Long time no post. Just back here again to update you all that I've changed websites yet again. You can find my writing portfolio on this site down below.
So the time has come now that I care about looking professional and having official branding, and all that jazz. because of that, all my further writing will be posted on my new non-tumblr writing blog, ZAKVR. Click here to check it out.
I will not delete this blog but I am in the process of moving the works I like to my new blog. This excludes all of the poetry and a couple of fiction and nonfiction works. They will stay here for archival purposes, but if you like my writing, ZAKVR is where to find me now.
Thank you to everybody who has followed this blog, reblogged any of my works, or generally just supported my craft. I hope this isn’t the end of your journey as a reader of mine, but if it is, I hope you had a good time.
So the time has come now that I care about looking professional and having official branding, and all that jazz. because of that, all my further writing will be posted on my new non-tumblr writing blog, ZAKVR. Click here to check it out.
I will not delete this blog but I am in the process of moving the works I like to my new blog. This excludes all of the poetry and a couple of fiction and nonfiction works. They will stay here for archival purposes, but if you like my writing, ZAKVR is where to find me now.
Thank you to everybody who has followed this blog, reblogged any of my works, or generally just supported my craft. I hope this isn’t the end of your journey as a reader of mine, but if it is, I hope you had a good time.
Recent disasters have left countless people all over the country in need of aid, and we owe it to the people around us to help in any way we can.
The Creative Writing students and alumni of Ateneo de Manila University will be releasing our chapbooks to the public in exchange for donations to Kaya Natin! Movement. Kaya Natin! is a trusted, non-partisan, non-government organization currently raising funds for relief goods and operations in the areas most affected by Typhoons Rolly & Ulysses.
The catalog includes 3 short story collections, 1 poetry collection, 1 nonfiction collection, and 1 comic zine. For more information on the works, please browse the blurbs of each chapbook here https://tinyurl.com/ChapbookCatalog
For orders, please visit https://tinyurl.com/CWForACause and refer yourselves to the photos above to see the specific steps on how to donate. Orders will be open from November 18 to November 30.
For questions or concerns, feel free to reach out through Facebook Messenger or send an email to [email protected].
Brian David Gilbert talking about video games made me rethink how I write nonfiction | Aisha R.
In my undergraduate thesis I submitted in partial fulfillment for my bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, I wrote a critical essay dissecting my own nonfiction; my influences, my practice, and my intentions in writing for the genre. Because I was the one who wrote it, I am legally allowed to summarize it for you in one nifty statement: I realized that I write nonfiction to try know reality, to try cut it open and understand it in every way, to rid myself of confusion and lever myself to a position of power where I am the one with the key to the puzzle.
I did this with my nonfiction because it is heavily in line with my personality. I can’t rest until I solve the riddle. I can’t put something down until I’ve figured out how it works. I can’t just shrug and accept that I’ll never know, because I have to know—I need to know. I wrote my thesis and dissected my own writing the same way I used it to investigate the world around me, but this piece isn’t about my thesis—It’s about a piece of media I watched when I was trying to destress from my thesis.
I opened a new tab. I typed in YouTube dot com. I looked at my video recommendations, saw a video of some funky white dude talking about video games, and clicked through.
That funky white dude was Brian David Gilbert and the video series, Polygon’s Unraveled, made me rethink just how I then used nonfiction, how people tend to look at literature, and how I now want to write in the future.
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Polygon is an American video game website owned by Vox Media. They create a wide array of content, ranging from articles to reviews to—what I’ll be focusing on here—videos. Polygon’s YouTube channel churns out many interesting and entertaining videos that go from “definitely about video games” to “vaguely video game adjacent performance art.”
Their range, in topics and execution of those topics, is quite honestly phenomenal. There’s a video where Pat Gill talks about how the monsters from Bloodborne follow the same design principles as the Muppets, a video where Clayton Ashley dissects how video games make organizing stuff fun, there’s a video where Jenna Stoeber constructs an entire new timeline where Digimon won over Pokemon. The video team at Polygon is always putting out inventive videos that enhance the source material into something new that everybody can enjoy.
I enjoy all of Polygon’s video content, but I’m here to talk about one video series in particular: Unraveled.
Unraveled is a video series where Brian David Gilbert, aforementioned funky white dude, talks about video games in ways that almost always lead to his sanity being crushed into a fine dust come the end of his video. On Brian David Gilbert’s website, he describes Unraveled as “a video series I make for Polygon that serves as a cautionary tale against taking video game lore and logic too seriously,” and cautionary tales many of the videos are. In every Unraveled, he goes on a mission to categorize, rank, test, or uncover the hidden meaning within a specific video game media and he always goes astoundingly bonkers doing it.
To make this clearer, let me tell you what happens in the first Unraveled video: “Solving the Zelda Timeline in 15 Minutes.”
In this video, Brian David Gilbert—hereafter referred to as his internet alias acronym, BDG— dressed in a full three piece suit, embarks on a mission to piece together every single scrap of Zelda media into something resembling a coherent timeline. He pins titles of Zelda games to the wall as he slowly becomes more manic, as the lights begin to tint red, as he loses layers of the suit like a crazed mad scientist delivering his final lecture. By the end of the video, he has created a three pronged timeline that converges into one via the use of Zelda Monopoly, of all things. BDG looks into the camera, out of breath and disheveled, and says “Don’t ask me to do this again.”
Spoiler: they ask him to do it again. Two years and 26 episodes of Unraveled later, this video series is one of Polygon’s most popular creations.
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Michel de Montaigne—a French philosopher who popularized the essay as a genre of literature—was the first person to describe the essay as a form as something that calls back to the French etymology of the word. Essay comes from essayer, which means “to try” or “to attempt”. Montaigne described the essay as an attempt to put his thinking and his process of which into a piece. It just so happened that what I “attempted” to do with every essay of mine was to try and make sense of something, specifically reality itself.
This essayistic process centered around the “attempt” is what Brian David Gilbert is doing in Unraveled as well.
Bear with me.
How Unraveled unravels is something that strikes me as essayistic. In every episode, BDG attempts to analyse something and in doing so presents his thought process in the video for our enjoyment. He made sense of Castlevania’s extensive bestiary by ranking them based on hotness. He made sense of Mortal Kombat characters by categorizing them based on what kind of cuddler they’d be. He made sense of the ridiculous amount of Fire Emblem characters by using a form of Italian theatre, the Commedia dell'arte. BDG takes a video game, and finds a system to pin it to, a system that will make the chaos make sense.
But does everything have to make sense?
One thing that had always miffed me my entire life was people reading literature and coming out of it with the first questions on their minds being “what did that mean?”, “what was the message?”, or, god forbid, “what was the moral of the story?”
It felt cheap, for one thing, to see people go through well crafted literature and have their immediate desire be the supposed “answer” that "unlocks" the entire work. Literature is more than a puzzle to be solved, it is something to be experienced, to be enjoyed, to be immersed in. Billy Collins’ “Introduction to Poetry” lays out the issue pretty well:
“I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.”
Our obsession with meaning, solution, and answers makes us blind to what we can enjoy along the way, but this obsession exists for a reason. Having the meaning of a text puts us in a position of power. It places us in front of something we want to understand, the object of our curiosity tied to a chair with rope while we dissect it. Knowledge is power, and it’s no surprise that many people want to have power over literature; it’s dense, it’s pretentious, it’s scary. All of that is intimidating, so we work to try and put literature below us by solving it.
Seeing people do this annoyed me, but isn’t this what I was doing with reality as well? Is this not what I do with my essays, using nonfiction as a way to put reality below me by uncovering what reality means?
A double standard. Why is my search for meaning valid, but others’ search for meaning is not?
The answer—no, maybe not answer, maybe possibility is the better word—I found in Unraveled.
BDG dissects video game lore and media and tries to make sense of it, but as BDG describes, the entire show is a cautionary tale. In every Unraveled, BDG either completely loses his sanity trying to make things make sense or he has to devise a system that is unorthodox and kooky for things to work out. If it’s the former, the cautionary tale is complete; trying to make sense of everything will result in one’s downfall. If it’s the latter, the message is more nuanced; one can try to make sense of things, but sometimes that “sense” is so elusive that one has to go on a hell of a journey to get there. In both cases, meaning is sought, but not necessarily acquired in a straightforward or linear way. BDG searches for meaning and fails, or BDG searches for meaning and learns that, maybe, meaning isn’t always the thing we should actually be looking for.
The Unraveled episode investigating Kirby’s existence illustrates this point most clearly.
In this episode, BDG tries and fails multiple times to try to make sense of how Kirby is simultaneously “everything” and “nothing”. He tries to make Kirby a metaphor for capitalism, a metaphor for nature, before realizing time and time again that his explanations do not make any sense.
Towards the end of the video, BDG stands at a beach, disheveled and tired, looking out into the horizon. He says:
“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things to mean something, but Kirby didn't need an explanation. I did. There is no bullet point or fan wiki entry. Kirby is not nature or a metaphor. Kirby doesn’t need a dark backstory or a logical rationale. Kirby is just Kirby. As I stand here watching the waves lap against the sand, miles away from civilization, I realize I'm not simply standing on the edge of the ocean, but the edge of the world. A world I've accepted without knowing its hidden meaning. Perhaps there is no hidden meaning. Perhaps it's better that way. Perhaps it's time for me to go home.”
The desire for an answer is not indicative of all the things in the world having one; it’s merely indicative of the human desire for it—the desire for the power inherent in knowledge. While we’re not wrong for having that desire, we must also understand that we cannot begrudge the world for not having an answer. If we continue to treat everything in the world as a puzzle that needs to be solved, we will see the lack of a solution as a failure. This is not the case. It can’t be. I can’t speak for everybody, but I cannot let it be.
Unraveled made me realize that my tendency to use the essay as a means of knowing is not wrong, but at the same time that it is unsustainable in the long run. I will encounter topics I will not be able to make sense of. This is nobody’s fault, not mine, not reality’s. It’s just how things are in this complicated world of ours. I want to write in a way that makes space for these complex topics, a way that doesn’t see the lack of a solution, a key, an answer, as a bad thing.
Perhaps there’s an answer, and it’s okay to look for it. But perhaps it’s enough to stand at the beach, to watch the waves come ashore, to look at the horizon and accept it in the way it is.
Hello!! I was just wondering if you took down some of your work? I can't load any posts past the chrysalis comic, which kinda sucks cause I was trying to find one of your works similar to "Kids These Days". I think it was called "The failed deliverance..." (I'm sorry I can't remember the rest of the title.) It's fine if you did take it down, but can I please have the link to it if you didn't? Thank you very much!
Hello! Yes, I did delete some of my works, Failed Deliverances of Forbidden Girls included, because this blog acts as my online writing portfolio and I wasn't satisfied with how I wrote that piece. Sorry for taking it down!
His owner had taken him the moment the sun shone over the horizon, streaming into his coop in bars of light. The tie around his ankle had been gently unwound, rousing Domeng from the last fits of sleep and his dreams of victory. Vague images of blood and ripped feathers and raucous applause follow him as his owner lifts him from his coop, walking with Domeng tucked safely in his arms.
The streets of Tondo pass like that. Shrouded in the last vestiges of certainty on their way to both of their turning points.
The arena is deserted when they get there. His owner takes him out back to the cages. A stand of cages with rows stacked one on top of the other. Domeng is placed in the last one. His owner gives him one last stroke over his back, shuts the door of the cage, and leaves.
Domeng doesn’t know how time passes after that. The energy inside of him blurs what would have been regular hours into swatches of moments. Owners stream in and, one by one, the cages fill up. The other roosters are as restless as he is but they don’t have it in themselves to drown in it. Instead, they pace the small expanse of their cages. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn, three steps—repeat. With nothing else to do, he follows. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn, three steps—the talon of his left leg scrapes against the rotting wood of his cell, it sends a shiver down his spine, his feathers standing on end—turn. A cacophony of manic, feverish, constant scratching, over, and over, and over, and—
“Domeng,” says Manuel from the next cage. Domeng hadn’t noticed he’d been put there. When did that happen? “Will you please stop that?”
“Stop what?” Three steps, turn, three steps, turn, three steps—
“Your pacing is giving me a headache,” Manuel grumbles, voice like dry dirt and rusted metal.
Manuel always spoke like that. Manuel’s owner and Domeng’s knew each other, and often times when one would go speak to the other, they’d get tied to the same post outside in the sun. Domeng had been poised for a fight, because that was what they did, but Manuel hadn’t even gotten up, only cracking an eye to look at the young bird whose hackles were rising for no reason other than the belief that that was had to be done. Manuel always told him that he was too old and tired to attack him out of nowhere. Domeng always just thought he was too kind, but Manuel always hated hearing that.
“Everybody else is pacing too,” Domeng stops so can turn to Manuel. Out of their entire row of cages, only he sits still. His feathers are unkempt and ragged from age. Down his chest, a scar causes a rift in his plumage. “You aren’t telling them to stop, are you?”
“They won’t listen to me. You, on the other hand, did.”
“Ah,” Domeng looks down at his feet and how he’s stilled. “You have a point.”
Past the frantic scratching of wood, Domeng can hear it. The footfalls of men filling the arena. He can’t see any of them past the other row of cages opposite them, past the wall the keeps the back away from the stands, but he doesn’t have to see it. Their sounds, those sounds only humans can make, confusing warbles and roundabout grunts, crowd the air around them.
The cages seem even smaller.
“You’re fighting today, yes?” Domeng says, backing away from the door of the cage, to distance himself from the noise.
“I’m here aren’t I?”
Manuel looks so calm, just sitting there. He wears tranquility like he was born with it, like he grew in it, like he’s done with it. Domeng tries to copy him, sitting down, ignoring how his feet twitch with the need to run. Through the wood separating their cages, Domeng can feel the rough edges of Manuel’s feathers.
“Are you excited?” Domeng asks him.
“You’re a fool if you are, Domeng.” Manuel sighs, as if talking to a child. A wave of indignance surges in Domeng, unbidden and brave. “This isn’t something to be excited about. I’d have thought by this point, you’d know this.”
“It’s nothing against you, you know. This is my first fight. You can’t blame me for being excited,” he says, trying to sound dignified. If Manuel’s scoff is anything to go by, Domeng must have done a bad job. “It’s all I was born for.”
“And it’s all you’ll die for,” drawls Manuel. Sometimes, when Manuel talks, Domeng can’t help but think he sounds like a person, what with how people always sound so tired all the time.
“I won’t die. Not if I win.”
“If you win.”
Domeng puffs his feathers up. “When I win.”
“You’re impossible,”
“You’re old.”
This shocks a laugh out of Manuel. Domeng can feel it rumble the cage, but the sound is all wrong. Too many jagged edges. “I suppose you’re right.”
From the arena, a voice pipes up from the mass mumbling. A few seconds pass of this one person yelling before it’s followed by cheers. A man comes into the back room and wrenches two cages open. For the first time today, the roosters go silent, their pacing cowered into trembling stillness.
The man unceremoniously grabs a rooster in each hand and walks out.
Domeng knows what happens in a fight. Two roosters enter, only one leaves. He knows that Manuel has survived every fight he’s ever had. He might not have gotten out completely unscathed, but his scars are a sign of his victor, Domeng thinks. A sign of strength. He knows these things, but it doesn’t prepare him for the sound of it all.
There are cheers, cheers so loud Domeng can’t hear anything but the vicious exclamations of men. Past this wall of noise, the fight is still strong enough to seep through. Quietly first. A rustle of feathers. A spray of dirt. A panicked cluck. Then, a flash of a second, and like a knife stabbed into the air, and there is a pained, anguished squawk.
And then: cheering.
The man walks back into the room, placing one rooster back in its cage while the below it lays empty. Two more doors are wrenched open.
“Do you have any advice? For what to do?” Domeng asks, desperate to distract himself from sharp edge of sounds surrounding him.
“Stay alive,” says Manuel simply.
“I was hoping for something more specific.” Domeng huffs. Another fight just ended, this one much faster than the last. Must have been a strong one pit against another who probably hadn’t grown all his primaries yet. It must have been that. “You’ve won so many, after all. You must have some tips.”
One rooster is returned. Two more cages are opened. Domeng turns and sees Manuel’s eyes trained on the ceiling. The wood is rickety and full of gaps like punched out teeth. Through the cracks, there is light. “I didn’t win. My opponent just lost. There’s a difference.”
“You make things so complicated,” Domeng stands, frustrated. Manuel does not stir. He just looks up at Domeng with an expression Domeng can’t place. “Do you have any advice on making the opponent lose?”
Manuel doesn’t answer for a moment, and all Domeng has company for is the racket of the next fight. Longer this time. Must have tired each other out. Helpless, Domeng begins to pace again. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn, three steps—
“Stay fast on your feet. Never stay still,” says Manuel, surprising Domeng. The man comes back. One victor. Two more fighters chosen from the lot. “Protect your eyes. A talon to the eye and you’ll be so blinded by the pain you won’t be able to see out of the other one.” Manuel doesn’t talk like a victor. He talks like Domeng’s owner after days of tireless work. “Protect your throat. What butchers do, we can do just as well. You’ll bleed out in seconds, and you won’t even die quickly. You’ll lie there in the dirt while the life drips out of you until the God those men are so afraid of finally lets you die.” Manuel’s words drip like Domeng assumes blood must. “Protect your chest. Some of them will try to rip your heart out. Some succeed. Some don’t. But you’ll never be able to forget it. You won’t be allowed to.”
Around them, the cages get emptier and emptier.
“Protect your name,” says Manuel. “Stand tall. Don’t let them see you’re afraid.”
Domeng can’t hear the arena anymore. It’s still as loud as it was, but it’s muted. The severity of Manuel’s words lay heavy on Domeng’s back.
“You know, I have a lot riding on this fight,” Domeng says because ‘thank you’ doesn’t seem like the right thing to say. “My owner, you know, he really took care of me. Carried me around everywhere, fed me, made sure I was strong. His life is hard, apparently, so this wasn’t easy, and I’m his ticket to make things better.” Manuel is looking at him again, and Domeng can see now that he’s getting looked at the same as the light from the ceiling. What that means, he still can’t puzzle out. “I don’t really understand it, but I know he worked hard for me. And I worked really hard for him too.”
“I don’t doubt it,” says Manuel, and this time, his voice sounds like grass. Gentle.
“We both put a lot into this, and it will pay off. If I stay focused and brave, I’m going to win.”
For a second, Manuel looks like he wants to argue in the way he always does. But he backs down. Maybe he understood what Domeng was trying to say. In Domeng’s mind, things were simple. In Manuel’s, he assumed things weren’t.
“I hope you win,” says Manuel.
Domeng clucks out a surprised laugh. “I thought you said there was no winning?”
“Well,” Manuel stands up. Domeng looks around and realizes the all cages are nearly empty or housing an exhausted rooster. The only ones who haven’t fought yet are himself, Manuel, and two other roosters. A man comes into the room. Manuel turns to Domeng, looks him straight in the eye. “Maybe it’d be nice to get proven wrong.”
The man flings Manuel’s cage door open and grabs him. With his other hand, he does the same with the rooster in the lower cage.
“Manuel!” Domeng calls out as the man walks away. Manuel lifts his head from the crook of the man’s arm. “Good luck.”
Manuel is too far to say anything, but he nods once.
And then he’s gone.
With nothing else to do, nobody to tell him off, Domeng begins to pace again. He doesn’t want to hear the arena. He focuses on the sound of his talons against the wood. He focuses on the light streaming through the ceiling. He focuses on anything but the fact that his heart is hammering. This fight is long. Longer than all the rest. Wood. Talons. Small cage. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn, three steps—
The man comes back. He places the victor back in his cage.
Manuel is nowhere to be seen.
Domeng wishes he had time to grieve, wishes he had time to entertain the cold, overwhelming chill that had begun to grow in his gut, but he can barely even blink before his cage door is opened. The man takes the other rooster, Domeng’s opponent, in his other hand. Domeng meets eyes with his opponent, and he sees nothing. He sees nothing there but a terrified blankness, and inside his own chest, rattling along with the sharp pain of Manuel’s loss, he found his own fear scratching against his heart.
The man takes them out of the room and into a small hall. Domeng is handed to another man, and they split ways, going to the other end of the arena. This man’s hands are rough, grip strong on Domeng’s body, nothing like the near adoring way his owner held him. His fingers hold onto Domeng’s legs, as if he were going to escape. He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. He was born for this.
There, the entrance to the arena.
The man takes three steps and—
The pain is like fire shooting up Domeng’s body. It’s like a nail being plunged into his body. The man’s hand around Domeng’s left ankle is heavy, but Domeng can’t even properly register it past the throbbing agony.
He barely has time to blink before he’s flung into the arena.
Around him, the stands of people begin to cheer. Their leery eyes look down on him. Their terrible little sounds. His opponent is pacing side to side, three steps, turn, and this isn’t fair. He worked so hard.
Domeng is ruined, he will be ruined, and he stands on his ruined leg, raises his head, and looks ahead. Protect your eyes. Protect your chest. Protect your name.
Five days before Miles Santos dies, the sink in his bathroom breaks.
It started with a trickle of water dripping from the pipes underneath before growing into a spurting torrent that soaks his knees. This is what he gets, he muses, for not switching to water replication plumbing. He goes through his things looking for anything to fix it, but his condo is a crowded mess of wires and screens. Miles manages to find a roll of duct tape tangled within an extension cord.
With shaking hands, testaments to the sleepless nights of the past week, he wraps the leaking pipe with tape. Outside, his tablet continues playing the video he left it on. The voices drift into the room quietly, bouncing off the porcelain. Soft, pattering sounds of disaster.
“—the eye of typhoon Tomas was located, based on all available data, at 2,635 kilometers east of Southern Luzon. This is still outside of the Philippine Area of Responsibility. It has maximum sustained winds of 130 kilometers per hour and a gustiness of up to 160 kilometers per hour. It is moving west at 30 kilometers per hour. This typhoon is expected to enter PAR by Saturday—”
Water slips past his fingers and soaks his arms. It splashes against his face, sharp and cold. Miles coils tape around the pipe over and over, choking the water back in the place until finally, the pipes yield.
“—when we say super typhoon, it has to sustain a wind speed greater than 220 kilometers per hour. Typhoon Tomas is not a super typhoon, but it still has a long way to go above water before it reaches landfall and thus has the potential to, ah, acquire more strength.”
“So it’s possible for typhoon Tomas to become a super typhoon.”
“There is a possibility—”
Miles’ hands are soaked. His shirt is damp. His bathroom floor is a glorified puddle and he’s kneeling in it, an attempt for absolution. It’s a flimsy attempt at best, he thinks. He will never be clean again.
He stands up from the mess he’s made, sits down at one of his monitors. Still cold and rapidly becoming colder, he types and creates a monster.
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Is it done?
yes
am i good now
No, you still have to install it.
We’ll also need a physical copy on a hard drive.
A team will come by next week to confiscate all your equipment.
It will all be compensated for, so you don’t have to worry.
okay
when will the payment come through
After we have the system and after you install it.
you’re sure
Yes.
I’ll text you again with details for the drop.
Stay updated.
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Three days before Miles Santos dies, the traffic on slows to an unbearable crawl right on the bridge of Marcos Highway. Trapped from every angle, at mercy to the sheer power of unmoving vehicles, Miles has no choice but to see the river. He could keep his gaze straight, focus on every detail of the truck in front of him, but the river would snake its way into view. From his periphery into his mind, the river is there, demanding attention, until he can’t help but turn to look at it.
Already, the water is higher than usual. The surface ripples with turbulence as it rushes forth, crashing against the concrete bed that slopes down from the riverbanks. There was a time when those banks were nothing but the same earth and silt it had always been, but Miles couldn’t remember it. He was born only after they started constructing the improved channel. He grew up climbing over chain link fence with his friends, a flattened cardboard box in hand. On summer days, the river was docile. Dry. Just a trickle of water in a ditch too large. Miles and his friends would sit on the edge of the concrete slope, cardboard safely under him, and push off the edge, sliding down to the sound of laughter and a barangay tanod yelling at them to get the fuck outta here, stupid goddamn kids.
The pillars shake Miles out from his memory. On the edge of the concrete slopes, tall, grey magnetic pillars stuck out every few meters. Unactivated, they stood silently. Watchtowers over a vicious beast.
There is a barrage of beeping from behind him. Miles scrambles to step on the gas and drive forward.
The truck in front of him stops. Miles brakes. Alone in his car, he feels he can’t breathe. The river is there. A chill wells up deep in his stomach, branching out to his body. A restless energy.
Miles drums his fingers on the wheel and slowly, as the cars inch forward, rain begins to fall.
It’s hours before he gets to his mother’s house. The drive seemed like it wanted to drain the entire day away before he could live it. The house, fittingly enough, was gray and drab. The plants in the garden were alive, but slumped in lacking care. The paint of the gate was peeling, showing off the hard metal underneath. His mother’s house looks like as if all the days had drained away years ago.
His mother is much the same.
The mother he grew up with was sharp and nagging. Always scolding him for every mess and mistake, pushing him to be better, yet never showing him anything more than an absent nod for his achievements, too busy with cooking for the small carinderia she ran on her own. Now, too old to work, she sat in a house Miles got for her the moment he had enough money to, out and away from Tumana and into the quieter neighborhoods of Antipolo. Her edge had been weathered down by time into something weaker, but no less biting. Her memory was fuzzy at the edges, always calling Miles by the wrong name, or forgetting the date today, or forgetting that she had forgotten in the first place.
Miles came over every other week to have lunch with her, whether she liked it or not. Today’s lunch had passed in the same old questions followed by the same old silences.
He helps his mother from the dining table back to the living room. She reclines in her rocking chair, and massages her temple. “Matt---”
“Miles,” he reminds her.
“Miles, habang nandito ka pa, ayusin mo nga yung TV,” she says. “Ang choppy ng signal ‘tas ang hina pa nga ng volume, wala na akong marinig.”
“Ma, computer science yung alam ko, hindi engineering.”
She scoffs. “Sana nag-doktor ka na lang.”
Miles doesn’t say anything. He simply stands to fix the TV if only to escape another endless circle of conversation.
He switches the TV on and watches the glitching static distort the face of a variety show host. The host’s grating laughter distorts through the speakers, an awful, terrible sound. As he unplugs and plugs different wires with barely trembling hands, the noise flits in and out. Miles manages to get the volume up higher again, like his mother wants it, and his own voice finds its own sound.
“Ma, medyo busy ako for the next few weeks, ha.” With a hard thwack to the back of the TV, the screen phases into clarity. He looks at it instead of his mother, continuing. “I won’t be able to come by for a while, but, uh, I got a really big bonus at work, and I’ll forward the money to you, okay?”
“Ha?” His mother says, squinting past him to look towards the TV. “Anong sabi mo?”
“Wala,” Miles shakes his head. “Wala, ma.”
-
11pm
MRMC Station 3, Tumana.
Don’t be late.
-
On the day Miles Santos dies, he goes back to where he used to live. He parks nearby, and walks through the rest. It was a part of the slums that had been demolished to make way for the large, hulking powerline that fed into the electric pillars of the river. Where once there was a cluster fragile houses Miles would once run and duck through, there was now just flat rubble and the metal reinforced wires trailing through, out and away.
There are a few kids kicking a ball around, scuffing dirt and laughing. One of them kicks the ball too far, rolling towards Miles’ feet, and Miles forces a smile as he bends down to toss it back to them. He tries to forget he ever saw them, but when you see one person, the rest keep coming in. A fruit vendor passes, pushing his rickety cart filled with cool pineapple. Women with streaks in their hair snickering and gossiping. A stray dog following at the heels of a young girl.
Miles used to live here, and the ache of seeing the place again after working so hard to leave it thrums through every inch of his body.
All he wanted was better.
And look where that got him.
He arrives at the drop location hours early. In his car with his silence, he sits and watches the rain engulf him.
To his left, he can see the crowded Tumana slums barely illuminated by the dusk. It was home once, when he was smaller. Houses here were small and grimy and flimsy ribcages people would live in. The streets and pathways would get narrower and narrower the deeper you went ,the ground a perpetual a slog of sticky earth and discarded garbage. The canals that ran through the barangay were as sleek and high tech as the main river, with smaller but no less advanced magnetic pillars, but all the innovation had stopped there. The ribcage houses were finally safe from the river, but weren’t safe from everything else.
To his right, the river slithers into his periphery, demanding attention. Next to one of the pillars sticking out of the concrete banks, there is a small building, STATION 3 emblazoned on the side in block letters, punctuated by frantic sprays of vandalism. The station was just one of many dotted along the length of the river. Manual control systems for the improved channels. Nobody’s used them in years.
Dusk bleeds into night. One by one, windows of the slums light up. Old school fluorescent lights mixing with the newer EMLED lights.
Miles hears it before he sees it. The undeniable thrum of energy. Miles swears he feels the earth shift when. It does, in a sense. The magnetic pillars were a revolutionary piece of technology, but it took energy to power. More energy than can be taken without a price.
The grey pillars light up, a soft, illuminated blue streaking across the center of each one. The top of the pillar beams out an arch of light connecting to another pillar on the opposite bank. Like dominoes, all the pillars buzz to life, creating an endless, unbreachable tunnel of energy. Rain that falls onto the magnetic field slides off, slipping into canals at the side that filter back into the river. Every canal and ditch is encased in a magnetic tunnel, pulsing through the roads, veins and arteries of rainwater filtering into the river. All the rain coming from the mountains, from the city gutters, from the sky mercilessly pounding rain into the earth.
The Tumana slums tremble into darkness, all the power sucked into the cages keeping the water captive.
Miles doesn’t do anything but breathe. The restless energy is gone, replaced instead by a deep, stinging chill that constantly scraping at the walls of who he is. He sits there, unmoving, and lets the rain and the night pass him by.
He watches the magnetic field. Hours pass. The water rises. Rises. Rises past the riverbank, the magnetic field the only thing holding the water back from overflowing and drowning the slums just meters away.
Up ahead on the road, a nondescript red car parks in front of him, the headlights still on, shining directly into Miles’ eyes. The lights blink at him. Get in. He grabs an umbrella from the backseat and exits the safety of his car, brisk walks through the torrential downpour, hurriedly opens the door of the other car, and clambers into the passenger seat.
Four is sitting behind the wheel, phone in hand, idly swiping. He looks just about as pristine as Miles knew his own self was the opposite. Four looks up, eyes scanning over Miles’ soaked frame, bored and amused at the same time
“You really had to bring all the water with you, no?” Four asks, looking at Miles with that unimpressed gaze he always has.
“There’s a super typhoon,” Miles grits his teeth. “In case you haven’t noticed.”
“Touchy. I’m just joking,” he rolls his eyes then holds a hand out. “Physical copy?”
Miles digs a small plastic ziplock bag from his pocket. Inside, a small USB stick. He hands it over to Four who doesn’t even spare it a glance, stowing it in a side compartment without looking up from his phone.
“No other copies exist?”
“None.”
“Alright then, we’re nearly done,” Four says, tapping on his phone. “I’ve queued the payment transfer to go through once news sites start blasting the breaking news headlines. You get back into your car and follow me out and—”
“I’m not going.”
Four’s typing stops. He looks up and meets Miles’ gaze. Miles can’t find any shock in Four’s eyes. If anything, the only thing that’s there is a twinkle of intrigue.
“You’re not?”
“I’m—” Miles tries to find his words, all feeling awkward and clunky. “I’m staying here. I’ll deploy the program here.”
There’s a beat of silence. The rain outside is coming down so strong, the noise blurs into a static. Everything and nothing. A held breath.
“Hm,” Four looks back to his phone. “That explains the payment thing. I wondered why the account wasn’t yours. Whose is it?”
“None of your business.”
Four actually laughs, and Miles thinks it looks like a snarl. “I guess you’re right. Do me a favor and wait til I’m out of the danger zone before you run the program, will you? The payment expires if any of my programs detect a sign of an untimely death.” Four swipes his finger across his phone and Miles hears his own phone ping. “This car’s details,” Four explains. “Watch over me while I drive.”
“Can I go now?” Miles says. He wants to get out of this car. He wants to never see Four again. He wants to never have met him in the first place.
“Sure,” Four smiles. A sneer trying to look kind. “This is good work you’re doing here. Remember that. Pleasure doing business with you, Santos.”
Miles gets out of the door and slams the door shut. Under his umbrella, he watches Four back the car up, turn, and drive away.
He pulls out his phone and taps on Four’s car details. Miles watches his GPS show Four’s car drive further and further away. His trip is made short and smooth by clear roads. Too late and too rainy for anybody to drive out. People are in their homes, sleeping soundly.
When Four passes the threshold into Quezon City, Miles closes his eyes. When he opens them, he can feel every drop of water on his skin like a knife pressing into him. In his hand, his phone feels like a grenade.
He opens his program. The pin is pulled.
Miles had created a lockpick. A universal lockpick. A program that could adapt to any system and open any doors. Untraceable, quick, and efficient. Creating the program was a long and delicate science of knowing where to make it prod and where to make it push. A balance between toeing the line and destroying it. He understands more than anybody the meaning of a breaking point and what happens when that point is pressed.
It’s child’s play now. He runs his program remotely from his phone into the servers of the Station 3. From there, he watches it frolick along tens of security measures and failsafes. He watches it weave past all of them. He watches it mangle the system to pieces.
Miles can’t watch it finish, his shaking hands dropping his phone into the muddy ground. Even if the water shorted his phone out, it was too late. His body wasn’t cold anymore. His body was an absence of everything. He’d been hollowed out and then deleted. It was over.
Miles doesn’t look up from his phone. He doesn’t have to. Through the reflection on his screen, he sees the lights of Marikina City come alive. The streetlamps, the homes, the stores. Power surges through all the lines, unbidden, rattling appliances awake, blowing out too-old lightbulbs, taking every home hostage. The night glimmers out of the darkness in chunks until the city is thrumming with electricity.
Behind him, the magnetic field flickers. Once, twice—
So I won a Loyola School Arts Award for Creative Writing: Nonfiction last May. Instead of having an awarding ceremony, us awardees decided to put together a chapbook of our works.
My work, To Keep Safe, an essay about taxidermy and longing, can be read on page 66. This essay is not posted on this blog, so check out the chapbook here at http://tinyurl.com/LSAA2020.
This chapbook is available to read FOR FREE. However, we are accepting donations for we have partnered with Tahanan Sta. Maria, to which all donations will be going to.
So I just won a Loyola School Arts Award in Creative Writing for my work in writing nonfiction!
Let me briefly set aside the professionalism I try very hard to maintain on this blog to say OH MY GOD OH MY GOD YES YES YES!!!!
Thank you Ateneo de Manila University. Thank you ADMU Fine Arts Department. Thank you everybody who has ever taught me. Thank you everybody who has ever read my work. This means so much to me (really. I care more about this award than my actual diploma).
Tagpuan, an online chapbook fundraiser | notes from the autopsy by aisha rallonza | now available for online purchase!
what is this
“Every year, CW graduates compile their works and sell them as chapbooks--a culmination of their endeavors as writers. In the time of social distancing and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Creative Writing seniors of the Ateneo de Manila University are launching their chapbooks online to raise funds in support of the Lumad students in Manila.
We’ve entitled this project “Tagpuan,” which serves as a meeting place or intersection of art and literature in the digital space. All proceeds from the chapbooks sales will be donated to the Bakwit School in Metro Manila, who are feeding around 100 displaced Lumad youth. The proceeds will also be used to replenish their medical supplies in order to remain safe during the time of the pandemic.
We’re reaching out to help the Lumad Bakwit School as one of the many communities affected by the Enhanced Community Quarantine in Luzon. We humbly ask for your support in the endeavor.
You may contact: Teacher Elsa - 09090128952 for donations in kind (food, medicine, and other essential goods).
Credits to Juancho Luna for poster design ”
View the full list of available chapbooks here.
contents of “notes from the autopsy” by aisha rallonza
A cemetery of the rich and a cemetery of the poor, the act of peeling the skin off of a dead animal, the relationship of mother and child put under the lens of aging, the experience of wanting to throw one's self off a building. How does death shape life? This collection slices open the body of mortality, peers into it, and attempts to make answers from the viscera.
This chapbook contains four essays: Resting Places, To Keep Safe, Growing Pains, and Are You Telling The Truth? essays that have previously been posted on this blog have been expanded or revised. The approximate wordcount of this chapbook is 19k words.
beneficiaries
All proceeds from the chapbooks sales will be donated to the Bakwit School in Metro Manila, who are feeding around 100 displaced Lumad youth. The proceeds will also be used to replenish their medical supplies in order to remain safe during the time of the pandemic.
how to purchase
1) local buyers (those within the PH) / those purchasing using BDO of GCash (able to purchase any chapbook)
2) international buyers / those purchasing using PayPal or other means (”notes from the autopsy” only)
click here to purchase the chapbook on Gumroad. price minimum is set at $2. donations above the chapbook price are very much appreciated. chapbook will be available for you to download immediately after purchase.
It was the year Lolo died. He was from the north up in Nueva Ecija with his ten siblings now all dropping one by one (yellowing pictures and market flies and peeling paint on street signs). We drove there for three hours to fetch an old ironing board he had built himself and then we drove three hours back. I was sitting in the backseat next to clumsy mangled wood trying to fight off car sickness to read something about Hegel. You’ll have to forgive me, I don’t know much about Hegel and what I do know, I don’t agree with, so I’ll have to paraphrase, bias and all. It was something about speculation. About how statements weren’t facts so much as a space to float and meet and touch each other. I wasn’t a fan of this kind of uncertainty. One hundred kilometers per hour and the fields blur into an endless expanse of things passed by (lost names and short lives and wondering what it used to mean). A slow-fast procession of in-between cities lit by the sky beginning to burn away, the softest kinds of orange, gentle in its accusations of how you take, how you leave, how you never come back. The world equated itself in layers. I stare out the window and the straight lines carved into earth and wonder that this must mean something, it has to, I could hear it. Air conditioner rattles, engine snarls, the radio that kept lapsing into static. It was a ravishing discomfort but in the archaic sense; to be seized by force. Discomfort wrought not by the highway stabbing through me, but simply passing through. Definition is getting from one place to another, from what it is to what it means (and it means “gone now” and “swat away the carcasses” and “how will we get home now?”) Perhaps if we took a winding road, I’d be more open to the dance of maybes and whatifs, but that day, we took the highway. There’s only one way to go from there, to Manila from Cabanatuan.
The Drive from Cabanatuan (after Anne Carson’s “Merry Christmas from Hegel”) | Aisha R.
Woah! I just finished reading your most recent piece about telling lies, and I’m again blown away by your writing. The gritty honesty and the way you connect the pieces of your life and thoughts so fluidly is amazing. When you described grasping the stranger similiar to how you described grabbing the fire extinguisher, it wrapped up the story perfectly. I also like how you use questions to illustrate difficult thoughts. You’re an amazing writer and I hope you know that you deserve good things!
Oh, I am so glad you liked it! I’m actually pretty surprised by the things you bring up because those were specifically things I had a hard time with in the essay. I struggle a lot in finding connections and making those connections flow, so I’m glad it came off as fluid. That last bit of the essay with the “grasping” is the part of the essay I had the hardest time articulating. I’m also happy you liked the questions because they’re...exactly that. Questions I still have. I would originally be frustrated when I don’t arrive at a clear answer, but the attempt to answer something is still has value, I’m starting to think.
In sixth grade, I accidentally stole a fire extinguisher. It was lunch time. I was in school. I found myself loitering on the second floor hallway, right outside the library, where I was headed, when I found myself enraptured. Right ahead of me, there was a panel in the wall. Inside the panel was a fire extinguisher. It was a panel that was usually covered by glass, but on that day, the glass was gone, leaving the fire extinguisher out in the open. At this point in my life, I was incredibly interested in fire extinguishers. I was going through a phase of picking random objects and reading about them extensively, from neon lights to lithium ion batteries to alligator snapping turtles. On that week, it was fire extinguishers, and the one in the panel was too great a temptation to resist.
I walked forward. Nobody was in the hallway. I stood in front of the panel. There were no other footsteps. I reached out, picked up the fire extinguisher, and felt the kind of inexorable glee only an eleven year old could feel upon holding the thing I had been reading about for days. I held the fire extinguisher in my hands, feeling the cold metal against my palms. That moment was one suspended in childlike awe.
The spell was broken when I heard somebody yell my name, “Ms. Rallonza!”
There was nobody in the hallway, but I had neglected to remember that this second floor hallway was directly across from another building filled with classrooms and ongoing classes. In one of those classrooms, an entire class and my old science teacher were watching me. My fight or flight instincts kicked in, and since there was nobody to fight, I ran. With the fire extinguisher still in my hands.
This is a story I tell a lot of people. Sometimes, I include the epilogue where I have to return the fire extinguisher and apologize to my teacher, but at its core, it’s a silly story. It’s the perfect mix of my impulsivity, my tendency to fixate on random objects, and my knack of shutting down reasonable thinking in a crisis. All of these elements crashed into an anecdote ridiculous enough to keep telling but mundane enough to not really matter. Initial embarrassment aside, it was the perfect story. Or it would have been, if the story were actually true.
Most parts of it were true. The setting, the fascination with fire extinguishers, the not-there glass panel, the getting yelled at. That’s around 99%. The only lie was the bit where I picked the fire extinguisher up and ran away with it. In reality, I walked over to the panel, reached for the fire extinguisher, got yelled at, and then ran away. That’s all. From one version to the other, I always thought it barely made a difference. This version certainly was more interesting, and in the grand scheme of things, it was just one wrong detail in an otherwise correct telling of events. It didn’t matter, so I told the story again, and again, and again. I had told it so many times with that wrong detail that I often forget it didn’t really happen, that I myself can sometimes remember the weight of the fire extinguisher in my hands as if it did.
My habit of lying started early, when I was a kid. From then on, I grew up getting called out for those lies. Nanay always told me I was a terrible liar. No matter what it was, from “I didn’t break it” to “I passed my math quiz”, she could always tell, and from there, she’d pull the truth out of me. Honesty is the best policy, echoed my memories of kindergarten, and I assume this was the goal of getting called out for lies, but it didn’t work with me. Instead of not lying, I just told myself to get better at it. Don’t fidget, don’t look away, don’t let your voice waver. Talk like you believe the lie just as much as you want other people to believe it too. I don’t know if I really got better or if Nanay just got tired of telling me off for it, but I never stopped. Not once.
In my defense, I only lied about things that didn’t matter. Never anything big or sincere like apologies or I love yous. I lied about the small things, like if did my homework or if I unintentionally stole a fire extinguisher. A habit that started in childhood followed me up until now. I lie about small things the same way I talk; naturally, unthinkingly, one word after the other, unbidden. A lot of the time, I don’t realize I’m lying because of how easy it is. Things that don’t matter slip off the tongue effortlessly.
So a few months ago, when my guidance counselor asked me if I regularly think about killing myself, I didn’t fidget, I didn’t look away, and I held my voice strong. As far as “no”s go, I thought that one was pretty good.
-
In Leslie Rubinkowski’s essay, “In the Woods,” she writes, “The smaller a lie is the harder I scramble to expose it. Because one tiny lie slides past and then bigger ones follow and then rot sets in and then everything flies apart [...]”
It’s important to note that Rubinkowski is writing from the perspective opposite to my own. From the one being lied to. Her grandfather had always told her odd stories, she became a reporter and valued the truth, she went out of her way to expose fabrications and find out if something really happened. It was this tension between lies and truth that kept her up at night.
On the other side of the coin, there I am. The one telling the lies. From there, I can easily admit that I have no compulsion to call other people out on their lies, in whatever way. Exposing them, confronting them, proving the lies from the truths. None of that appeals to me because I believe that lying, at least lying about small things, is done with some kind of purpose. When people ask “how are you?” I assume it’s not because they really want to know, but because they want the answer of “I’m fine.” Small lies and small answers aren’t really searching for truths, but searching for answers that are appropriate. Answers that are wanted. I lie about the fire extinguisher because when I think about what people want, the truth or the interesting story, I always find myself siding with the latter.
But the sentiment of escalation still holds. Start small, and the bigger ones follow, and then things fall apart. That’s how most stories usually go, but it’s not how this one does. While I believe the escalation is possible, I don’t believe it’s happened to me.
Thinking about killing myself feels small. The thoughts come to me not after moments where I am extremely upset, but instead during moments so mundane they aren’t even worth telling. When I cross the road, I imagine stopping in the middle and getting hit by a car. When it rains, I imagine throwing myself into the nearby river and drowning. When I’m in bed, to fall asleep, I imagine overdosing on paracetamol, my breathing weakening after vomiting for hours, my liver failing from the toxicity, my eyes finally falling shut. It sounds bad when I say it like that, but the fact is that I wake up the next day. The fact is these thoughts, no matter how constant or detailed, stay thoughts.
But, argues some part of my mind, thoughts are powerful. And I can’t deny that. Suicide ideation is defined by an unnatural preoccupation with suicidal thoughts. That in itself states that no matter how normal these thoughts are for me, they aren’t supposed to be. Normal people supposedly don’t think like this. It’s one thing to have a fleeting thought of dying, and another altogether to think about it every other hour, every day, each fantasy so vivid and well worn with how much I go back to them. Repeated thoughts become habits. Habits stay consistent and can shape people. If exercising everyday pointed a person’s trajectory towards better health, I wonder what direction I was going in with my constant thoughts of killing myself. I wonder if this is the difference between a long life and one that ends at twenty years old.
There is a contradiction here: I only lie about small things, but these thoughts are supposedly not small. I lie anyway. I lie to my guidance counselor, I lie to my friends that I’m still seeing that guidance counselor and that I hadn’t stopped three months ago, I lie to everybody I tell “I’m fine” when I’m really thinking about the revolver locked in the cupboard at home.
Perhaps, I rationalized, these thoughts started out big, but after years and years of thinking them, I wore them down into pebbles that could slip through the cracks. The only problem is that if I try to think of beginnings, I get lost. Trying to remember the first time I thought about suicide is like trying to remember the first lie I ever told. There was no clear beginning, just a period of my life that began and failed to end. If big things can become small, or if small things can become big escapes me. All I know for sure is what is true and what isn’t, and what that means to me. If I lie about it, it must be small. I wouldn’t lie about it if it wasn’t.
Rubinkowski writes:
I used to think I was trying to expose the same lies that annoyed me when I was young, but as I’ve gotten older I realize I was lying to myself. There are lies that attempt to hide, and there are those that reveal. These are the ones that haunt me because of what they say about loss and hope. I could count on my grandfather lying to me the same way I could count on him loving me. He lied to me because he loved me, I think.
and:
So maybe what I’m looking for aren’t lies at all. Maybe what I’m looking for---hoping for---is a happier truth.
Looking at my collection of lies, my collection of small things, I try to peel the layers away. I try to see if there’s a happier truth behind my lies. I find a little kid who wanted to hold a fire extinguisher because they’d read all about them, a kid who wanted to be liked by their friends and family, a kid who wanted to be what people wanted. I find an adult walking the edge of being alive and not wanting to be. I find myself grappling with smallness and bigness and what it means.
The truth of it all is this doesn’t make sense, and that scares me. It only seems right that lies are how I make sense of things.
-
Over the course of writing this essay, I became hyper aware of my lies. I lie so easily about small things that I often don’t notice, but now, every time I spoke, the question was at the top of my mind: was I telling the truth?
I recently went to the dentist. The left side of my mouth had been in pain for a month, and I didn’t schedule an appointment earlier because I was lying to myself about how much it hurt. When I was finally there, the dentist had cleaned a tooth out and told me it was broken. She said it might need a root canal if the damage was too bad. She tapped at the tooth and asked “Does it hurt?” No, I said. She tapped at it again. “Are you sure?” Was I? I thought I was. The sharp pain in the tooth disappeared after she cleaned it, but some kind of sensation was still there. Was that pain? Was I hurting? Was I lying? If I was, why?
The answer was simple; I didn’t want to have a root canal. It sounded terrifying. Feeling pain meant the root canal would happen, so if there was pain, I lied about it.
The contradiction again. This wasn’t a small thing, but I lied about it. New questions came into my mind. Questions about cause and effect. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Do I lie about things that don’t matter or do I lie about things because I wish they didn’t?
All the lies I tell are told because I want to be avoiding something. They’re my attempts at deflection and diversion. By telling a lie, I create another dimension, stretching out the distance between where I am and where an inevitable reality is. In my not-truths all it seems I’m doing is speaking things into insignificance, into smallness. And smallness feels safe. Small things aren’t important, and thus small things don’t hurt because I don’t give them the chance to. Truths can’t be controlled like that. Truths don’t care about anything other from the fact that they’re real, and that realness is merciless. Cut at a brick wall, and you’ve just chipped it. Cut at the skin, and I bleed. Telling the truth means admitting that that bleeding matters.
The person who stole the fire extinguisher is the same person who wants to be alive. This is the same person I am not. The same person I give to people because I know it’s that one they really want. Rubinkowski, on the lies her grandfather told her, writes “This is who I am, he seemed to be saying. Never mind that it isn’t true. In his lies, he offered up his best self [...]” If behind a lie, there’s a happier truth, in front of it, is an image of the self. I wonder who I offer in my lies. Not a best self so much as a facsimile I wish I could be. I wish I could hold in my hands something I knew everything about, something that made complete sense to me. I wish I could be somebody who woke up in the morning and didn’t immediately feel disappointed that I hadn’t died in my sleep. Behind my lies is somebody confused, and in front of them is somebody who yearns for another version of myself. They’re a version of myself that is truthful about everything, from the inconsequential to the allegedly a big deal. They’re a version of myself that admits that things matter, that reality is important, that I’ll have to face things eventually. They’re a version of myself I don’t recognize.
I reach out towards the image, the stranger, but my hands stop short. I hesitate. My hands fumble, and I can’t hold it. I don’t.
Hello, all! A revised version of my essay Resting Places was published in a chapbook showcasing the works of the fellows of the 24th Ateneo Heights Writer’s Workshop. The workshop was a wonderful experience and I am so grateful I was able to be a part of it.
You can read the chapbook here for free! The works of all the fellows are amazing and you can find my work on book page 58.
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