To the love of my life, wherever, whenever, and whoever you are

photo from fuckyeahronhermione.tumblr.com

Dear you,

I was listening to Coldplay a while ago and I suddenly remembered the first time I met you. It was in one of my dreams when I was still 13 (or around that age, at least), and in it I was walking down a white-walled corridor towards a doorway. When I pushed the doors open, I found myself outdoors, in the middle of a large crowd of people who were waving their hands high above their heads and singing along to a familiar song. There were bright lights coming from a stage, and I think I could even see fireworks from afar. And there you were, in the middle of the crowd, and you looked at me. Somehow, even though I couldn’t see your face clearly, I knew it was you.

I’ve never forgotten that dream. Not after all these years.

As time passed, I met different boys whom I believed to be you. Some were lovers of music and had a strange sense of humor, some were tall and conventionally romantic. There were moments when I would find myself amidst fireworks or songs I loved, in the middle of a large crowd under the night sky, and I would look around, hoping to see you. But I never did.

I’m probably getting my dream all mixed up, though. What if it wasn’t outdoors, but indoors? What if there wasn’t really a large crowd, or music, or fireworks? It’s been too long. All I’m sure of is the night sky, some lights, and you. Have I already met you? Are you still there, or have you been around all this time? What if we had our chance and missed it, or what if we made a mess?

Maybe we don’t even like the same things, or maybe we do. After all, I don’t think I can date (much less end up with) someone who doesn’t read or share at least some things and dreams in common with me. You might like Vonnegut and Harry Potter, but you probably also read Stephen King and Palahniuk. Maybe you’re a Marvel man to my DC girl. Or you listen to Phoenix and Ray LaMontagne but you don’t like U2 or Nat King Cole, like the Eraserheads but not Up dharma Down (really? I mean, why not?), prefer Nickelodeon to Disney, want to visit South America instead of Europe, and so on. Little things, easy compromises. As long as our fundamental values are similar, it’s all good.

Besides, it’s really always been the words, the affinity for language and its use in conveying things that need to be said. But at the same time, it’s also always been the silence in between. It’s the same silence that passed between us when you looked at me for the very first time.

Know, however, that I wait for you in the heart of the suburbs and by the window at the 12^th floor, in between shelves in bookstores, among the linen sheets and pillows in hotel beds, in corridors between classrooms. Your timing isn’t exactly wonderful, I understand that now. But I’ll wait for you anyway. I hope you’ll forgive me, you know what for. Know, my dear, that I love you now, always have and always will. I loved you in those whom I loved, and I love you in the wind that passes from here to where you are. I love you in your absence and I will love you in your presence.

Someday, someday. I’ve seen too many 80′s movies and read too many books, and maybe I’m a little in over my head. But hope springs eternal.

Love,

Me

Why I’ll always be a groupie (or a Band-Aid, to be exact)

Here’s a question for you: when was the last time you listened to music?

By “listen,” though, I don’t mean hooking your iPod to your car radio for a late-night driving soundtrack. I mean listen, in the way Zooey Deschanel told the kid who played a younger Patrick Fugit’s character in Almost Famous, “Listen to Tommy with a candle burning, and you’ll see your entire future.”

If I were to answer my own question, I’d say I last really listened to music just a couple of seconds ago. I had Cut Off Your Hands’ “All It Takes” playing in YouTube, linked by a co-staffer on his Twitter.

Admittedly, I couldn’t understand half of the lyrics. But what matters is that it reminded me of a time in a world far away from here, a place of open fields and red bricks and girls in tablecloth skirts and boys in green collared shirts.  I remembered waiting for my brothers in the afternoon after school hours, our car parked underneath the electric tower in the empty lot beside their school’s campus.

I was in love with music, with the synths and echoes in new New Wave and the ethereal Hopelandic and soaring guitars in post rock. This was the time when I first heard Cut Off Your Hands, when this version of The Pale Fountains’ “From Across The Kitchen Table” was my most played song in iTunes, when Stars and The Cure spoke to me in ways nothing or no one else could. I was the weird kid with the coconut shell haircut who had only heard Chris Brown and Soulja Boy out of the Top 40 but learned by heart Jonsi’s wailing in Sigur Ros’ “Saeglopur” and psychedelic Bowie-like beats in of Montreal’s “The Party’s Crashing Us.”

On the wall facing my bed in my weekday apartment, I have taped several mini-prints of concert posters inspired by my former office mate’s bedroom wall. I wake up to this everyday, to blurry typography and rainbow-colored vector art on 4R matte photo paper. These are a testament to my undying love for musicians and their art.

Cookies for those who can guess the bands per poster

My Band-Aid complex never really went away, and I don’t think it ever will.  It’s always the same thing, as though history is destined to repeat itself. I will always admire my friends who make music — the shoe-gazing boys with guitars and strange humor, the next-door neighbor whose late-night rehearsals of Adele songs sound like studio recordings (the girl is a superstar, I swear).

I suppose all this admiration stems from my own frustrations. I wish I could sing or play the piano/guitar as wonderfully as these people, but right now I’m content finding myself amid such talent. For me, working with them throughout the years, whether in theater or in other such performances, has turned out to be a blessing more than anything else.

paperback copy, P315 at Fully Booked

Last Friday was the opening of the Fully Booked branch near the apartment, and I went there during my break in between Philosophy and European Film. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t buy anything because I still had an entire stack of books from the book fair, but I lost all sense of self-control when I saw several copies (both trade paper and paperback) of Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad. I grabbed one immediately and thanked God that it was the last day of the week and a (somewhat) empty wallet was no longer much of a problem. I could starve for the rest of the day, just let me have that book.

A Visit From the Goon Squad, as the cover art suggests, is about music. Or at least, it’s about the music industry. I have yet to start reading it, but hopefully I’ll be able to finish it before the HBO series comes out. I’m excited to see if it can give me an Almost Famous sort of experience.

The thing is, the other mediums that I hold dear (film, theater, literature, art) always find such great inspiration from music, and vice versa. The same goes for life. I can’t imagine one without music, without songs associated with important people (the best friend who left for Vancouver, that football player you used to date in high school) and moments (the first kiss, the first break-up, the day the music died). Like what Nietzsche himself said, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

That’s just the way things are. The world always becomes a bit brighter when the right song starts playing, whether it be by Matt and Kim during an afternoon drive, or slow dancing to “That’s All” at your wedding. Just perfect.

The Renaissance Man

photo of The Vitruvian Man by Winnifred Frederson

In Western Literature class the other day, we discussed the era of Michelangelo and Shakespeare, a time of men in tights and painted frescoes that bring back the glory of Antiquity. Of course, when discussing the Renaissance period, the topic of Leonardo Da Vinci will always come up.

Da Vinci has become more of a symbolic figure than anything else. Here you have the quintessential Renaissance man — painter, architect, sculptor, musician, scientist, anatomist, geologist, mathematician, engineer, cartographer, inventor, writer. He’s inspired many an artist, scientist, and writer after his time, including one Dan Brown whose fame and fortune is all due to the mythology surrounding the polymath’s body of work. Da Vinci is, in short, the ideal, all-around male intellectual, the embodiment of the Greek notion of Arete.

They certainly don’t make people like that anymore.

During the discussion, a friend of mine in that class said, “I wonder when the next Renaissance will be.” I told him that technology makes things too easy for us for there to be another era like that. He answered, “It isn’t technology that’s hindering us. It’s capitalism and the socio-economic situation the world’s in.” Which is not to say that he’s against capitalism itself, but its effects on society and the individual. Because in today’s world, who still aspires to create simply for the sake of creating?

Then again, the idea of the Renaissance man is phallocentric in itself. Da Vinci sits loftily among the other “dead white males” of the Universal Canon, those whose works have dictated the shape and flow of history. Women, on the other hand — well, we’re a different story.

Where I study, we have our own word for Arete. We call it Magis, an ideal which presents the pursuit of excellence not just for one’s own sake but for the sake of others as the highest goal. My Western Lit teacher told us that as Filipinos, we have our own Renaissance Man in Dr. Jose Rizal; by transitivity, as students of our school, we are (supposed to be) Renaissance men (and women) ourselves. The model of the perfect student is that he (or she) must be educated in the liberal arts, with the idea of the humanities as the path to freedom.

A study of the Mona Lisa, 0.5mm ballpoint pen on paper

Back in high school our Art teacher made us draw people in contrapposto postures (see: Michelangelo’s David) for our Renaissance art lessons. Another one of our projects was to produce our own versions of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I remember mine was done in Gustav Klimt’s style, but prior to that I made a few studies (sketches) of the lady’s face.

I can’t find those studies I had drawn before, so I tried making one again last night, based on a photo of the painting from the Internet. The proportions aren’t exactly the same and she doesn’t have the same look in her eyes as the original, but I haven’t properly drawn in a while.

The point is, Da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa del Giocondo is of a whole other level which I can only dream to reach. Not even modern or postmodern reproductions, whether Klimt or Warholian in style, can fully reinterpret the Mona Lisa without changing it almost completely. In a similar way, our era cannot produce a Renaissance like that which Da Vinci and his contemporaries brought about. The times are too different, and too many people have become estranged from ideals.

Then again, I could be wrong. I hope I am.

Bibliophilia

A couple of weeks ago, one of my best friends and I were walking along the sidewalk in front of the new building near where we lived. We suddenly stopped in our tracks when we saw some construction workers putting up a sign above the glass doors of one of the empty new shops. I squealed; the red letters spelled out, “FULLY BOOKED.”

I took it as a sign. For what, I’m not so sure.

My bibliophilic self has had a love affair with books ever since I first learned how to read. My parents bought me volumes of children’s encyclopedias and story books that my Yaya Neneng would read to me during siesta time. They sent me to a pre-school that specialized in helping kids learn how to read at an early age. It comes as no surprise, then, that through the years my bedroom bookshelves have gone through several reincarnations – from built-in niches that contained Sesame Street almanacs to four-tiered stand-alones that now hold Dostoevskys and Chabons.

In the university where I study, there are monthly book sales held outside one of the department buildings. Here, pre-loved books are arranged in brown shelves and on tables where they are sold for almost half their regular price. In the last one I was able to buy Jorge Luis Borges’ A Universal History of Iniquity. I couldn’t help it even though I knew the Manila International Book Fair (MIBF) was beginning the following day. My wallet was half empty and I still wanted more.

Last Saturday, my family and I dropped by the MIBF and spent a little over an hour picking out books in the National Bookstore area. I grabbed two instantly, but Papa said he was using his credit card to pay. The best thing about being a book-lover is having a dad who loves reading just as much and is willing to buy you an entire library if he can.

So I ended up with six books by closing time (some of them I’m sharing with my dad):

clockwise from top: Ignorance by Milan Kundera; South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami; While Mortals Sleep by Kurt Vonnegut; Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Trial by Franz Kafka

I’m excited to read them (starting with The Great Gatsby), but I’ve still got a pile of books I haven’t finished reading (Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, still haven’t finished Infinite Jest because the ebook I got was crap, the Borges one mentioned earlier). I keep buying books to read because I figure that I might as well grab a copy when I see one since a lot of good books are hard to come by. A friend of mine once said that she experiences buyer’s remorse when she buys clothes, but never when she buys books. I feel the same way.

Random finds are great, especially when they happen in your own home. I found a book on Picasso’s Guernica hiding in one of the shelves in my room the other day. I got it for my dad a few years ago in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, where the original Guernica painting was on display. I really like modern art as well, and the book’s graphic design an layout was pretty interesting (hello, fold-outs!). The book includes information on the history and background of the painting according to its different parts (yes, the Guernica, massive as it is, can be divided according to different elements. Ask your high school art teacher.)

Speaking of art books, my Western Literature teacher gave me one a few days ago. It’s a children’s storybook on the Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and his famous painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte. She’s such a mommy, I love her. I think I know what to give her before the semester ends (regardless of what grade I may get). She’s one of those inspirational teachers who encourage me to keep on believing in the things that make no logical sense, but nevertheless make life a little more beautiful.

Like signs, for example.

I once read in an article she had written long ago that when she was younger, she decided that she would choose whether to marry her fiance or not based on a sign. They were sitting on the porch outside her house one night and she told herself that she would not marry him until she saw a falling star. Rash and reckless, maybe. But a few minutes after she had made the secret decision, her fiance went up to her and said, “The night is filled with falling stars.” She saw three that night.

I have asked for many signs and gotten them over the past few years (signs for what, I will not say). But sometimes I doubt them and their validity. Am I making up the connections in my head? Or are they the workings of some higher power?

Whatever happens, though, I’m still intent on finding someone among the Fully Booked shelves. Some nice guy, tall, reading DFW or Italo Calvino or even Mario Puzo, with his headphones/earphones on (listening to Toro y Moi, preferably, but he can be listening to Panic! At the Disco for all I care), glasses not required. That would be pretty great.

On looking like Paraluman and writing the day away

I promised myself that I’d start blogging more often, just so I’d have a personal excuse to keep on writing. It can be such a chore to write (especially when it’s what you do for a living, or in my case, for my major), but writing about yourself and your life serves as such a good form of self-indulgence and release. Never mind that no one else will probably care; if you live alone most days of the week like I do, writing is a great way to feel less lonely – it’s almost like you’re talking to a friend on the other end of the phone line.

A while back I was able to catch a lovely version of the Eraserheads’ legendary song, “Ang Huling El Bimbo” on the radio. Instead of the usual drums and guitars, Ely Buendia was backed by a complete orchestra, FILharmonika to be exact. I downloaded it and I’ve been listening to it non-stop ever since. I also posted it in Tumblr and lo and behold, 113 notes just a couple of days after.

I figured that the song would help me in coming up with a story I’ve long wanted to write but never had the courage to (more on that later on). Unsurprisingly, it did, and I’ve jotted down quite a few notes in the Muji notebook I was saving for a rainy day. Well the rainy day has come and while waiting for the President’s SONA on TV I think it’s about time I get over last night’s heavy-heartedness (which I’m prone to, unfortunately) and unleash the ideas in my head.

But of course, I couldn’t do it without a little push from Gilda Cordero-Fernando (my heroine, referred to in previous post, that crazy brilliant woman I kind of want to be like when I’m older) and Jack Gilbert, whose poems are a romantic’s best friends. Case in point:

image by Mikey Manalo

(Obviously, I like poetry. A lot. I’m the snobby Lit major that never was.)

Also started on three different books (one for school, the two others for fun because I am an impulsive reader that way. No really, I keep buying books even though I have a pile of unfinished ones next to my bed): The Iliad by Homer, Robert Fitzgerald translation, How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen (got into an argument with my dad about him; he said he doesn’t like the way he writes, I wanted to say he doesn’t like the way anyone new writes), and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I first heard of DFW in our Philosophy of Man class last year and I’ve been intrigued ever since. It also helps that Franzen wrote about him.

Books (or reading, for that matter) are always the best when it comes to catharsis, even more so than the average chick flick or Adele song. Okay, maybe not. But they can help get your mind off things you’d rather not think about. Especially Infinite Jest. That thing is a mammoth and it’s absolutely nuts.

But right now Ely Buendia’s singing the final verse of El Bimbo and it’s back to reality. Time to write again. Hopefully years from now my notebooks will find a home in the shelves of the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings (ALIWW). Yeah right, but a girl can dream.

P.S. Here’s the FILharmonika version of “Ang Huling El Bimbo” for your benefit. Listen and enjoy. Seriously, enjoy.

This is the last one, I promise

WHEN I was younger, I used to watch old, black-and-white movies with my dad on lazy afternoons. I remember the look of excitement on Audrey Hepburn’s face while riding a Vespa in Roman Holiday, the sound of Marlon Brando’s cries of anguish in A Streetcar Named Desire. But what I remember most is the conversation between Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and George Kittredge (John Howard) in The Philadelphia Story. It goes like this:

George: You’re like some marvelous, distant, well, queen, I guess. You’re so cool and fine and always so much your own. There’s a kind of beautiful purity about you, Tracy, like, like a statue.
Tracy: George…
George: Oh, it’s grand, Tracy. It’s what everybody feels about you. It’s what I first worshipped you for from afar.
Tracy: I don’t want to be worshipped. I want to be loved.

That last line stuck, I don’t know why.

Years later and I’m almost at the end of my University years. In a month I’ll be legal everywhere in the world. I’ve found what I want to do with my life (I think) and I’ve done what I could to get there. Shift to the right course, check. Get into the school paper, check. Work for an award-winning TV show and a highly-respected magazine, check. Start on law school applications, pending. Well, so far I’ve got almost everything covered. Everything’s fine.

But since I am a Catholic school girl and I was bred to become an idealist romantic in every aspect, I still wanted what many starry-eyed girls weaned on Disney wanted: a Prince Charming to sweep me off my feet.

Somewhere along the way, I thought I had found something that would have/could have been something for the long run, but it wasn’t. Not because it really wasn’t, but because it was dropped like a hot potato (bad idiom, but makes sense). The worst part of it was I didn’t even understand why. Then it happened (or sort of happened) a second time, and it got dropped like a hot potato again. And I still couldn’t understand why.

My mother had told me a few months before she passed away that the right one will come someday, and when he does, I’ll just know it’s him. No questions asked.

I’ve learned to be okay and not think about it so much anymore. I’ve got a lot on my hands now – work, academics, more work, family, even more work. Contrary to what I had hoped for (a nice, balanced life without stress), I’ve turned into the quintessential workaholic college girl. I took on a lot of responsibilities because I believe I could do them, and because, well, they keep me busy. Nothing’s worse than feeling lonely when all your couple-friends are out, so might as well have a date with some press releases or unedited articles. Pathetic, maybe. At least I’m getting somewhere.

Let me back up a little bit to the something that would have/could have but wasn’t. A promise was made there, not to me necessarily but more of to the cosmos in general. For some time, I was under the impression that the maturity level had gone way up. Then the school year started, the promise was broken, and it was back to that feeling of disbelief. So much for trust and friendship, since even those were denied. Knowing someone better than anyone else, even better than they do themselves, doesn’t guarantee anything.

What a massive waste of emotional stress! Was it ever worth it, to promise to stay hoping things would get better someday? It was always just right, the mix of things, the humor and the balance of one personality with the other. There was no unnecessary worshipping here, just two equals who had similar ideas of what they wanted for their lives in the future. Dex and Em, Em and Dex. Ron Hermione, But no, I’m not really a friend, we shouldn’t have become friends, no, no, no, blah, blah, blah, kthxbye.

(If you’re reading this – you know who you are – I sincerely hope you’re happy. Really.)

Reading Thought Catalog doesn’t exactly ease the situation, but I need to so that I could check up on writing styles and what works in eliciting responses from readers. I noticed that most of the essays about love and sadness combined were always the best written ones, or maybe it’s just me projecting. But they often got the most comments and retweets on Twitter, so it occurred to me: whatever this is, it’s universal, and I am not alone.

Of course, I miss it terribly. In between proofreading mock-ups for the magazine I’m interning in and listening to the news on the way home, I’m thinking about the Gin Blossoms and last summer and how much it all meant to me. But I put off saying anything about it because I’m too tired of caring so much anymore, and to hell with drama! If it were really worth it, an effort would have been made. But it has to go both ways. And I refuse to grant this another proper narrative. Betrayal is never worth a second thought.

But I love you, I would say to the first pale star, I love you for nothing. Keep it for a rainy day.*

No more, darling. Not this time. Never again.

 

 

*from “A Wilderness of Sweets” by Gilda Cordero-Fernando

Photo by Chrissa Magat, edited by me

You could’ve done better, but I don’t mind

In those days, we were Edie and Bob.

I once had a Penny Lane complex — I wasn’t a groupie, but I had a thing for musicians. You know, boys in bands, specifically those who liked weird music and shared them with me therefore creating the crazy music monster that I am today. I especially liked the frontmen, the ones who publicly made love to either a microphone stand or a guitar (or both). I cheered them on and listened to their songs religiously like the starry-eyed fangirl that I was.

There was one boy. He was skinny and stood slightly hunched, with messy curly hair and piercing eyes that always made me feel slightly uncomfortable. He always wore a gray shirt, tight black jeans, old school Ray-Bans, and a Marlboro Red dangling from his lips. The way he spoke was indicative of his personality: slurred and careless, other times hasty and excited. He did the vocals for his high school band that sounded kind of like Of Montreal on crack (as if they didn’t sound like they were on crack already).

When we first met, I had short hair (just like the kind I have now) and I wore eyeliner. He introduced me to Pablo Neruda, to Sufjan Stevens and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. We had late-night phone conversations when my parents weren’t home, and these lasted until just before six in the morning, just in time for sunrise. Because of him, I dug out our older DVDs so I could watch “Before Sunset” and “Lost In Translation.”

The thing with him was that I never thought of him as pretentious. No, I was a fangirl, of course I adored him. I loved his poems, whether they were about love or something else. I even etched a line from one of them onto the surface of my desk at home (“And I am tired of serenading the wind“). I thought he was way more talented than he probably really was, or maybe that’s just the bitterness talking. But I could honestly say I was delusional. Neruda-esque my ass.

I also loved his music. He wrote some things about me, and in them he called me Bella. Bella. Who was he kidding? And this was before any of that Twilight nonsense came out.

Sometimes I look back on those times and I ask myself, “Girl, what were you thinking?” Then I remember. Oh, right. He looked like a young Bob Dylan. He wrote me poetry and he wrote me songs. He was considerate, kind, and gentle. Even when I was being a frigid bitch, he never said anything. He showed me off to his friends and to the rest of his world. He said I reminded him of Sienna Miller (and Edie Sedgwick). And he always told me the three words first.

But one day, he just disappeared.

It happened gradually. At first, he wouldn’t reply to me or answer my calls for a day. Then he’d send me a message or IM me on Yahoo! Messenger. Then he’d be MIA again for two days until he’d text. Then it became three, four, five, until it reached a couple of weeks or more.

One of his friends said that he was really like that, that he’d just vanish and no one would know where he was. I should have paid attention to all the warning signs. It wasn’t that he was a completely horrible person, but there was something wrong with him. He said it himself, admitting he was bipolar. This is where Thought Catalog’s articles suddenly become relevant and I can only blame myself for being so stupid.

Like I said though, it wasn’t all bad. Sometimes love really is stupid, and that stupidity could work out. It just so happened that ours didn’t. I still feel the same sense of dread and despair when a boy I like doesn’t talk to me for a while, because I’m afraid that he’d leave me all over again. That’s the thing I’m most terrified of.

But what happened then taught me a lot. I realized that I no longer like frail, Bob Dylan-ish boys. I also learned how to chase away my fears with the same things that the skinny boy shared with me. I promised myself to show a little more affection next time, to not be afraid to wear my heart on my sleeve.

I still don’t know if it worked, or if it’s working, but I hope it is. I hope it will.

Bravery in a byline

February 2, 2011. 11:42 PM.

Outside, the fireworks have begun.

Miles away, ambulance sirens join the chaos in Tahrir Square.

In the air-conditioned offices along Esguerra, the cubicle kids and the reporters off-duty huddle over their computer screens, watching the white smoke rise form the corners of Cairo’s streets. Their Twitter feed shows a tweet from Anderson Cooper. “Got roughed up by thugs in pro-mubarak crowd..punched and kicked repeatedly. Had to escape. Safe now.”

My Al Jazeera live stream freezes, and the newscaster stops midway through her sentence. Katie Couric, on Twitter: “Outside square Pro mubarak protestors very hostile…wouldn’t let us shoot video, pushing etc another photog just got punched and maced.” In the background, a constant murmur can be heard – the murmur, when magnified, is the sound of millions of angry voices that refuse to die down.

Over here, everyone’s talking about Kung Hei Fat Choi. I can’t blame them; Egypt is a continent and two millenia away, an idea in our heads of pyramids and pharaohs and desert sands. The same with Baghdad in the nineties and Iraq in the early 2000′s. What’re they to us anyway?

Ah, but in the deep south, everyone is wary. The earth resounds with gunfire, the smell of blood and anger fills the breath of the trees in the jungle. The rebels and the soldiers, the collateral damage in between. The air is heavy with fear, in the careful footsteps of Manila cameramen on dead leaves, the loud heartbeat of the reporter in white betraying the calm on her face.

Bus explosions and bomb threats in universities are closer to home, I suppose, but it seems that journalists all around the world are having a field week. The anchors behind the desks, dressed in suits and black pumps, have all come from that point – years ago they were young and full of energy, swimming through floods and walking on electric wires, shielding themselves from ammo with broken walls and tin roofs.

Somewhere out there, one of them is walking home, unaware that he is being watched by men on a motorcycle.

There is danger, yes. But there is also courage. There will always be some sense of bravery in a byline, and there is mettle even behind Erica Hill’s perfectly blow-dried hair, in the airwaves and in 140-characters.

Here come the butterflies

Funny how a few words could make your insides crumble. Funny, too, how another set of words can bring you back to life. Such is the job of the person who, despite the aloofness, manages to resurrect the butterflies long-dead after months (or even years) of sadness.

I hope he never finds me here.

He probably doesn’t even remember how it all started. Puberty, they say, opens you to the existence of the opposite sex, to boys who smell like the sun in the afternoon shining on a grassy parking lot with an electric tower looming over you. I was 13, still clad in the tablecloth collar and skirt of our all-girls school, memorizing Tori Amos and Gregorian chants in Latin along with Titania’s lines from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” My eyes were brighter then, less weary and wary of the world beyond the brick walls.

My little sister would wait for me at the gates after class ended, sometimes alone, sometimes with her friends. There was one girl with long, dark hair who was usually there, waiting to go home as well. One day I saw her playing with my sister, two little kids passing the time before they could go back to the comforts of their Disney Channel shows and merienda. A few minutes passed and her car arrived, and lo and behold, someone emerged from the passenger seat. “Kuya!” she called out as he took her bags and glanced shyly over towards us. Typical, typical.

He still picks her up from school to this day, but this time he’s the one driving. He’s a lot taller and he’s a lot more fit than he used to be. Gone are the boyish cheeks and the unsure eyes; instead he walks with a certain nonchalance and speaks loud enough to be heard amidst the noise of a cafeteria crowd. Girls pass by him, look over their shoulders, giggle. I roll my eyes. Everyone notices him.

I’m quite sure he’s forgotten that he learned how to handle a camera from me. I had an old film Nikon SLR then, and I used to take a lot of photos in my free time. We were sitting on stone chairs, brushing the falling leaves from our shoulders one quiet afternoon, the soft light filtering through the branches above us. “How does it work?” he asked me. I gave my camera to him and took his hands. “Hold it here, and put your finger on the button here,” I said. “Adjust this part here to get as much light as you can.” He did as he was told.

Oh, to be young and feel the pain of unrequited love.

I still wonder if there had been anything at that time, anything between young me and young him, in those daily texts of “Good morning!” and my replies of “Good morning too!” That shy, awkward boy, now over-confident but still a boy, and his soft smiles when he and you are alone, alone in your apartment at night, having dinner you cooked, falling asleep on separate beds and never considering and never doing anything at all. And I wonder, “What if?” But they all say no and I say no, so there, conversation over. No one wants to date the weird boy, not even after he says “Keri mo naman eh” while you’re wearing his baseball cap and looks away saying, “Nothing,” when you ask him what he just said.

But I guess, maybe someday. Maybe not.

The fluttering feels nice, though.

In defense of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

 

You immediately spot her when you walk into a room.

Dark hair with straight-cut bangs kissing the tips of her eyelashes, her nose buried in Kafka On The Shore, kitten pout at the curl of her lips. In one hand she holds close to her chest a glass mug filled with milk-doused coffee. Headphones covering her ears (teal or pink Urbanears, no less), her foot tapping to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, she looks up and sees you, smiles, then returns her attention to page 294, to Kafka and Miss Saeki in the aftermath of their lovemaking.

You write her off as another Zooeytrope, an Elizabethtownian, a Ramona Flowers without the funky hair. When you sit down and open your book on Plato, you take a peek from the corner of your eye wondering whether she’d stand up and come over and do a Natalie Portman in Garden State, just to prove to yourself that you’re right about her. Hipsterrific, of course. She can’t be anything else.

Stupid boys. Pixies have feelings, too. Look at what happened to Tinkerbell.

Listen, it’s not her fault that writers and directors like using her as a foil for their self-absorbed male protagonists. She’s shallow on screen, bubbly on paper. But in between those lines and in every black out, there’s always something being left out. On purpose. Who wants to know about the chick’s issues? No one. She’s just there to light up your life and that’s that. No one cares that she got her heart ripped to pieces by some asshole in high school. No one cares that she likes to read and make art and plays the ukelele because her now-dead father loved the same things.

Well, whatever. She likes her music because she recognizes the uncanny ability of a few folksy cymbals and indie-hiphop to cheer her up in ways that Britney and Christina can’t (even though she loves them just the same). She reads because, like what Charles Warnke said, “the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end.” She grins with her eyes and blows you a kiss and your head reels but you don’t understand, or maybe you do but you don’t do anything about it.

It sounds like a cliche but she’s like every other girl. She gets lonely, she wants to be pretty, she thinks 90s boy bands are great. She glances at you with a faint cloud of sadness in her eyes because you’ve decided not to give her a chance because she’s just going to hurt you, because she’s “like that bitch Summer,” because she isn’t good enough for you right now. She misses you without knowing you, sorry that she ever hurt you in your past life because she never meant to.

But hey, that’s life, back to Murakami and Vonnegut. Have you heard the new Blalock’s playlist? Walk the Moon was pretty damn awesome.