From: Darling

“There is no tragedy in having to start again, as long as you start again.” - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.

                -and if I have a hundred fingers, it still wouldn’t cover the amount it took me to start and achieve the version I am today; to chase after the image I so desperately desire in the future over and over again. And so, when my professor asked if I'd want to return as a child, I shook my head. “There is no glory in remaining the same”  I thought. There is no glory in returning to that fragile girl in freshman orientation. It was only a year ago and yet she was more a child than myself ten years past, and I don’t know how  to feel about that. Much to my dismay, there was nothing sparkly in the very first year of being accepted in the place I prayed so hard for. It was a blur of events, where I wanted to feel like myself over and over again. The official farewell to adolescence — as I'd like to call it — was the moment I stepped foot in my chosen university, Sintang Paaralan. Just as the unexplainable tend to be feared, awe is never far behind, and awe I felt, the magnitude of dreams, ambitions, and life I have envisioned for myself came pouring from an overflowing dam of stagnance. 

               Finally, I am gripping the pen that holds the ink of my own becoming. My name will be on a diploma. First, I have to survive.  

It’s a taboo to admit you’re not in love with the dream university you prayed for — especially in a prose you’re submitting to the campus. After all, why waste years of agonizing and desperate prayers for this, only to lose yourself  before the throes even begin. And so, this is the prose of confessions where my freshman year felt like a rupture of the self, or a mutilation of a dear body part, the catalyst of all my uncertainties, and all the figs Sylvia Plath fed me.  Perhaps what they don’t tell you about arriving at your dream is how much of yourself you’ll have to leave at its gates. 

               The horrifying inclemency of my mind followed me through the dawn of my freshman year. It was like everything, unlike everything, where the same activities, and school papers had to be submitted but of different people and different betrayals of my relationships and expectations of grandeur. Where the same hunger for a non-existent recognition, and the ever so present obligations but of different magnanimity. It showed in the most aggravating moments where I had to painstakingly build my village, test waters, and every lexicon, every recitation, every attendance felt nothing but performance instead of stepping into the light of the dreams materializing into my very eyes. 

When Sophomore came, and I had the chance to witness the new freshmen stepping into their own dais — where my old reverence held — it was nothing short of breathtaking. It’s puzzling to feel proud and happy for strangers when I couldn’t even raise the corners of my mouth in the same position I was in. There is a different kind of disillusionment when I entered my freshman year. It took me a hundred rebirths to be able to enter this lovely school, a few thousand to survive the first year, and countless more to be able to realize how there was never anything to be lost, that gripping the quill of my diploma until my knuckles turn white and my hands bruise, will never change kismet. To finally realize that when triumph starts to rot in your hands, it is perfectly alright to cry, and you start, all over again. To realize that your friends in freshman year have long since abandoned you, and the hard work you did might just be paying off, just not as loud as others so long as you start all over again. To love life even when you have absolutely no stomach for it. 

Sophomore, junior, and senior, will fly by, and there will always be time to build a hut in the middle of the wreckage my history has made, over and over, again. 

In my head I do everything right. - Lorde, Supercut 

I don’t know how to write without overspilling my words, it seems so difficult to write and leave it at two sentences, or a phrase. Always never enough. 

This is my pilgrimage of love and the ouroboros of my fear, where nothing ever stops with a period. 

The change came like an impending storm in the rainy season— right after I planned an outing, and as odd as it may sound, I should’ve accepted it by now, even anticipated it, but then it wouldn’t be me if everything comes so easily. I think it was the sugar, everyone knows youth is associated with sugar and I wish that’s the only issue correlated with this, but its not, when you've spent your entire adolescence loving and hating your age it gradually starts to feel like strutting in front of the muscular surfer guy who trains tourists and arching your back just a little farther out for him to notice, he never did, I was thirteen. As a child, I suppose I was not quite normal. 

When the adults and their ‘too sweet’’ comments about food started haunting me, I began consuming sweeter things, afraid I'd become like them, compliant about being robbed of the tiny pleasures in life. It disgusts me that my tastebuds are morphing into those of bitter people. I wanted to keep wanting sugar so I avoided coffee like the plague and drank sweeter chocolates like my body is infinite. The intense fear of becoming someone else was magnanimous and change can go fuck itself, because I am going to stay like this forever, I am going to stay as the pre teen my mother called lovable after a crying session, even as I feel the ligaments of that statement tear itself apart 4 years later, even as I sit here talk about love knowing in the fibers of my being that I have manipulated everyone who has ever fallen in love with me to fall in love with me. I read a book with a quote claiming love as one of the most violent acts, and so I would stay here on my bed, thinking about the metaphors of sugar while my future self sips her bitter coffee, and neither of us will be there for the other. She will not be there and I will be here, looking for every sliver of reasons why I had to leave all the people I had to leave.

Kumusta ka? (next time you will hear this phrase, you will know it`s me)

It is said that love turns people soft but what of grief?

I read somewhere that lemon trees are very selective about their caretakers, I didn't believe plants could have a grain of sentience enough for that until Mami told me the mango tree refused to bear fruit until you left. It was bountiful. The old meager tree was lavish with its delicious supplies and I wonder if it dislikes you. Or it could be that it repents for its utter futility that it's desperate to prove itself useful after you left. So many many theories but I like to think it was you. 

You are the tree. You are the fruit we devour. 

As we gather the harvest some curious neighbors would gaze up in awe of its glory. The mangoes never seem to end and Mami is distressed about the too high branches and remaining fruits. 

             “Sayang naman.” she said, dismay written across her features. The lines on her face had gone deeper and I know I have no jurisdiction over kismet but all that's running in my head were desires of both your lives longevity, enough for you to see each other's furrows deepen and enjoy life to its fullest.

Resumed comments of astonishment were heard from the neighbors, all familiar faces of people my kid eyes had witnessed throughout my childhood and my heart twinged. I do not resent any of them and these thoughts plaguing my head would make me throughly sinful but I'm helpless over it, there was this doltish guy next to the house who had kept carping about the tree, his place next to the house were nothing but scraps and junk, I do not think he lives there. Everyone disrelished him. I’d be dishonest to say I didn't, what does he have over the greater beings that his life is longer than you in spite of his youth? Why is that you are revered and loved while he was detested yet he lasted, and at the most rotten landscape of rectitude I ask God, would it hurt to transfer a few years out of him to you. Surely there are no reasons he would want his unkind life of disability to last?

I swallowed a throat-scraping sob, you deserve this life far more than these people do. 

But who am I to say that? Who am I to judge who is deserving of time and who isn't? Daughter of God shaped by cruelty of eternal grief? Was our love scant that it wasn't enough to keep the air in your lungs flowing? What makes one's life greater than the others? I do not wish to speak ill of others but, what have you ever done to be deserving of that greater pain than they do?

As if regaining my composure, I ran, my little hands closing her door before walking back. I cried. 

             Ma, ano ulam?

             I don’t know, wala tayong taga luto.

I cried harder.

       This is the first time I have ever written of you and I wish pain and absence didn't take the place of a person. He was supposed to be here. I was supposed to know him and take care of him. 

—external part of essay (will not be submitted) 

         I’ve read a poem on Pinterest, it says ‘poetry does not cure grief--but it understands’ and perhaps this goes the same for you as well. These letters will not accomplish anything, this will not bring you back and I am ashamed to confess that I have written literature for people who have not earned it and yet I couldn’t offer even a single comma for you. Forgive me, I was too young, too young to joke about death but naive enough to carry the gravity of it. Forgive me, forgive me for seemingly turning blind eye to your encased body in need of warm embraces. Forgive my childish eyes, for looking unfeeling. I love you so much.

        Grief is different. Grief has no distance. It comes in waves, paroxysm, sudden apprehension that weakens the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. But does grief come in all forms? Was it grief when my adolescence wept without cognizance of what was truly happening, was it grief to be numb from the absolute agony of death right in front of my eyes? Was it grief to take years before my brain had processed what had happened? Facing grief is tough, I had not expected it to take the shape of an English essay on a random Thursday night. I miss you more than I remember you and I do not know what that says about me, if that is such a bad thing as all I wanted is to embrace you. 

—internal part of essay (will be submitted) 

       In another universe, your soft fatherly eyes gazed at me with fondness while you handed me the piso I've been asking for since yesterday. In another universe, we had an ulam that is not sunny side up.

I wish your head explodes from some unexplainable godly pressure squeezing your brains and skull from the insides as if it's a excruciating migraine you couldn't get rid of, eventually driving to the explosion of your innards or it could be an invisible pair of gigantic fingers squeezing your head without remorse, your blood would squirt from your neck and arteries ripped, eyes popped out jumping from your sockets to dirts on the ground, finally matching the things your eyes refuse to see. The iris of your orbs would stare back at me with shame as I respond with mirth

Your blood would scatter all over the place, the gore might even reach me as the sputters of flesh are ripped apart from its confines. Every fragment of the miniscule anatomical brain you possess would be unidentifiable but I would know your frontal lobes and all others would be mere filthy flesh staining the fabrics I've worn rather than a once living human incapable of anything other than spitting sins. You repulse me but my entirety would shiver in satisfaction as I watch the pieces of your bones break into smithereens much like a glass I'd dropped once at midnight.

The room would retreat into sudden silence but the horror and shock of those in front of you would alter their lives forever. The happiness you'd all been laughing at would perish as your friends stared at the mortification of dripping flesh and putrid bones. Some would be in their mouth, some in their eyes, and everything in their faces. I would hope one of your eyes lands on the chest of one recreant and traitorous companion I'd once procured or perhaps the most obnoxious of the group. Screams would erupt and I would sit in silence of blood and terror. Peace humming in my body…one you no longer have.

Beauty is the beast; a retelling of beauty and the beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne from Belle’s perspective. 

“A curse upon your house and all within it. Until you have found someone to love you as you are, you shall remain forever a beast.” my mother announced with a venom laced voice, and the once striking prince of Alsace transmogrified into a creature of horror and malice. With tusks of a savage boar, a brindle of a regal mane, and a howl that leaves my bones rattling in my skin, everything looked like the beast she proclaimed him to be. It was akin to a chimera — a critter from my books. It looked fairly occult but to be able to set my eyes on it right in front of me was everything I could ever dreamed of, It was rather… beguiling. Along with the prince’s mutation comes the grotesque transformation of the pompous nobles and servants around, their skin yanking apart with screams of torment as the orchestra of the night and their bones crepitating until they’re nothing more than chattels and fitments to be used. Fascination settled in my gut. 

— That was eons ago, I glanced at the grime pooling under my nails and the tears soaking the collar of my dress. Life is fleeting and father is no stranger to that, thanks to his gullibility and foolish verdicts I’ve made it right where I desire, my lovely beast’s waiting arms. “He's a fool. So are you.” my beast had told me before leaving me to paint the bricks red with my hands drenched in foul blood. He was wrong of course, but I can't tell him that, the only fool in this story is him. All of them, for not discerning the deception right under their noses. 

                Finally, I am their guest. 

Inheriting mother's magic wasn't part of the original story. I am La belle, the beast's captive and he is my wicked captor, I am supposed to wail and yet I was a boiling teapot of unrepressed ecstasy. My beast's transformation did not only invoke fascination but passion, It was love and no one can tell me otherwise. Mother didn't see it coming but I was made for him. I made a deal with the beast and let him subjugate me in his hell. It turns out that was exactly what I needed. I am his and he is mine. 

From: Darling

If I morphed into someone you never agreed to be with, If I suddenly couldn’t be the rings in your Saturn, couldn’t be your rest, couldn’t be the flower and sunshine you adore, If I couldn’t give you a scrap of my infamous delectables or  feed our skins passion no more, no longer aesthete, would the monster even be me, to you? Does your heart beat for me or the fruits I can sprout? If I turned into a worm tomorrow, will all the memories remain, would your heart stay the same? 

Would you place me in a terrarium, fill it with soil and grist? Would you spray water on me or throw me out onto the  hard pavement ready to be stamped on? Or would you rather feed me to the crows? Would I be repulsive, your hands would refuse and recoil at the mere sight of me? 

Would you still love me if I was a worm? I think I would put you in my favorite pot of plants sheltered by its leaves and my roof. 

From: Darling

Today is May 1. 11:56 pm, 4 minutes till May 2 and this is an appreciation letter for myself. 

I am doing better now. I have flourished, I bloomed, and I am now working to be a much much better person than I was previously. Last year, last May. And that's not saying my past does not matter any longer but It is what pushed me to be better than what I was before. This is a concession of my history, my blunders, my affliction, and my romance. The preceding year, the dawn of May would have me sobbing on my bolster, filled with anguish for a love I did not deserve, a love so vicious it was pernicious, it mangled my whole perception of what it means to give my all, deluded by a happy ever after that will never come; I abandoned sagacity. I am doing better now. Healing was an onerous process be that as it may I made it out alive. 

The tears that could've drowned me were now the water feeding the garden around my soul. I am content. I am healed, and although there are times that scars throbs eliciting vivid emotions and scenes of the past, I feel fortified. As the 2nd of May arrives, I wanted to let my heart, soul, and entire being be made aware that I am elated. I've survived not because I needed to but because I wanted to. I withdrew, I ran, I hid, I fought back and reclaimed my equanimity and nirvana. I've defended the castle that has sheltered me through thick and thin and I will keep doing so. Challenges might arise but I am thoroughly grateful. 

*May 2. 12:06 am 

         There are days where I feel like a corpse. This is it. Perhaps it’s the leaden weather, an eternal rain blanketing the skies and village that made me it, perhaps it's the noises- every fucking where, from the dogs incessant barks across the goddamned house, maybe the ear piercing complains of the abuser who calls herself a good mother behind the house, her screaming pesky little kids, maybe it’s also my sisters joyful laughter that grates my ears. I don’t know which, seriously, everything fucking drills in my cortex. what.the.actual.fuck is wrong with these people. I seemed to be under the impression that this peaceful and placid weather should equal the environment, it doesn’t. It didn't, it will never be. Everyone around me seemed to become insufferable in 24 hours time and I am held captive to witness the grotesque aftermath of whatever this fucked up shitty evolution has come to be. I became a corpse. Rotting and macabre, very very fitting for all hallows eve. I haven’t done any stupid things for a while now, soon my corpse will shed and skeletons will emerge. I will be the bones that haunts you for fun.

A comparative analysis of a burnout writer and half a student with extinguished flames for passion. It started with a query, “If I manage to create an art as visceral as the eminent poets and great mavens would you take part and behold the luminary I've made you?” Would you rummage my dimensions, speak behind the canvas of quean or open a scorching book to marshal confused letters in the author's dedication. You replied with a “Sure”, Not a yes, not an I will. Not a certain but an equivocal sure as if that question was not worth shit. 

Sure is the father who seeks milk, he might return. Sure is the priest who tells you God harks back after abstinence. Sure are the mauve gashes bestrewed on my thighs after I swore to stop. Sure are the barcodes I drew with fervor. Sure is your mother's “I will always be here” till death rolls up. Sure is dusk but then dawn exists while the moon is the Yes clouded by the latter. Sure is happiness and Yes is pain. It's salvation and sin wrapped in silks, tapering in the edges of divinity. 

Yes are the oblation. Yes is the blood from the incisions. Yes is my father who stayed. Yes is my mother who embedded mortality in my veins. Yes are the rows of cicatrix down each wrists and please... forgive me If I do not wish to be included in the concourse of your sure uncertainties. 

–My Yes is an incurable hemophilia that drips and drips while Sure is your apology to mangled amputations. 

– Your Sures are the letters of fallen soldiers to every widowed wife. My yes is the great war of rage that obliterates the indigent

From: Darling

As I unremittingly watch your videos consisting of transient moments of your mundane day to day activities, I realized just how much I try to divert my eyes away, the more verity presents itself that our worlds resemble the perfect paradigm of polarity of opposites. Whereas you rouse before the roosters sing and attend to your daily routines, I am buried six feet under a mountain of bed linens, eyes closed until my body aches before I eat ennui for morgenmete.

You'd talk joyously anent the places you've just been while I lend my ears, unconsciously anticipating the circadian downfall of my lampshade and the abject irritation coming alongside it. You'd tell me anecdotes of ziplines and your crusades with ebullience and my frowned lips would curve at your soporific voice, imagining the montage terrains through my blue veiled window like I haven't done it since the beginning of dwindling time. You're optimistic while I question mine. Two sides of the same coin, you live on the shiniest while I have the grime. I cannot say I feel ignominide, I cannot say I am not. It is what molded me after all, and I do not hate myself nor my upbringing.

You have the brightest life figured out for you while I'm starting mine. Something you'd shame me If I admit to being filled with such. What could I have done at your age? Will I be in my life's niche just like you. Where you find beauty in your passion, I find peace in my destruction. Embraced with solace of self fulfillment, I write with a frown etched on my face filled with lethargy and marked with curiosity. I looked at you, eyes pervaded with ardor and perseverance. I tried my best not to cringe at my obvious foible and averted my sight. What a view.

I am the statue of great mortification and it is not a question if you felt the same, I am what I am. You are the embodiment of everything great, all for condemning eyes to see while I look away. I am the gray to your yellow. I am the charcoal to your Fulgor Nocturnus. I am the illness to your flourish, the midnight rain to your sunshine, the winter of your spring. I'm reaction and you're action. I am innocence to your corruption.

I am Cinderella Tremaine and I just hope your patience lasts until my voice cracks and you hear me singing Lavender blue in the attic of my melancholia.

From: Darling

Distance yourself to everyone who drains you. You deserve more and better. Protect your peace. Enjoy solitude. Keep growing. Enjoy things. Be healthy and positive.

Motivational quotes, and creative banners of lifestyle aesthetics fill my head. Everyone speaks encouragement but no one talks about how addicting it is. The high you get from feeling the spurious moral righteousness. The sheer intoxication you get from the “peace” you obtain. The solitude and serenity, the absence of chaos and pure stillness in your entirety. It was heaven and so you cut people off from your life, set their manors in your head on fire, banished them in memory as if friendship never existed. As if they'd been mere strangers, no anything but faces. You'd pull out people like the annoying threads of your knitted cardigan and watch it unravel... like the stars in earthly skies.

It was naught, but marvelous. Gratification flooding in my veins, a tectonic feeling maneuvering my body, a phenomenon begging to be done. Peace coats my heart, I'd then stack bricks until temporal fortifications are made. Tranquility blossoms and until then I'd keep pulling yarns off my cardigan until it's nothing but loose threads and a massive wretched edifice of loneliness hunched over my frame. Abysmal darkness and foreboding creeps in but peace throbs painfully in my gut, canticles of sanctimony grasps my throat hitting notes with hypocrisy.

More.

That's the quality of humans isn't it, to be blind of desires and fall in complex ambiguity of peace and chaos intertwined, to perceive seclusion and isolation as childrens of peace until you're in point of no return.

From: Darling