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.

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.