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.
No comments:
Post a Comment