At 25 I took the roundabout and never wrote about it

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Psychobabble #2*

My 23yearold self. WeHeartIt

My 23yearold self. WeHeartIt

Finally digressed into that phase of which my 23-year-old self would be proud: the uninhibited sloughing-off, the undoing of my quarterlife, starting with the mundane, my multipurpose bag for example. Bought a satchel for replacement today, a good bargain. Detailing out its size, color, look is tedious at 11PM, at work no less. So let’s see where else I’m sloughing through:

* WordPress blogs I follow * prolly my Facebook friends (which is currently at 300+; let’s get real, I only have prolly less than 50 friends in real life, a generous [to me] estimate) * the books I hoard * the lies my current purchasing power allows me to stomach (gagbarflaugh Php___ worth of garbage purchase after) * handouts on hatred, war, cynicism, and defeat (yeah, that came straight from a Sarah Kay poem) * real-life friends * job * the clutter on my work desk * zombie dreams * mediocre plans * naïvete

Those slides on my life’s Keynote that nobody really bothers to stare at, let alone speedread, let alone blink awestricken at meriting a second look. So, yeah, am sloughing off the mundane and hopefully the ones that matter more in the history of sloughing off things because I’m turning 26 soon. 25 is lounging on the cusp and in the chasm. I never liked it here, let me go.

* Psychobabble #1

{What had sounded better in my head}

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Everything was necessary.

The absoluteness of your everything distills necessary from … everything.

Everything as necessary is music to my ears, as if notes dancing in and out of their measure, fluid, alighting with grace on the train platform, guiding the curious incongruence between my point A and point B, not bothered by the mess that by now has been wrought by my mixed metaphors.

*****

My heart was first officially broken at nine years old. I had no witness, but God knows how hard I cried over a boy, and the only reason I mention this is not so I could legitimize the pain I felt at nine, which now would seem so juvenile, but so I could ask, then, if time heals anything how come pain feels the same all the time? 

Because that’s my heart right there, on the train platform now, beating for twenty-five years, and I have all the right to protect it, don’t I? No, not from the train commuters shoving up their asses to this modern carriage, because I don’t know any of them from Adam. Neither from the others down there whose commute just parallels mine; lives I’ll never meet. But yes– yes from those I plotted my point-A-to-point-B coordinates with, those I planned to bring with me from here to there, North to South stations and back, those I shoved up my ass to a spot on a crowded train for, and this the source of my collapse, those who would have done these same things for me. And the pain at twenty-five is reminiscent of the pain when I was nine. If time heals all pain how come it hasn’t cured mine?

Silence. Metaphors still mixing. I wouldn’t ride into the commotion if I could help myself, but there are days I take the train so I can help myself. To conjure answers when life has thrown my way nothing, as when I write, patching old wounds with the gauze of my words. Old wounds should have turned into scars by now but I keep picking off the scab. But, hear me, I keep blaming time. I keep feeling the pain so I keep blaming it on time. Sometimes I blame it on my amygdala, too. But there is always an external entity, or an intangible to blame, because it’s easier to deal with pain if you divide the blame by two. And if you write in past tense about those you know and in present tense the strangers. If you keep asking the question for which you can conjure an answer, answers even, for even the clichés could work wonders sometimes. And if you keep hurting for the younger versions of yourself when all you have is one, the now, the one that is all confused in the wtf-ness of the now. But perhaps even your predisposition is necessary. And your too-often broken heart.

*****

And he says everything was necessary.

Daenerys Stormborn and damning the odds

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First season, tenth episode. The reel is my memory. I remember flaming torches that could rival the number of those lit in all Survivor versions, forming a ring in the middle of the desert as in a sacrificial rite. The Dothraki and Ser Jorah Mormont behind. Daenerys– widowed, lost a child, lost a brother, having a handful of Dothraki slaves for warriors, barely eighteen but burdened by longing for home, no family, no iron throne, no kingdom to return to to begin with– stood in between facing the fire, ready to be consumed by it.

We first saw Daenerys in Magister Illyrio’s grand mansion in the Free City of Pentos. That’s as far as we can get from King’s Landing, the capital of Westeros. She and her big brother Viserys, the self-proclaimed last dragon and true heir of the iron throne, were living off the magister’s kindness and hospitality, which were actual investments into favors that can be claimed when ripe from the ‘future and one true king’. Now Viserys needed an army to reclaim King’s Landing from Robert Baratheon, so he was marrying his sister off to Khal Drogo, a Dothraki lord who was known for being undefeated in battles and who would be his provider of a strong khalasar (army): I’d let his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all forty thousand men, and their horses too if that’s what it took to get my army.

800px-Viserys_Daenerys_Targaryen_hbo

Dany, as she was also called, followed suit because she did not want to awaken the dragon in her brother. She bedded with Drogo, spoke with her handmaidens to master the Dothraki tongue, learned ways to pleasure her husband with lessons from them, learned to love him, too, sure enough to carry his son in her womb. Tall orders for a little princess. Or not. Because a little princess she never was, or felt she was– her mother died giving birth to her on Dragonstone, leaving two orphans to the care of a few loyal servants and to one day desiring in very different manners to avenge the death of the Father she never knew, the Mad King Aerys Targaryen. Now she was a khaleesi, the ascent coming in with three dragon’s eggs as a gift from the magister, the allegiance of the exiled Ser Jorah Mormont, the khal’s growing gentle love, a horse to mount at the head of the movable tribe whereas Viserys rode in the neck or midsection that it didn’t matter anymore, and the pulsating realization that she was Daenerys Stormborm, Princess of Dragonstone, of the blood and seed of Aegan the Conqueror, of the blood of the dragon.

Soon she was bearing within her Drogo’s heir, on which Viserys grew impatient as he had shown no regard for Dothraki customs and pace with things, and ventured upon insulting the khal for keeping his end of the bargain unfulfilled. In a feast to celebrate the khaleesi with child, the last dragon dared his sister’s husband before other khals to give him the crown he’d been promised. Bloodriders thereby brought their leader molten gold to pour onto half the head of the impertinent future king of Westeros. When the gold was half-melted and running, Drogo snagged a stew pot from the fire pit and crowned the upended thing on Viserys, who died painfully quick and proving something to his little sister once and all. He was no dragon. With a curious calm she pondered. Fire cannot kill a dragon.

Until his last breath, which was without a curl of smoke, she loved his brother. But his death made the fire raze all the quicker from her veins to her heart, and she found it in her to truly love her husband, to dream a future with him and their son, to raise her voice at the abuse of women and children in their tribe’s raids, to spite some of his bloodriders for their bias and injustice, which cost her husband his life, and to make hard decisions regarding supernatural solutions to save him, which then cost her the child. Just what the maesters (men who acted like medical practitioners in Westeros) ordered for a khaleesi– but she had become more than that.

First season, tenth episode. I remember the fire dying, wisps of smoke filling the desert air, and Daenerys Targaryen rising to her feet. Fire did not consume the last Targaryen. She consumed the fire. Naked and covered with soot, she seemed unhurt. Two dragons suckled at her breasts, while the third was draped across her shoulders. They were making music that had been unheard of in a hundred years. The music of dragons.

Because I have nothing original to say– so here’s E.B. White

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I first encountered the essayist E.B. White when my sixteen-year-old self bought the Elements of Strunk (yeah, Strunk). Since then this dead, old man (he died 86 years old) has been my almost-acquaintance– “not the type I would be drinking buddies with,” as one of my officemates puts it. The foreword about him in that Strunk book said he worked for The New Yorker, and back then I had no idea how huge The New Yorker was. I thought it was some sort of Daily Bugle. But then, Butch Dalisay would quote him in one of his Penman articles ~a couple years later:

“The circus comes as close to being the world in a microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade. Its magic is universal and complex. Out of its wild disorder comes order; from its rank smell rises the good aroma of courage and daring; out of its preliminary shabbiness comes the final splendor. And buried in the familiar boast of its advance agents lies the modesty of most of its people. For me the circus is at its best before it has been put together. It is at its best at certain moments when it comes to a point, as though a burning glass, in the activity and destiny of a single performer out of so many.

“Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources – from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.”

~ The Ring of Time

I think I would then read Charlotte’s Web after taking a short fiction class under Sir Dalisay. But aside from the constant thumbing of the Elements pages for the appropriate Strunkian rule– in school, at play, and then at work– I would have no other encounters with White. Until Maria Popova excessively quotes him in one of her brain pickings, which I would just mimic here:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

Thanks, Maria Popova!

Thanks, Maria Popova!

I like the essay, have always liked it, and even as a child was at work, attempting to inflict my young thoughts and experiences on others by putting them on paper.

I am not fooled about the place of the essay in twentieth-century American letters — it stands a short distance down the line. The essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen. A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence.

I think I’m doomed to become an essayist. I better buy me and this E.B. White guy some drinks some time.

PS I was midway into crafting a 250-word intro for my Game of Thrones post when WordPress decided to de-automate AutoSave. I was aiming for coherence with that one.

The breeze

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My makeshift desk is our old iron board, chosen because it’s near a power outlet, but more importantly because it sits me near the screen door, now opened wide, and makes me gaze at the blackness through the terrace’s iron bars, and shadows– when this homey, fanning soft breeze would rendezvous with me at any spot in my parents’ house I’d forget how old I am and how painful life can be at times, as I do now.

The breeze, not only this particularly friendly one at home, but in all the forms it has presented itself to me, from my protected childhood to angsty adolescence to cagey, depressive college years to early and mid-twenties in pursuit of freedom for the self, has been a true friend. The autumn-esque leaves did not look so senile when they were swirling with the gusting of the October wind, in those finals-week afternoons I stumbled my way on the freshie walk to class. At 4 a.m., when my forced insomnia was at its tail, the moving air swayed the illuminated leaves behind my old QC apartment in grace, indulging my too-often broken heart in a trance.

Years later as I joined the ranks of eager corporate slaves, eager to travel, to waste money on better dresses, better shoes, better places to rent, even better gadgets, which are replaceable by the next Cupertino-based upgrade, eager to live and work in cities where the lights are steady but hope often flickers, eager to taste liberties that early years living on our parents’ money did not afford us. It is in those times I thought the breeze had divorced me, if divorce ever happens in friendships. But a few weeks ago it met me with a peck on the cheek as I traipsed along Ayala after midnight dizzied by extended time at work. It’s how I know it’s never left me. I have always been the prodigal friend.

There’s this anecdotal piece at the back of my mind, something I haven’t told on paper, because I have been subconsciously preserving it for my memoir– when this homey, fanning breeze would rendezvous with me by the huge window near my bed in my childhood room, I’d film in my head how future events would turn out. There would be pavements, dead leaves, sleepless nights, there would be me in heels and a blazer walking tap tap along Ayala. Images. The emotions would be left out of the script . . .

You know how they say things never turn out as you expected– and they really don’t– you instinctively grip onto something to keep your footing? That’s the role of the breeze for me. And as the camera zooms out on the makeshift desk, the doorway, the iron bars that cast their shadows in the terrace, I am left alone with a friend. And the universe is again in balance.