G

Nonfiction by | November 29, 2015

An afternoon, early summer of 2010, at the pathway to the CHSS building of UP Mindanao, I first saw the girl I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. Her name was G, a freshman. She had a shoulder-length hair, parted at the center, a thin physique which was emphasized by long sleeves shirt and pants. In my vision, she walked as if her feet stepped on piles of cotton—softly and lightly.

I have always felt a tinge of envy every time I hear stories of romance from people close to me. All of them seemed so easy as though it has long been planned and only the perfect time had to be waited for before the execution.

There were times when I would catch myself smiling at random pictures of my high school classmates with their boyfriends or girlfriends beside them. There was always a hollow in my chest. Scanning through photos on social media, I would sigh and every breath sent air right through the hole in my chest. I could not help but tell myself: I was not one of them. My true identity, as others would call it, was unknown to me until I turned seventeen—a sophomore at UP Mindanao, thriving, getting by, trying to get over with the academic life. It was as if the universe handed me what I could not give myself—a means to determine who I was.

A lot of people have given testimonies before about time and motion slowing down when they meet somebody who could possibly be their other half. And for me, that somebody was G.

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Mr. Webster, Spider

Fiction by | November 22, 2015

Be careful you do not get an appetite for words or you may end up like Mr. Webster, a hopeless word addict, helplessly becoming every word he ate.

There was once a spider with a round gray body covered with yellow stripes on the upper part of it, fuzzed all around with tiny feathers, even on its thin wiry legs. He wore eyeglasses that were so tight they stuck to his head even when he climbed up a steep wall or walked upside down on a leaf.

Mr. Webster was his name. He was always collecting words. He would scuttle onto a book shelf when nobody was looking, go into the loose pages of a book and read and read and read. When he came upon a word he liked, such as “refurbishment” or “incantatory” or “felonious” or “derelict,” he would stop to think, rocking on his long legs while he thought about the word, what the word could mean, and try to use it in a sentence over and over in his mind. He was quite a genius, this Mr. Webster.

And sometimes where there was a word he particularly liked, he would cut the word out of the book or magazine with his little sharp jaw cutters and eat the word letter by letter until he digested it. Then he would climb up to the rafters or ceiling of the big library where he lived and there weave a web house where he could sleep until it was time for the next meal.

After a while, he got to be master of the printed word, so that when he wanted to fall asleep, he would go into a book and look for the word sleep, eat it and instantly fall asleep. Or if he wanted to taste something sweet, he would go into a loose-leaf recipe book, look for the word honey and eat the word.

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Heartless

Fiction by | November 15, 2015

The markings on the chest of the old man lying on the ground glowed brighter than the moon that night. Light blue. The light crawled throughout his already pasty skin. When the last drop of blood fell from his head, which was hanging above the rest of his body, he finally spoke.

He asked me what I was doing there and why I was just staring blankly on a dead headless body. I told him I was hurting and that the body, headless, reminded me of my own. He seems to have tried tilting his head in confusion, but failed. He realized he could not tilt his head without his neck. He stifled a laugh, and said, “Sometimes I forget that I do not have a body.”

I wondered if sometimes the body forgets that he does not have a head, but of course it cannot. It cannot even think. Without the head the body could not even function.

“So you told me that my headless body reminded you of your own?” he asked, breaking my train of thought.

I looked him in the eye and I asked him.

“What is that glowing thing in your body?”

He was disappointed when I answered his question with another inquiry, but he still answered my question. Although, he was hesitant at first.

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Kissing Scars

Fiction by | November 15, 2015

“What is this?” he asked, looking at my arms. I breathed deeply. The tension began to strike.

I stared at him uncertain whether I would reveal to him the truth or tell him white lies. If he were not to poke my arms then surely he would not see anything, would not see any white spots on my skin.

My dad used to tease me when I was a child. “Your husband will be surprised with your first night together.” He laughed. It was a joke. But it bothered me whenever I thought of Lee. What if my dad’s joke would turn into reality?

It scared me, knowing that maybe Lee would be the same as my high school friends.

“Psoriasis! Psoriasis!” They kept shouting even after the class had long been dismissed. It was on the day when my report on our biology class was about the skin as a part of the integumentary system, the organ system that protects the body from various kinds of damage.

I was ashamed of what they did. I could not move my entire body and could not stop from crying. Nobody cared to ask me why I was crying.

“Wala, wala,” I said. “There is something in my eyes.” That was only alibi that I could think of.

I treated them as my “barkada,” but they never went back to the classroom for me. They never even asked me why or what happened. In the first place, they never even knew how painful it was to reveal the entrusted secrets I tried to bury. For three years of being with them, I kept those hard feelings. It was just that I never wanted to destroy the friendship that we have made, friendship that left scars.

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Of Remembering

Nonfiction by | November 8, 2015

The only sound that resonated in one of the crowded rooms inside the lonely mansion at Lugay-Lugay Street was her loud, ragged, and pained breathing. It was 9:45 in the evening, the night after Christmas in 2007. Families, relatives, and friends, rushed from different distant cities and countries to Cotabato City to be with her in her final moments. The golden silk curtains were drawn, the air-conditioning unit was turned off, all the lights were switched on—brightly illuminating every inch of every face, and of everything—in the house, and the white narra door that was always locked was now left wide open for the people to enter and see her in such a heart-breaking state.

She was lying on a hospital bed bought by her eleven children, six sons and five daughters. IV needles were injected on her bruised right hand. She was wearing an oxygen mask that did nothing but to amplify her agonized gasping for air. Her black, thinning hair was tied into a messy knot. Here caramel skin was too big and too loose for her now thin body. As I sat silently in a corner, my back against the whiteness of the walls, she looked very small and shriveled as a leaf that had fallen from the mango tree her firstborn son had planted in her garden.

The hushed sobbing of the crowd. The soft rustling of clothes being smoothed down and brushed. The anxious patting of the bare and naked feet, as the people in the room shifted their weight—left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. The holding of breaths. The passing of time. Her breathing slowly fading away. Silence. Her youngest daughter’s horrified wail followed by her youngest son’s urgent warning, “Stop it, stop it. Do not cry.” Her husband’s nervous laugh as he tried to crawl out of the room. These were the sounds that pulsed in the room as my heart thumped heavily in my chest.

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Against Pamimintana: Writing in the Age of Facebook

Nonfiction by | November 1, 2015

This afternoon I will talk about the phenomenon that has influenced my own writing the most, both in terms of theme, sensibility, and the way I process the world. I do not think I will ever be capable of writing anything without this phenomenon as a pervasive backdrop. Globalization assaults us in many fronts. Political, economic, military, cultural, even technological, which is linked to both the economic and cultural brands, which shows the systematic quality of this phenomenon. For our purposes today my usage of the term will refer almost always to the cultural brand of globalization.

The most direct and least complicated influence of globalization in this generation of writers is in terms of thematic, material, and sensibility. A cosmopolitan worldview that is a result of being exposed to a wealth of information and experiences suddenly accessible. Superficially, this can mean having characters who listen to John Legend, make jokes about Game of Thrones, or religiously maintain a tumblr account—all terrible examples. My current project, if I may use my own work as example, is about the call center industry. It attempts to show how outsourcing typifies a new global configuration that is merely a continuation and a new stage of colonialism, only this time there is no battlefield, at least not in the literal sense. It as a storyline that could only have been produced by a highly globalized reality.

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Kaisog

Poetry by | November 1, 2015

ni Anna Akhmatova, gihubad ni Macario D. Tiu

Nasayod ta unsay anaa sa timbangan    
     karong taknaa
Ug unsay nagakahitabo karon.
Ang takna sa kaisog naghapak sa atong
     mga orasan
Ug ang kaisog dili mobiya kanato
Wala kita mahadlok sa mga bala
Wala kitay gibating kapait nga walay    
     atop sa atong mga ulo
Ug amo kang ipatunhay, sinultihang  
     Ruso
Ang gamhanang pulong nga Ruso!
Amo ta kang ipanunod sa among mga
     apo
Gawasnon, lunsay, ug luwas gikan sa  
     Kaulipnan
Hangtod sa kahangtoran.

Pebrero 23, 1942, Tashkent

—
Si Mac Tiu usa ka Carlos Palanca awardee ug National Book awardee. Nagatudlo og pagsulat ug katitikan sa Ateneo de Davao University ug University of Southeastern Philippines.

Alunsina takes a walk in the rain

Poetry by | November 1, 2015

It is difficult to miss you in the summer, your voice written all over the clear night sky, the stars mapping out your single instruction: go home. Each night, I keep my eyes on the shadow of my open umbrella. I stay indoors, stay away from the windows.

Today, the news tells me you are scheduled to be lonely. I part my curtains and look up.

Later, when the roads turn slippery with your sadness, I will put on my shoes, soak myself in your tears. It is difficult not to miss you when the evening sky is speechless, when your silence travels down my cheeks, like a request.

I cannot forgive you. That day, if you had not refused, I would have given you a present. I would have carved my love in stone.

—
Conchitina Cruz is an Assistant Professor of the University of the Philippines Diliman. “Alunsina Takes a Walk in the Rain” first appeared in her book of poetry collection, Dark Hours, which won the 2006 National Book Award for Poetry.