somehow everything comes with an expiry date.
--He Zhiwu (Chungking Express)
The Borrower
Once again, I emptied the bathroom of your facial creams, facial scrubs, exfoliating cleansers and perfumes. You have a lot of them, and I thought to myself, these are all going to burn your face but I guess the fact that you use them proves that they do you good. Some might have been here for ages, the packaging were chipped and torn off on sides and corners. The words telling how effective and beneficial they are were falling and fading… just like you and him years ago.
But you insist on being a living ghost. You linger, you stay, you whisper in his ears your demands. You keep on coming here at night, haunting this mirror, these empty jars, these perfume bottles and the memories I am making. You walk the stairs wearing your high-heeled shoes to make sure your presence is astoundingly heard. You go straight to his room, open the closets, rest on the sheets and stay there as if this room, that is indeed familiar but changed, is your own. And I wonder how many times did you try to ignore that the illogical accusations you wrote in his closet had been long gone. You weren’t in the proper ground to say that and you weren’t in the proper mind to paint that word there all huge and screaming. You were gone, you ended it, it was over and you should have been.
The walls have already been repainted. The scars you left had healed and the accusations you’ve thrown and the bad memories you made no longer matter. And you weren’t the one who picked up the pieces and put it back together. You did the mess, stayed and forgot that just like the four-letter word you wrote in the closet, everything can be fixed. Broken glasses can be swept, stained walls can be washed, scratches and peels can be repainted and windows left shut can soon open.
“Ghost, look at your hands, they stayed soft, clean and pampered. Clearly it wasn’t you who fixed what you had wrecked.”
At late nights, beneath your breath that smelled of beer and Marlboro Lights, the loud music faintly hides your rosary of “whys” for your self-redemption. You drunkenly blurb of attachments, of your liking/loving and relationships that were too late. You had your time, and all you did is boil yourself on your jealousy with these people you now claim to love. One time it occurred to you that there is a sorrowful mystery you’ve been skipping and for the first time, you felt ashamed. But you came pass me the other night, I didn’t close my eyes and watch you walk up to his room, your body language proud and bragging. I didn’t see the truth.
I wasn’t expecting respect, but I thought your intelligence can grasp the idea of sensitivity.
And yet I come here and start my memories with pulling down the clothes you left hanging in the shower. I sleep with all your books above my head. Restless, I would toss to my side and find your coffee mug with your name drowned in blue. Do you still remember the letter you wrote him, the one that made him believed he was nothing? You told him you wasted your life on him. Why stay? Why linger?
Tonight, I shall wait for you by the mirror with your burning cleansers and perfumes, a candle in my hand.
“You see, Ghost, you have to go. I am here now and I want to waste my life with him.”
(If I burn, I’m taking you with me!)
(sept. 23, 2010)
Four months after one of my boring birthdays, I found a hamster just outside our front door. It was just lying on the marble floor, snuggling on its own body and didn’t even move even if I almost stepped on it. The little adorable pathetic creature seemed to be dumped by another pathetic being, I thought to myself.
I took an empty fish bowl, put some soft fresh grass on the bottom and placed the slumbering thing inside. The circular glass became its new home and I would stay up late at night just to watch it eat, drink and play around. Sometimes I would let it lay half dreaming on top of my palm or just leave it inside its cage next to my bed as we watch late night shows on the tube.
But after a week or so, my silent companion just became hostile. For no reasons known to me it started trying to bite my hand whenever it gets the chance to. And out of no actual fact to explain the lost of bond between us, I started concluding that the air inside its cage might have just gotten polluted and the poor little thing has been going insane.
I was sort of heartbroken that I couldn’t bear to look at it. So I decided to place a mirror adjacent to its cage and watch it from there. This way I don’t have to stay close, keep ourselves from hurting each other and still watch it from a safe distance.
And from the reflection, I see how it changed each day. My little teddy bear had stopped becoming nocturnal, in fact it didn’t sleep at all. It ransacked its own home spilling the water and food and it lay down on its own piss. Its eyes started to become red and its soft fur had grown sticky, dirty and spiky making it look like a small porcupine. Yet in a way I felt as if that’s what it wanted. It thought that being a cute teddy bear hamster is boring and suffocating that it is rebelling to become something else. Although it is stupid coz it can’t actually become anything different and so being a porcupine clone made it look all silly and annoying.
Tonight, as I watch its reflection move wildly in circles like a boar inside the glass, I am thinking of putting down my cigarette for a while, picking up my Kafka book and walk to the tabletop where the cage annoyingly rests. And from there I’ll decide if I’ll cover the hole with the book, lift the cage and shake it madly until the pretentious bastard bleeds to death.
Then I’ll make myself a coffee and play some Johnny Cash.
(excerpts from Oct. 16)
What if I am actually in front of you, holding your hand and telling you stories instead of just being a hushed voice scribbled in cold paper?
I would ask if we can go for a walk.
And we would hold each other’s hand strolling on the sidewalk while smoking the pack of cigarette we’ve bought in Manila. We’d talk about friends back home and what they might be doing at this late hour. We’d talk about your first gig and imagine what you, Kakoy and Arvin would do during the set. We’d laugh at things, laugh at people, laugh at ourselves and when we have nothing more to say, I’d jump on you and ask you to carry me on your back. You’d do it even if we look so silly just like the couples in Korean chick flicks and so I would beg you to put me down after a few steps, under the pale lightshade of a lamp post.
I’d tell you I love you twice and snuggle on your neck and you’d feel that my nose is freezing.
Or maybe we could cuddle in bed.
I would tell you it is too cold for me and I feel like my bones are going to crack one after another—a partly true alibi so I could slip my freezing feet between your legs. I would ask you nonsense things like what color do you think my name is? And why do I have this idea that you’d say pink? But I’d tell you it feels more like black and you’d remind me again that black isn’t a color.
Then I’d tell you that for me, your name seems to be a tint of yellow, the same one I used to color the sun with stick rays and a smiling face when I was five. And you’d think I’m such a weirdo that because of that I’d remember you whenever I see heart-shaped sunny side ups in recipe books.
Exterminator
this is all indirect contact
for you are the ghost
in flesh and bones
who keeps me hidden
in your borrowed closet
of creams and lingerie.
you are the kind voice
that holds back my reality
and makes me believe
it is all a dream
and i,
an invisible stranger,
waiting
when you will have
the courage to move on.
your kindness hurts me,
you are the beautiful face
i waste hours for
while the cold weather
eats through my skin and soul.
hiding from your eyes and the rain,
i hold myself tightly so i could see
if i am indeed
just the imagination
you try to make me be.
(nov15, 2011 - park - raining)
“i tried to kill myself with a lady bic. a pink plastic razor with daisies on it and a moisturizing strip. and it took me forever just to get through my skin… i’m just tired of being invisible.” —Deb, Empire Records
I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat.
I´m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet,
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second-hand physique -
With all he is, and all he was
A thousand kisses deep.
your dark-skinned lover
i had never bought you a bunch
of yellow chrysanthemums
or even a single white rose
never cared to go home
on the 40th day
or dared to visit your tombstone.
it would only remind me
of how cold you were
when you were in existence
that is somehow limited to
sitting on the front porch,
drinking a glass of gin
and smoking your favorite
cheap brand of cigarette.
in the mid of april,
i wanted so much to tell
you how i despise your
brown-eyed lover
but you were too fascinated
with adorning her
and your love-child with
all their fancy wants
and created needs.
it was sickening,
especially the idea that
as she was sucking out
all your wealth,
and we struggling
to live on nothing,
you and her branded us
as blacksheeps.
and yet i spent every single
cent and tears to get you
off the disease she had caused you.
i swallowed insults and curses
served coldly in an expensive platter
just to make sure you’d be well.
still, i wonder why you let them
tell lies and insult me even more.
i could’ve forgiven her and you
but i waited for the “thank you”
or “i’m sorry” that never came.
you loved her so blindly
and i, so much less.
what if i only exist in the pills that pick you up,
an illusion in the peak of euphoria,
a vivid ghost of your li’l blue ecstasy, slowly dying as the night fades…
will you still remember me?
you’ll be my fave blue pill
12202010
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
