Awake

I want to be your coffee cup. To have that bottom lip running across my angles. I know how careful you can be. You take things in painfully slow, always at the precipice of hesitation. It makes my breath hitch. My senses focus on that single second the hot liquid caresses the slick skin against your teeth. My imagination mesmerizes me.

You hold that cup with such considerate gentleness that makes me curious about how you hold other things not made of porcelain. Are you as guarded? Or do those fingers explore like a conqueror, mapping out entrances and exits, twists and territories Your knuckles look rough, and my thoughts head straight to impossibilities. I want to tell you about them. But not right now, when your eyes are closed, tasting. Not right now, when I can bore right through you with unabashed hunger and still keep it a secret.

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.

On Why I Should Write an Autobiography (And Why I Shouldn't)

Reading a good book always made me want to write a good book. I know that dream is right up there with winning an Oscar for Best Actress, but it somehow seems more feasible than, let's say, growing three more inches.  In the beginning, I dreamed of writing really deep, philosophical works of art. Like Love in the Time of Cholera. Or The Bell Jar. You know, things that teenagers would probably hate, college students would probably salivate on, and pseudo-intellectuals would probably pretend to have read. But upon further research and introspection, I've come to realize that the market is already chock-full of narcolepsy-inducing (yet highly award-winning) literary material, so maybe I should just stick to what I can accomplish in the next 50 years or so.  Something I honestly know about, care about, and can talk about for an indefinite amount of time.  And obviously that something is myself.

You might be thinking, "You're not even famous, why would you write an autobiography?" And there lies the brilliance of it, ladies and gentlemen. I will be the first non-famous person to ever have the audacity to write about my life and actually expect people to read it (much more pay for it). This makes me officially worse than Snooki from Jersey Shore.  She has an MTV show, what do I have to show for myself? Well, I joined a kiddie pageant when I was three, if that counts.

But that's not the point.

The point is the market is already saturated with the same stories. Stories about falling in love, falling out of love, falling in love after getting pregnant, falling in love with a vampire, falling, falling in love with being in love, murder, murdering while falling in love, murdering while falling in love with a vampire; they're all the same. I'm pretty sure someone (read: my mother) would appreciate a fresh story about, well, me.

Contrary to popular belief, my life is actually pretty interesting.  I teach at a well-respected University in the Philippines, and yet I have managed to moonlight as a prostitute to sponsor five homeless kids' elementary education (If you're reading this and you're my superior from the well-respected University, the part about moonlighting as a prostitute is a joke.  Unfortunately, sponsoring five homeless kids' elementary education is, too). Seriously speaking, my life experiences may not have involved snorting cocaine with Kurt Cobain or having midnight trysts with our Barangay Captain in exchange for 24/7 security, but I can say that it can actually fill a 300-page book and it is very, very possible for you to read without inducing yourself into a coma.

My friend who works at an e-publishing house has cajoled me into submitting a 25,000-word novel, saying that I have the writing ability to make something interesting. I told her, "If I had that writing ability, I wouldn't still be using my Dad's credit card to buy me some Starbucks" (read: I actually did not say that; I just wanted to put in something wittier than "Okay sure, I'll try"). Obviously, I didn't take her seriously.  But after listening to Tina Fey's Bossypants, I'm just like "Fuck it. I'm doing it, bitches."

So here goes. I know that it is highly likely that I will never, ever end up with a book publishers would willingly spend their money on, but how will I know if I don't try?