my 42.

another sign I have to ignore when I haven't seen the stars in nights
and the prophets of doom are getting more restless every day;
and that part where the rain is joy sublime
falls during the most opportune time when I'm boxed inside concrete, steel and glass.
The paranoia sometimes really feels old
and equally compares to what I feel when I see the rain;
those personal reverse Back to the Future episodes.
And by the time the clouds drift into other shapes,
I have agreed with Randall Munroe again
that wanting something doesn't make it real,
even if you manage to fool yourself somehow.
The resulting coldness being the only consolation as the rain fades away.

Then I remember Fox Mulder's poster in his basement office and know that I do.
And so, I go on continue wanting anyway.

trance is one of our words.

this afternoon, knowing that I cannot drown out the clamor of my thoughts, knowing that I cannot move you into the background, knowing that there are intimations of paradox in our worlds that had suddenly merged, knowing that there are chances of going back to the void, I have to stop knowing; and forget and only feel.

I press play instead and feel the woofers hum before the music comes on, then I play it loud enough to drown out the world and even the sound of my breathing; and as the bass thumps against my chest, and I forget reason, and logic becomes unbound three minutes into it and I close my eyes and see you there.

Then there is no heat of summer, and I only feel the syncopations going through me, going through me, layer by layer and pulse by pulse. I let go and forget myself, and go on folding time and go on folding space to keep somewhere where even most memory cannot follow. I keep moving and I have no idea of where, I go where the music goes and my heartbeat keeps rhythm like an internal mix of its own. This is not vision anymore because I can see in the darkness, and when I open my eyes it is the same. So I keep them closed and go on shifting and moving and somewhere along lose the certainty of gravity, the certainty of realness and the certainty of almost everything in the daze of this 4/4 beats. In this exquisite deconstruction and abstraction, that is now beyond beauty, I forget almost all.

But the body reminds and you are there and we move, our bodies glistening, holding, twisting around each other, liquefying in this trance, and going where we have been before but forgotten now in this dream that has forgotten to fade, because we are now our own strange attractors, dancing into our very own fractals.

by the window.

One afternoon, I saw sadness sitting by the window staring into space, calm and expressionless as if contemplating happiness. She looked o so lovely there, by her lonesome that I wanted to go near and hold her hand but I think it wouldn't be proper. It wouldn't look good at all. So I sat down just a few meters away and watched her, painted by the afternoon, her gaze still unwavering. I could see traces in the immediate air from the longing in her breath and and the way she stared outside, it seemed she gave off the dreaminess of a subdued pain. She grew lovelier by the minute, and every second of this melting mid-afternoon, or perhaps hours, it must have been hours, I can't be sure. So I continued to lose sense of time as I gazed at her, unmoving in that sedated yellow light coming in from the window; my mind unravelling alongside.

Wished I had a camera.

And almost forgot the one in my head so I took pictures and stored them in my mind for some future time; a slideshow just for times like this certain mid-afternoon - when I'm like her and I'm missing you.

cheezepaper returns.

We were there, all of us, this one afternoon, this one time and looking at pieces of paper where we wrote random adjectives and nouns, and which we later fished out of that glass jar coming up with these two string of words: 'cheezepaper returns' and 'broken digital candies' like a portent of a future event. Perhaps we just wanted a band name because there was a big chance that we would be performing before a crowd. Cheezepaper Returns won over the more pop sounding result. Later the Returns was dropped and I have forgotten what the reason was, perhaps we just wanted something more succinct. Short and unforgettable even I almost forgot that one bit part.

In retrospect and since recently as I was writing about those times, our lives at that time and those souls that I grew up with, some of the details came back in bursts of clarity that though remembered also faded like a dream. But for some time as I held those memories and I also wrote them down and it helped. And I also know that at that time we didn't just want a band name. We also wanted something to call that intangible thing of being part of something. So it was Cheezepaper.

It has been more than a decade since and cheezepaper has also become a verb for us, but in the end, we know, it would always be that noun, that something that we called ourselves. Sometimes we speak of it if only to evoke that time after that fateful afternoon, of the years after that and how our lives had been. Even if only in our minds now.

Once a cheezepaper, always a cheezepaper. So it goes, yes, so it goes.

from left, Fiel, Ninoy, Bonks, Nald, Jao.

these eyes are nearsighted but they are still meant to admire you.

Don't let them just wither away here, vision mildly decaying year after year. Resolving pixels on my monitor screen in place of you, seeing digital words and virtual images so limited by the contrast, brightness and RGB control. This pair haven't seen you for so long, they have begun to see you everywhere; like ghosts of varying degrees of translucency and desaturation, all lingering suggestions of your beauty both normal and paranormal. From that giant eye of an actress in a billboard to the slightest variance of the jawline of the the girl sitting across me in the commuter train I take everyday. Lingering. Lingering. All striking my photoreceptor cells with the same force of how your memory boots me up in the morning.

Everyday a constant barrage of you, when you are not really there. Visual information overload. And, no, I just cannot close my eyes.

The darkness of my room is a tricky refuge when it hits me as a good idea for escape. And when my eyes adjust to the darkness, in the absence of color, there is nothing to remind; except that in the darkness there are things other than me. In the shadows and light deprived spaces of my room are my classified intelligence photos, satellite images of you filed under reveries and ultimately the memories driven by an internal combustible engine I call my imagination. The darkness isn't safe really when dreaming is another realm of looking for you. Escape only comes with sleep, dreamless sleep, provided by sheer physical exhaustion.

It's been too long, been too long squinting at the first sight of the early afternoon, or the mid-morning sun, some sights that are accompanied by involuntary moisture sometimes. Every day is this. Every afternoon is this. Every night is this. The world is so lomo, underexposed positives and photoshopped reality when I want a full color, life-sized and all of the possible 10 million colors of you. I have had enough of pseudo representations of you, please satisfy the saturation points of my eyes again.

Let me see you again, because my eyes they only make up the first line of a whole range of appreciation for you and they are barely my whole arsenal when it comes to loving you.