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.