife's Disaster Manual

Deborah Paredez

When the forsaken city starts to burn,
after the men and children have fled,
stand still, silent as prey, and slowly turn

back. Behold the curse. Stay and mourn
the collapsing doorways, the unbroken bread
in the forsaken city starting to burn.

Don’t flinch. Don’t join in.
Resist the righteous scurry and instead
stand still, silent as prey. Slowly turn

your thoughts away from escape: the iron
gates unlatched, the responsibilities shed.
When the forsaken city starts to burn,

surrender to your calling, show concern
for those who remain. Come to a dead
standstill. Silent as prey, slowly turn

into something essential. Learn
the names of the fallen. Refuse to run ahead
when the forsaken city starts to burn.
Stand still and silent. Pray. Return.

Lot's Wife

Dana Littlepage Smith

Do not look behind you.
Gen. 19:17

So simple a mistake. They say I turned to look;
instead it was to listen. I did not know: only the dead
can stand the music of the spheres made mortal.

Caught in my hood, the hard chords of chaos:
the childish scream, the mother's litany as she names
the loss which instantly unnames her.

And then the inconceivable: between the flint
blast and the crack of iron, I heard
the burning of the scorched moth wing,

the lily as its petals crisp to white fire,
but more than these, the footfall
of a naked man who runs to nothing.

And so I chose this brine,
now crystals shift. The salt dissolves
and I want to speak.

Whore of all hopes, I now believe
some stories survive
in order to remake their endings.

Lot's Wife

Gary J. Whitehead

Sometime soon after the embers cooled,
after dust clouds settled, after the last strings
of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air,

they must have come, people of those three cities
remaining, to pick among the charred bones,
the rubble of what was once temple and house,

stable and brothel; to kick at stones; to tug
at handles of buckets, blades of shovels and spades.
Later, raising ash plumes in the scorched plain,

cloths at their mouths and noses, eyes burning,
neither fearful nor repentant but full of wonder,
full of the scavenger's overabundant hope,

they would have found her—even as now
some men encounter the woman of their dreams
(beauty of the movie screen, princess they capture

with a camera's flash, girl whose finger brushes theirs
when she takes their card at the market register)—
found her, that is, not as the person she was

but as whom they needed her to be, and, man or woman,
each of them would have wanted a piece of her.
Standing in that wasted landscape,

she must have seemed a statue erected there
as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized,
her head turned back as if in longing to be the girl

she had been in the city she had known.
And they must have stood there, as we do,
a bit awestruck, taking her in for a time,

and then, with chisel and knife, spike and buckle,
chipped at her violently and stuffed their leathern
pouches full of her common salt, salt with which

to season for a while their meat, their daily bread.

The Quiet World

Jeffrey McDaniel
 
In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

How Not to Ask Questions

Two weeks in, I decided I would not stay.

I got to class and I changed my mind.

And changed my mind again.

Everyone has told me to "give yourself time," to adjust or acclimate or get into the rhythm. They told me to "ask yourself again at the end of your first semester," and "the first sem is the hardest!" One of them has even congratulated me for surviving the first month of teaching a full load at a university known particularly as the school of hard knocks. I spoke to more people in one month as an instructor than I ever had as an editor. I'm five stories behind my personal schedule.  

Last Thursday, I stood on the curb waiting for a Katipunan-bound jeepney. I broke my own rules and allowed myself to stay in the university hours after my final class. My classes on Wednesday and Fridays were early and the students difficult to engage and among their staring eyes, I always see a specter of myself as I must have been in Pulan's MWF En12. 17, mute, smelling of smoke and sweat, bleary-eyed, and only half-awake.

What hasn't changed: the only part of me alive was the growing hard pearl of fear inside some raw, dark mouth.

Here is what I want to do: write research, write creative projects, publish, and produce books. I want to read, most of all. I want to learn. I want to know more than I do now, I want to understand more than I do now.

Last night with a friend in a dark corner of some busy place. We talked till half-past one. I tried to explain how different our lives were, how different the choices available to us and the options we consider in the daily business of living. I wanted to say: you talk about not compromising and polishing your plans while I have to live without a road map. Do you understand? That is how we are different. You have the luxury to procrastinate; I do not.

You dillydally trying not to make mistakes.

When I suggest--unfairly, I suppose, because you aren't ready and we both know it, we both know you will take your sweet time--that you move towards something, you shift until your body becomes a fence and a barrier. You cross your arms, you cross your legs, your feet point at a wall.

When I asked him about his favorite books he said he enjoyed Beckett, whose prose challenged form and language to reveal only illusions of true intimacy. Even at the height of physical pleasure, you/I/we are alone. There is no pain you feel that your body or your mind does not manufacture. The claim that we are together, without doubt, in our separation is laughable in its quaintness, how little comfort the truth brings: we can say nothing but bow our heads in acknowledgement and surrender. We were so alone.

I do not see myself changing my mind. What scares me is the next inevitable adventure into the void. Another bet, another gamble, another game. Another industry, even. Maybe. And yet more risk.  

surviving bouts of intense optimism

I've become one of those people who need people to be alone. It's Friday night and I'm writing in some coffee shop, another generic asshole-in-the-corner-bent-over-overheating-laptop. I prefer the large, communal tables over the small, circular ones. I'm sharing mine with two couples: four boys.

I felt almost unafraid this week. I mean: the pounding disappeared and the tremor in my hands receded farther up my arm. I found I could allow myself more time and fewer hours of work as punishment for my mistakes. I found I could be kind to myself, that opportunities for tiny acts of kindness existed within the twenty-fours already spoken for and apportioned according to tasks and completing three different to-do lists.

I began writing in my journal again. Not long, rambling entries the way I used to. Jot-lists. Mundane things: don't forget your keys! Eat lunch! Visit Sarah after class!

I allowed myself to overstay my welcome in kind company.

Fear and anxiety made me tighten my grip on myself and demand unscrupulous hours. I set the bar so high there was no way to succeed. When I can control nothing else, when I feel trapped in the eye of a whirling storm, my arms go around myself to hold myself steady. Like that will anchor me to the ground.

Secret pleasures revealed themselves in the space between large tracts of unremarkable but overwhelming fear. The universe intervenes, adept at parallel construction.

In my literature class this morning, one student asked a question I thought I'd answered properly via close reading: how do we know we've not over-read a text? or misread a text? 

Two nights prior, I found a suite of poems written by kids aged 9-12. The poems were written as part of the Booklatan sa Bayan Leyte, a National Book Development Board project.

Walang kamalay-malay
Si Tatay na may patay
Doon sa kapitbahay.

-Angelica A. Navarra, 9, Granja Central School 

I read the poems aloud and withheld critical, contextual information until the class formed its opinions and understood the tone and image and the beautiful ambiguity of the words. And only after the class had formed concrete opinions and understood the poems outside their context, did I reveal that the poems had been written by Typhoon Yolanda survivors, children who had learned to live with loss in an extreme environment. Children who continued to live and who turned to the brevity of this form to say, among other things, we are here, we are still here. Then I asked, did we misinterpret the poems when we read them even without the context? How then do we police our own understanding of poems not written with us in mind? By 'us' I meant the social and communal 'us' that is the product of living within the same society, having grown-up with the same set of beliefs. I didn't plan any of this but what I had brought with me on a whim was a good way to explain the difference between reading closely and misreading.

Sometimes, I am sorely tempted to believe in the guiding hand of some benign, higher power. Call it the Universe, call it by the name of a deity. 

laura kimpton and jeff schomberg

After the literature class I wandered up and down the faculty center. I forgot my keys on the dresser in my bedroom at home and the backpack was heavy with papers. I turned toward home my feet were leaden and disobedient. I didn't want to go. That was strange enough. I usually craved the empty hours by myself. Now, I was too afraid of the familiarity of my own room to look forward to another empty afternoon.

The fear expanded beyond its boundaries to conquer new territory: I keep finding small shards of it in unlikely places. On a Katipunan-Campus jeepney at seven in the morning, just before my Wednesday class. I'm afraid of the marks on my bedroom floor where the sealing wax has been scraped off where I drag the chair to and fro. I'm afraid of the floorspace beside my bed where I knot myself smaller still until my hand covers the width of my entire face. I am so small, so small, I remind myself, and you are small, you are small in the lives of the people in your own small life. You are tiny, I tell myself. I can shrink more, I say.

I am obsessed with taking up as little space as possible, hoping the fear will not find me.

To Lles2K13

I know, I know. You're doing it wrong, Lles2K14, you're supposed to write a letter to your future self.

I have nothing to say to the Lles of the future. Her hands aren't numb from the wrist down, she's relaxing in some faraway coffee shop where the cheerful barista has finally remembered to add an extra packet of honey to go with her Earl Grey. Lles2K15 is a regular at the corner cafe. Her phone connects to the wifi automatically. The man behind the counter understands she will stay at least four hours and he has taken to reserving the quiet table for her. Lles' hands are warm. Lles 2K15 is busy compiling notes for her thesis. The cafe is quiet but for a playlist of songs she's heard so often the music disappears into memory. 

You see? Lles 2K13 is in a darker place. Don't you remember?

So hello. I'm here. This time last year, Lles, you were more than half-way through a semester of undergraduate classes, a requirement you were secretly thrilled to fulfill. 

Every time you stepped off the jeepney and trudged up a flight of steps to the classroom, you fantasized about retracing the steps with a clipboard under one arm. Last August, your first classroom on your first day of class happened to be the room where your first graduate class met. The universe. Parallels and plotting. 

You use the tote bag Kim gave you a year ago. You use it for class everyday. The small room you've been given is a cell murky with dust and grime and you must inhabit it four times a week.

This is the latest in a long parade of mistakes.

That's not how you're supposed to feel.

You're supposed to feel excited that your plans are working, that you are part of an institution greater than yourself. You are understandably overwhelmed. It is cool in the shadow of some large, lumbering giant.

I should've written you several months ago.

Your notebook contains the phrase "take it one day at a time" repeated several times, under several dates. You feel guiltiest about this notebook. It travels with you everywhere, even when you go somewhere there is no possibility of light to write by and no scrap of time to scrape words together. You keep writing "take it one day at a time" because your vision has tunneled and the horizon has disappeared. You see nothing but the procession of days, straight and similarly clad in their uniform solidity. They are coming. You write "take it one day at a time" and account for the hours that must arrive in an orderly fashion. Number your days, marshal the hours at your disposal and be responsible.

Although I understand you will not understand the engulfing panic. You are watching this, after all, from some solitary peak.

I must be here to endure the tide.

You also write, "I want to understand this fear." Like it is some nebulous thing outside of yourself, some other alien thing that your body neither owned nor produced. The bile rises to my throat. You will write "I want to understand this fear" in the belief that knowledge will reveal your fears to be baseless. So you read Status Anxiety (Alain de Botton) and remind yourself that your actions are inconsequential in the history of all things, in the history of the universe that must be the only history we believe. There is nothing to fear, you can do nothing of consequence. There is no tragedy that engulfs the universe, there is no tragedy great enough that it must outlive those who suffer it. You also write "I want to understand this fear" because there is no other action available to you.

You are a fear-making, fear-consuming machine.