First Draft

I
I love yellows. They are sunny and mellow, a chocolate commercial would say, further coercing my fixation with the color. When I paint, my watercolor sheet gets peppered with these pastels; lemon yellow gets massacred first, before every other tube.

This copy jingle is in my head that fateful morning, as my hands brush off excessive clay from a soon-to-become ramen bowl. The sun feels faint from my teacher’s workshop; the ambiance, a confluence of Norah Jones’s wine drenched heart to the sublime quietness of early morning traffic—that period after the rush, when cars disappear one by one over the vast cement expanse that is EDSA.

A pair of heavy rushing footsteps emerges from the door. I look up. And stare. And smile. And feel a pulsing giggle form at the back of my throat. He smiles back, as bright as that lemon shirt over his shoulders, with a gaze that steals all other light.

II
I lost my identity in 2010, after a figure stole my bag of treasures. When I lost my bag, I ran around in a futile attempt to recover, and possibly play tag with the perpetrator of my loss. I failed. And lost all important IDs out of sheer carelessness. The next two hours was a flurry of phone calls and explanations. I got back my IDs in a month’s time except for my passport.

And so, on a free day, I trooped to Manila in hopes of getting an NBI Clearance and possibly, a new passport. I hated the NBI Office. As in the case of almost all government offices, one had to line up for hours to get a clearance. I never had the patience for queues. So on my chosen morning, I brought my best choice of a distraction: a thin easy-reading book, The Great Gatsby.

When my turn came for the finger prints, I was already in page 40. And as the woman took my photograph, the last remains of Daisy’s line lingered in my head. Daisy said girls should be fools. Beautiful little fools.

III
On the road, red light means stop. But in my, our, case, it meant go. Go translates to turning and scrambling for a quick hurried kiss. The dew tastes of liquor, the air of burned tobacco, and the pecks, empty deeds that meant nothing than what it is.

My fingers feel his, intertwining with mine like stirring spider’s feet. Moving, coming, leaving. I  brush off the lugubrious emptiness with a laugh, a giggle that is exactly the opposite of what I meant.

Small drops of rain dance on the windshield, falling from gloomy early morning skies that threaten to weep. The skies are the best keepers of secrets, I realize. The downside though is that they have this fucked-up way of reminding you every now and then.

IV
The end of March saw me in Baguio, in a white-washed room in the outskirts. Locals say the fog descends as early as 11 a.m. in that side of town and one doesn’t feel the mornings; the sun lights the city but its heat falls short. It’s there but it isn’t there. So I lie in bed that morning, cocooned in layers of blankets, waiting for the peak of the heat.

I never wait. Now, I do.

As I stare at the mountains I remember Kerouac who said that we are never born because we never die. That the concept of self is nothing but a mortal idea that will crumble. Is pain, then, nothing but a physical aching of the self? An idea that will dissolve in time? And that we never really find because we never really lose? And that we never win because we never fight?

I close my eyes and listen to the silence. Hours, minutes, seconds—all melding in the present, the now where I lie flat on my stomach, feeling the yellow ball of fire burn through the window and into the sheets—a physical illusion of the reality I try to escape, an assurance that the pain and the loss will fade because it never exist.

And it is true what they say, that for one who waits, time ebbs painfully slow. And I feel, yet again, a familiar trajectory: waiting and waiting and waiting and ending with a saudade of ache and unresolved flux. If Kerouac is alive, I will tell him: It is hard to get past the corporeal.

By mid-day the diminutive heat has crafted mists rolling softly along untainted glass that eventually gets engulfed by dense fog. The heat never comes. Not this season, not this time.