Drive

It is overwhelming, how much I want you to touch me. How much I’d like to feel your fingertips on the blade of my clothed shoulders, lightly scratching, beckoning my hairs to stand on end, soldiers at full attention. I try not to think of those same fingers roaming up and around and all the ways, but my mind is already there and every other place it could put you and your warmth. There is a tightness when I breathe, like you’ve reached inside my ribs and told my heart to stop. To slow down. To not fill my lungs with the smoky tang of your leather jacket. When I close my eyes, I am back in the semi-darkness of your car, with that song from somewhere, the dark roads opening up before us, the lights loudly blinking. But there is only you beside me and those hands on the wheel that I follow, enraptured. I wish they gripped something else. And as much as I could, I don’t look at your face. I don’t look because there is no end after that. So I subtly stare at your knee, my veins pounding on my throat, wanting to brush imaginary lint at the top of your thigh.

You make me feel like I have already touched you. It embarrasses me. I wonder if you could see right through my eyes and into the fire. There is thrumming in my skin and it hums at the undulating closeness between us. And although I have to count the days til I am back with you in the dim secrecy of those two seats, I anticipate, with parted lips, all that is possible.

Vacuum

There was a small vacuum inside my heart. Every time you told me you were tired, it turned on and sucked a little bit of joy. I felt a pinch, and I grimaced in anger and sadness. When you told me you didn't have time for me then, maybe later, it took some more. The memory of you looking at me in bed was thrown into the vast nothing of nowhere. When you forgot to tell me that you loved me, it took even more. The smell of the first bouquet you gave me. The feel of your arms that night in your car, while I whispered for you to never leave me. The taste of your lips the first time we kissed. And the pinch became a squeeze, and the squeeze morphed into a grip. I imagine my heart shriveling, getting smaller and smaller after every day I didn't see you smile at me, after every perfunctory greeting on the 17th of each month, the staccato of routine managing to get through the buzz of the fuzzy line.

After all that I am sure, right now, that my heart is a raisin. The vacuum is bigger, too. It has started to take my lungs that I can't seem to speak, more so when you ask how I am. I would have loved to say that there are times that I have to stop working just so I could stare at my phone's screen, wishing and hoping and begging for a hello. But I end up saying okay because it was all the air left in me. I feel it in my stomach, too. It grumbles even after I eat. It does not stop, and I have to type louder and louder lest my colleagues hear it. They may think it is me, complaining.

I am scared of the day, dear, that the vacuum takes everything inside me and I am left an ugly shell. I am scared of the growing black pit that creeps steadily to my throat, to my limbs. My fingers are cold. I wish they could touch you again. But you are far, and perhaps that is for the best. What I am frightened of the most is on the day I see you and reach out, the vacuum will take you, too, and I will never know where you have gone.

November Playlist: George Ezra Edition

I don’t know how he does it, but his songs are like capsules that hold my powdery memories. Every time I listen, it’s as though I’m swallowing a pill and letting my cells soak in the hazy film.

1. Budapest (“But for you I’d leave it all”)
2. Drawing Board (“Lately I’m a heartache, I’m a desperate plan in hand, I’m a blueprint in the sand”)
3. Blame It On Me (“What you waiting for?”)
4. Don’t Matter Now (“Well it won’t last and it won’t stand, It don’t matter now”)
5. Shotgun (“The sun it changed, in the atmosphere, architecture unfamiliar, I can get used to do this”)
6. All My Love (“All my love is yours, all my time is ours, all my reckless dreams and my restless hours”)

 Listen to these in order. Go on.

Baket List

Updating this list is bittersweet because I am sure I will die alone and unloved.

1. Visit all UP campuses
           UP Diliman
           UP Baguio
           UP Los Banos
           UP Cebu
2. Watch an Up Dharma Down gig live
3. Go somewhere far, alone
4. Come up to a stranger I'm attracted to and tell him/her that I find him/her attractive
5. Design (and pay for) my dream bedroom
6. Read Pride and Prejudice in one day
7. Go on a candlelit dinner date
8. Buy my parents new wedding rings
9. Save 100k
10. Find a man who will love all of me
11. Go to a gay bar.

Apparently, the straight guys that do exist and like me, don't really love me, and they leave me anyway because my all will never be enough for anyone. I don't know why I'm even trying.

A Foreign Feeling

First off, let me just say that Japan is a dream. I do not live in Tokyo with its streets bursting with people and color. I live in Okayama, where the skyline is consistently green and blue (now subtly changing to orange and gray as fall prepares to land). It has a city with lively businesses and warm restaurants. But it does not seem preoccupied with trying to become the next big capital. It goes about its own pace, trams shuttling people on a strict schedule still, but with the residents having the distinct air of living in a routine that they do not mind continuing. People are never late here, but they are never in a hurry, either. They just move on along. This is especially true in the inaka, Japan’s version of the rural, where the rice paddies meld with the smooth cemented roads and pockets of supermarkets and drugstores. I am smack dab in the middle of this geographic limbo. Work is from eight to four, but what you do after is entirely up to you, the energy you have left, and the amount of trees you are willing to drive by in order to get somewhere.

Every morning, I wake up here in a daze of disbelief. It is not the kind of disbelief where I have to slap myself to ascertain reality, not the kind of disbelief where I jump up and down my worn yellow sofa bed at the sheer blessedness of being here. It is the kind where I half-expect to hear my dorm mates’ faint snores before I open my eyes or feel the toasty heat of sunlight on my legs from the window above my bed in my parents’ house. I absentmindedly tell myself, every morning, “You are not home.” And this unintentional mantra, I suppose, has dictated what I have been and am still feeling about being in this unfamiliar land.

 For others, it may seem grim that I do not seem unequivocally ecstatic to be living in a first world country when my third world origins simply pale in comparison (even by the quality of tap water alone). I hear their curious voices ask if there is anything wrong with my apartment, colleagues, students, or me, because surely, I should acknowledge the absolute good fortune of being one of the chosen ones. But then, do I really need to be that thrilled to appreciate this new world? I think the quiet calm of discovering who I am in the midst of work, travel, and nothing-doing coats my Japanese experience in a fuzzy glow, a foreign feeling, that will linger in my heart long after I leave.

 *This article was submitted for the JET Programme Voices column. Results pending.