160 characters.

There was a certain challenge before in the limitations of a mobile phone's capacity to send text messages, just 160 characters and that was it. You had to create another message to continue your thought but, now, you can write a sonnet and you'll still have space leftover for a few haikus. So back then, I took those limitations further and tried electronic poetry. I even wondered back then who else was doing this; thinking it'd be good to share a few hundred digital characters with that person about poetry in 160 characters or less.

These are just a few I have salvaged from my old journals, organizers whenever I had the time to copy what I wrote before I sent them to whoever, because we didn't even have a sent item folder back then in our mobiles and texting with the knowledge that you were only going to see your poem once -- as you had to delete it after it had been sent contained a sort of lyrical loneliness for me, of brilliance and the abrupt loss of that shine. I think I can even say with some degree of certainty that of all those 160 characters I sent, only these few are left.

in the space between dream and waking we held hands and watched each other breathe in silence and quiet desire; dreaming only for the world to stay this way.

you run like warm cappuccino in my mouth when we are afternoons forever, together we look like the perfect coffeetable book, dog-eared and missing pages.

the lost routine and vanished certainties.the faded sidewalks and silent restaurant doors.the dark early morns and wasted twilights. us, the ghosts in between.

i wish for rain and i know every time i wish it may not always rain but i wish anyway, beyond belief, for each time it rains, it is you that rains in me.

i miss you like life after death and even if i may not live beyond the love collective i'll still miss you forever like fishball sauce and summer sunsets.

i want to create another word for love,for no standard definition fits or exists.i have another word unknown by Webster or the World Wide Web,that word is you.

19 other odd things we did, 40 other even things we wanted and 30 other things to miss since you're not here and 10 more things to do when you come back.

love song lyrics are running through me and i have holes in me the size of Ateneo, i am not okay. i am not level. i am romeo with an acid flashback of you.

A film we should have watched together.

(On a balcony, overlooking a lower part of the city. Jesse is sitting on the stone rail, Céline is leaning against it.)

Jesse: I feel like this is uh, some dream world we're in, you know.

Céline: Yeah, it's so weird. It‘s like our time together is just ours. It‘s our own creation. It must be like I'm in your dream, and you in mine, or something.

Jesse: And what's so cool is that this whole evening, all our time together, shouldn't officially be happening.

Céline: Yeah, I know. Maybe that's why this feels so otherworldly. But then the morning comes, and we turn into pumpkins, right?

Jesse: Ahhh...

Céline: Yeah, I know. But at this time, I think you're supposed to produce the glass slipper, and see if it fits.

Jesse: Yeah?

Céline: Yeah.

Jesse: It'll fit.

basta.

It has been so long but always you'd be the right person to walk with during afternoons along the Avenue, along the dusty streets of Naga, along the empty corridors and covered walks of Ateneo in summer. It has been so long but you are the one person I'd always ask out, not for a date, but to eat Biggs dinners or Greenwich lunches, and the usual kinalas. It has been so long but you'd be the first person I would come and look for to tell any small significant thing that made me see the world in another way. It has been so long but you're the only one who'd let me cry first before asking questions of why tears are there on her shoulders. It has been so long but there would be no other I'd want to be with, to listen to lazy rainy afternoons and let the comfortable silence tell all our stories for us. It has been so long but only you would jump right into the fantasy of our text messages without any cue, or inhibition. It has been so long but you still fall in love with my letters and turn of phrases and mean it when you say so. It has been so long but I still worry like a mother when I can't say exactly where you are. It has been so long but you still derail my thoughts and I wander along the wreckage, smiling; my favorite distraction. It has been so long but your eyes are the only pair I'd want to see squinting in the golden afternoon sun. It has been so long and I know I can only say so much.

It has been so long but the words come easy the way our hands easily fit into each other, and this is the way we have gotten too close our pores have become bestfriends.

tell Sara I got my angst back.

The storms are just perfect. I would have smiled if I could, but futile and plastic if I force it and so no, no smile just a thank you for the weather. As of late, there has been a sense of urgency, a resolute need to walk, to just walk and hold my life in my thoughts for that space. Except that I'm in Manila, where I am strange, dislocated and disconnected.

In Naga, most probably I would already be shivering in this rain and walking and seeing only green fields and myself. and you. This is not a wish for melodrama but it would be so good to walk in this rain, in this storm and in this cold and that either there won't be anybody around except me or that you'd be there and walk with me.

But it would be another year before I have the chance to be there and to see all the things I have been and to let me know that I am myself again. The story of my life.

So I wrote somewhere.

'I will see you when I look out of the bus window, I will see you when I see the stars shine outside the bus. And I will see my reflection looking at all this and see me thinking about you.

I am destiny's fool.'

sa paghuna.

ta paghuna ta kasubago mauran.
madaradagom,
malipot si duros,
kaya naghalat kita
sagkod nagrewind ning dikit
kang mga pirang bulan
duman sa tukawan.
na naka-abot kung sain man
puedeng uranan.
tapos kapot, hadok.
sabay halat giraray.
nag-alok ka na mapauran kita.
na garo mga aki, na
garo ngonyan pa lang
makakamati ning lipot.
sabi ko iyo,
pero habo ko muna maghali duman
sa kaimbungan kang paghalat ta.

Iyo, sige, niako.
ulay na muna kita,
ta mayo pa man ang lipot kang uran.

dai nadagos si uran kang hapon na ito.
banggi na,
kang nasa taas kita.
nagdadangog sa ribok kang atop.
sagkod kita, imbong na lang gabos
asin kugos.

we'll slowdance in the rain.

I'll watch rain fall all over you like a hundred thousand kisses made real
then let our hands slip together over each other, sliding over the wetness
if we shiver at first, then we'll embrace and we'll be our own warmth for just that little while.
and after the coldness passes, we stare at each other's eyes again like this is the first
or perhaps the last.

we'll taste the rain as the music in our minds start to play
and it will be warm rain gathering on our skin, collecting in million little reflections of us
we'll move slowly like this afternoon rain, languid and unhurried
emotions rising like black and white photos, old and familiar and lovely.

for a little while we will have our time in this afternoon rain,
and dancing to the music we played a long time ago
a certain song that our drenched bodies move along now
to dream of forever in this world and the falling rain.

we'll keep on smiling for as long as the heavens break down above
and close our eyes to keep in a memory, in remembrance
of one rainy afternoon we slowdanced along with the falling rain.

you autocomplete me.

There are some odd times I google your name, usually during early early mornings, and I make a silent secret request that a single correct hit would come up and hyperlink me a little electronic story about you, one that I haven't heard before and one that would make missing you a bit more reasonable; something that I can explain by myself; why I pushed the back button again in my mind, instead of just a repetitive F5. Just a little something to make me get over this pining away, until the next time your memories come phishing my current memory banks; that I flicker to safe mode in order not to crash again. Then I make the request again and get the usual 404 code and I try all the search engines for just a ghost of a whisper of your name, any electronic trace of you with a recent timestamp, anything, anything but the residual images and data crashes of years ago.

The 404 codes defragments me just by reading it, because the lines make you hope when you'd rather not, when you'd rather want a dead link and not continue believing the line that it is just "temporary unavailable". Then a 410 loads up sometimes and I depress the power button for the longest time until everything blanks out and the LEDs turn from green to orange then fade out entirely, and I start to envy the instant purging of its memory banks. To turn myself off without saving, just blank out, out of the grid.

But eventually I turn it on and myself; and I am again looking at my static user interface, knowing that if I go deeper in the interface, all user rights and all the defaults are in your name, even if I am the administrator. And I go to google your name again, ready for the results and the letdown.

Then suddenly a 302; you, streaming and live.