some day.

Perhaps even closer than Friday somewhere in the month of let's say, August, some weeks before your birthday you would let me take you to the edge of the ocean; that perhaps the world will let us take ourselves to the ocean and you would hold my hand again as we walk along the shoreline, because we have never left wet temporary footprints in the sand before except in my mind. Perhaps the grittiness of wet sand between our toes would be a lovely memory to have, along with the waves making only a shushing sound when the tide is out.

Perhaps some day, because I missed you.r eyes just moments after I woke up this morning.

a distant memory.

There was this one night -- I remember you wearing a white shirt and faded jeans, just flip flops and your hair tied in that knot. It was getting late and you had to get home soon. We passed through a convenience store on the way to go look for this orange soap and it was there that this memory got stuck. You, under that harsh fluorescent light, looking upon two rows of soap and shampoo, then you looked at me, a smile across the distance of a few shelves of household products and cosmetics. I called you, some moments later, but not by your name, and you held my hand as I got close enough, silent and grinning.

I wonder now, if this memory is just too distant it already borders on fantasy. But I distinctly remember your smile and I think that is all that matters for this remembrance to be true.

It was not a cold night, it was warm. Like us.

some cool evening.

I woke to the sound of light rain falling, and as I opened my eyes in the darkness, I doubted my ears. I got off the bed some minutes later and saw rain spatters glistening on the window of the parked tricycle outside our room. I had another doubt whether to call it rain at all, as the wetness from the concrete outside was already fading like fragments of a dream. It was just one of those two minute rains, that fell before summer, and it was just going to make the night more humid. But still it would have been good to see the beginning of that rain fall, however fleeting it was. It would have been good to stare it for some few still moments. I got ready for work and left not trying to think about it.

Almost two hours later,on my break and as I was reading a recent text message, the rain came. It fell hard; shameless and inviting. Cold and so missed, like it hadn't fallen for eight years and I was a dry, cracked ground, eroding in the summer wind grain by grain. When I saw the rain dancing on the black asphalt streets I had to fight the urge to walk slowly somewhere where the rain fell the hardest and the coldest. I really wanted to. I would, if not for the circumstances of work and obligation. It was just a few minutes shy of a new day, and the darkness was only broken by the light coming from the lampposts and the orange and green fluorescents of a nearby 7-11.

I watched a few meters away from the downpour and as the wind picked up, some errant drops would shower on me and I smiled like a child. I watched and smiled until the rain ceased to be a rain and only its slickness and wetness remained shining on the asphalts and the marble floor of the entrance to the building I was working in.

I read your message again, and felt you falling inside me like rain. A long time coming. I have really missed the rain falling, along with me.

something like.

it feels like a little of something,
like something familiar,
like some taste of sorrow
and a slice of almost pure joy.
I feel it is a little something
like desire

it feels a little like love, baby
a little like despair
of everything that we are
mixed in with hope and lust
and yes, it is feels a little like love.

it feels a little like when I am near you
and our skin kissing each other
it also feels like that time I watched you
ride away in the evening wind

it feels a little like love, baby
a little like perfectness
of everything that we are
mixed in with you and me
and yes, it is feels a little like love.

it feels a little like when we are
looking for each other when
distance is so real
and just a little embrace
then we are ready to die

it feels a little like love, baby
a little like being complete
of everything that we are
mixed in with your eyes and mine
and yes, it feels a little like love.

baby, I guess this is love.

okay ka lang?

I had to put off writing for a while, I was too far gone at some point and purposely writing about something else would only eventually make me succumb to your gravity and drag me raw against the gravel-covered street of your silence. For a time it was all downhill from there, and after a week I waited for the numbness that I know would come at some point, after having been here a number of times already.

Only this time I wasn't afforded that numbness and somewhere promptly forgot how to smile without being conscious of it. The absence of rain only made things feel worser than it was. No cold to turn to for a brief respite from all this silence and my sledgehammer reveries, as no hour passes without you staying inside my thoughts, like you owned them. And you are.

I have to wean myself from music again, it really goes well with all the emotions roiling inside me and everytime I turn the volume up I forget myself and only you remains. It gets harder to pick myself up after the music stops and the world reminds me that I have to be up to speed with its revolutions. I stay in bed for some time and ignore everything to continue revolving around you instead. When the darkness has embraced me long enough then I move and fall into routine.

Then I read "musta?"

I almost close my eyes as gravity calls and as I heed that call, again.

and like an afterthought, I remembered a line from a book saying that the rictus of pleasure closely resembles the rictus of extreme pain, enough that one can be interchanged for the other.

some rain.

as of late, like nearly half a year, sleep eludes me now during bus rides.
I only keep staring outside and my mind blurs like the scene passing outside.
like the road names, like the street signs, like the public schools devoid of children
like the rusty bucolic decadence of some homes and junk shops that appear out of the rural landscape
and like them, time also blurs and only the sun passing overhead will remind me of change.

on my way here to Manila, the rain fell, silent and secret at first
then like all eventualities, came and became;
and thus painted the bus window to translucency
but you were already on my mind long before I saw the grey clouds;
precursors of automatic remembrances and longing

since as of late, slumber has been replaced by something more important.
in between the rides and during the miles, sleep is a forgotten obsolete notion
when it concerns you and hurting for you.

that old insensate feeling.

I have just been looking at feathers in my hand, for the longest time; all of them scattering now and getting lost from each other in this rare wind that had began to pick up speed and strength a minute ago, or it could be hours. Weeks, perhaps. I have feeling that it has been weeks. I cannot begin to move and strangely the ground has grown to be comfortable. I tried to be close to the sun, and even armed with the foreknowledge I flew high enough and the reality of distance took over and so I fell, and gravity embraced me like a long lost lover. I hurt all over, and I still get to wonder why I have still haven't crumbled along with the feathers in this breeze. The feeling of sedation had set in except for some parts where the hurt just got all concentrated. I have to close my eyes in a few moments, in this pain without release.

The feathers were gone the next time I opened my eyes and my mind now is on fast forward, going to Friday, imagining things about this coming Friday. I will be walking again; walking on old, different streets that I haven't seen for some time. It is just Tuesday, and it seems forever in between. But I still have to live even if it maybe a mere reflection, I only have to be somewhere for sometime in order to do that and not look at the sun for sometime, not to look and remind myself of the futility of her distance despite the very warmth. I haven't slept in a month, perhaps Friday might be a little less cruel and allow me some, perhaps even throw in a three-minute dream of the sun and her possibilities.

because dreams, dreams, they aren't born of reason.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

martianlove.

To peel off some layers of memory. Slow and leisurely unwrapping of the years. The dear and beautiful parts where we burst into flames and died out just as fast. Like after a tryst, you walked away sudden and without a word. Then nightly you dreamed in high definition about me and about us. Our grounded emotions wanting to be picked up and carried inside our clothes like perfume or that cologne that smelled so like the smell of rain coming in our room. For all the places in our mind that in recent days we had discovered again, those secret joys of our own, all our own again. Old, timeless stories making us smile again, after being kept, deliberately neglected and during some days almost forgotten. The keeping that we thought... futile and unneeded for those memories, our emotions had proved the otherwise. Then overcome and carried away, we smiled and knew that the best and precious things in our lives were always free and just an embrace away.

give me a reason.

I'm sorry... since almost akin to a preprogrammed thought pattern, you're still the first thought when I wake up and you're still the last thought on my mind before I sleep; and sometimes even during sleep itself, you're there along with the shimmer in your eyes, like small oceans with the sun caught drowning in its waves.

You're...you're... you know, these are not really easy things to say over the phone, in text messages or more, in e-mails, even in these posts that I know you never read or when we get the chance to converse again in a promised next time that we see eye to eye again. We'd prefer to let silence wash over us during those moments and that silence only to hold us nearer; when the moment passes then I can try again.

This is what you are to me, and I guess this is just the way that I am, the way that I made myself, unconsciously around you. I thought there was a choice, between ignoring it and just letting it be. There wasn't.

Let it be, let it be then, please just let it be.

a mixtape for our silence.

These past weeks I silently played songs in my mind along with my media player, and lip-synched their lyrics. They sometimes slowly carried me to short uneasy naps, or accompanied me in the short lonely bus rides to work, or played like musical scores on my long way back to the apartment in the morning and they gently ripped me apart during mid-afternoons when sleep was never there and I could only miss you.

And so I sang them in my mind and thought of you and us, and some were more than familiar enough that the words weren't memories at all, and with some I stumbled along and learned. As I sang along, I knew some of those songs would entirely speak our thoughts for us if we were listening to them; the words becoming our own, an adlib for our chronicles, filling in the silence.

In our, perhaps, self-imposed silence, it would be so good to hear those songs together, and listen to the words as they come and as they retell our thoughts about each other, and to just bridge the gap of the long prolonged hush that had come over us the past weeks. Please let me hold your hand then, make that instance of touch be our calm assurance that reality is never harsh as we want it to be, as we go over the verses and the choruses of those songs we have heard over the absent years and the new ones that we heard together. To hear those songs together and fill our ourselves with ourselves again.

And I know, even if we don't get to hold hands because of distance or of circumstance, our minds will always find a way to embrace as before and like before; and as linked as before with how we feel, like twins of some sort, of some other weirdness or with our beloved idiosyncrasy when we are together. So that I can get to wish that we can listen to these songs together in some other way and listen to these songs silence this silence away. Then we can just miss each other in a good way, without the need for our own words for reassurance, just our presence and these songs.