gisapot

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first try at blackout poetry.

idk. i quite like it.

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hdakfhjs.note, a love letter to humss12d batch 2023-2024 / closing remarks to the sugbuhi documentary festival as we finish out creative nonfiction.

there is a misconception that writing creative nonfiction is traumadumping. that its talking about our worst experiences, projecting it onto our readers, and making them carry our burden, and that it's a dead and moot genre of literature that isn't as interesting to read and write like poetry and fiction and plays. no one will write creative nonfiction, no one reads creative nonfiction, no one even reads creative nonfiction! what for do i have to tell you how i know my parents hate me in such a dramatic fashion?

the department of education curriculum guide described the subject creative nonfiction in this manner: Focusing on formal elements and writing techniques, including autobiography and blogging, among others, the subject introduces the students to the reading and writing of Creative Nonfiction as a literary form. The subject develops in students skills in reading, and thinking critically and creatively, that will help them to be imaginative readers and writers.

what the deped and your nonchalant mindsets miss about the genre, sir jason and i had to take on the gargantuan burden of meeting: how do we reconcile the demands of teaching a loaded subject to a student body going through senioritis, and how do we mold you to write what you know from the heart, ergo, to write oa?

we had to go back to the basics and build up. throughout the midterms we had to rehash what you knew from CW on figurative language for poetry and fiction, and the elements of a plot to tell your personal stories. as my first ever creative nonfiction mentor johanna michelle lim said to me at the cebu young writers' studio, "to write creative nonfiction is easier than poetry. there is no form. there is no rhyme. there are no rules, just write."

but while for most of you the act of writing in a literary manner is as natural as breathing, formulaic, almost, sir jason and i realized a challenge as your teachers and you as budding nonfictionists. we had to work against a heavier thing that barred you from truly writing your best nonfiction piece, something sir jason and i could not feed you, something you had to resolve yourself that you yourselves also acknowledged: it's your fear to get naked.

Unlike your Grade 11 subjects COMM01: Oral Communication in Context or ENG01: English for Academic and Professional Purposes, where every sentence required a source in order to persuade your audience that this is a real phenomenon, we had to work reestablish you to get in touch with your emotions. in creative writing, you could worldbuild, rhyme to your heart's content and hide your hurt in between the lines.

but creative nonfiction is looser, more open, you are allowed. oa is valid. reflection is valid, and over the sem we worked to understand that.

as I said in a module i wrote for this subject, and i quote: this kind of writing requires a high level of maturity and reflectiveness as it requires you to think deeply about what you have experienced, the culture of the community you live in, and make observations about it. It is no longer about providing sources for every single sentence you write. Through the seamless weaving our opinions shine through in a frank description of what our reality looks like. As HUMSS students, we already have the background to write for this subgenre of nonfiction, as we are closest to the 'katilingban'. 

some of you might not have been ready to be mature or naked, but had to catch up in the challenge of taking this class. as you pass the midterm, you are then exposed to how your writing, while talking about you, is no longer JUST about you. now validated in what you have observed about the katilingban, you were then enjoined to participate in the rudimentary simulation of the creative writing workshop, through the blind critique. you were each other's panel through the annotation activities we did weekly, and you wrote critical responses on the essays your peers produced and got critiqued back to reconsider your choices in your work. the nakedness in creative nonfiction is not just in the fighting back against what tim kreider calls the "mortifying ordeal of being known". we had to allow ourselves to be poked at in order to become beautiful, and to write beautiful.

we then began work on the ethics of creative nonfiction and how that affects the writing of literary journalism, where everything from its elements to the language use came together to depict a person you have so admired in both the making of these documentaries and to write for this prestigious genre.

a writer is stereotyped as a disheveled shut-in, alone, in a dark room, dark rimmed eyes and stacks of empty cups of coffee on a coffee-stained table, writing nonstop with the curtains drawn so shut he can no longer tell if it is day or night. in a letter that i wrote to palanca awardee omar khalid, i said, while writing is a one-man act, it should be done with the presence of like-minded friends and seniors to spur you on to continue and do better [...] the people [...] showed me what a ‘writer’s rehabilitation’ could look like. like my former professor dr cindy velasquez said in one of the shortlisted documentaries and aligned with the carolinian core values, writing is a social responsibility, for the preservation of culture. you are with the katilingban. this, right now, is your writing rehabilitation: you write for the katilingban. so you must join the katilingban to write about the katilingban.

humss d has qr codes outside linking to their cnf ebooks, where they have compiled their best essays and the biographical profiles of their documentary subject. these are free, and the fruit of our sweet labor over this semester drafting, critiquing, and revising, contributing to the quietly loud field of creative nonfiction, naked and beautiful.

and with this culminating performance task, we finally conclude the litessay: creative nonfiction. congratulations not just to the winners, but to you, each and everyone. you have truly grasped not just the technicalities of creative nonfiction, but what it truly means to be beautifully naked.

people who are not interested in cebuano literature say cebuano lit is dead. how loud the outsiders are, how downplayed we may be, with you finishing CW, CNF, and hopefully graduating from humss, sylvia plath was right: "little or nothing. so many of us, so many of us! we shall by morning inherit the earth. our foot's in the door." writers, congratulations, and welcome to the cebuano literary scene.

[gisapot]

elements_for bathalad.docx

The author should also prepare a separate attachment for their Curriculum Vitae with a very short gumalaysay or essay describing their favorite classical element (fire, air, water, & earth). 🔥🌪🌊🪨

(lifted from the Bathalad 2024 open call for submissions)

Or, what happens when a nonfictionist wants so badly to be in on the drama of Bathalad but had to submit fiction. Following instructions pa ba ni? I don't know, but I quite liked what I wrote in the 48 hours I impulsively decided to join Bathalad, so, here it is.

When I was much younger and my parents had more energy, we’d make the Saturday morning drive from our rented one-story apartment in Satan’s left butt cheek, also known as Mandaue City, to the sleeping shrimp town of Medellin. This was in the pre-traffic, early 2000s, genuinely-fan-of-Aggressive-Audio’s Bakakon Ka era. In our beat-up secondhand blue Nissan Terrano whose plate number I still remember to this day, we’d drive up to the zigzagging, looping roads that faded in and out between Danao, Catmon, Sogod, Borbon, Tabogon, Bogo. I could never tell where I was, especially in the age where we never had any personal phones and never needed to have one, much less one that was connected to the internet, but I could always tell that when we drove against the mountains that had abrupt steep drops that overlooked the sea, I was halfway through the fish town where my grandparents raised my mother, and now our dog, a Golden Retriever aptly called Goldie.

Somewhere in the mountainous area there is a very distinct landmark---an abandoned, derelict structure too barebones to call a house but stable and shapely enough to say plans were made here for a building meant to overlook the sea. It was alone, overlooking a steep cliff down to the deep waters of Sogod, held up by its steel, concrete, and hollow blocks. Rocks in its crevices, and vines from the earth taking space they weren’t supposed to be in.  Of course, as any history-inclined child would, I asked my mother whatever happened to that house, now left by the cliffs, the vines encroaching on human space. And of course, because my mother does not care about history, my father on the steering wheel responds for her: the owner was an OFW who married a Japanese man and decided to build a house overlooking a cliff then got bored of the project so she stopped funding it. And of course, as a child you take that to be true because it’s my dad who said it and whatever he says is always right, even if it’s a glaring conspiracy theory without peer review about an abandoned house on the cliff.

I cannot fact check the truth of these claims because I do not know what municipality that structure was exactly in, the mountainous areas of north Cebu already blurring together into one entity I childishly called and will still call ‘bukid’. The structure had no neighbors, just a barbed wire fence not even around it but next to it with a white square tarpaulin hung over it with bold red text: NO TRESPASSING, and I fail to see what it pertains to, the fence or the structure? All the properties much like it were further down the mountain, fenced with concrete, privatized by steel gates painted over with resort names---BERCEDE BAY, TYCHE BEACH, COCO PALMS RESORT…

Unfinished, alone, unconfirmed origins, vines creeping its wiry arms over the bitten half walls and its imposing fingers as foundations: the earth isn’t taking. To take something is to assume that they are obtaining ownership of something that was not theirs before. One cannot say the earth was taking back, either. To take something back is to assume something remained in the condition that it was borrowed in; without the unfinished house, the ground remained flat and even, rocks not hiding in its crevices. No, the earth was subsuming: what is there, it desecrates like it was desecrated, to absorb back into the soil. Like the Lord said, from dust you come and to dust you shall return.

The way my parents drove me past the structure every weekend for most of my elementary school years, my parents decided to leave the country and took me with them, and so began a long stretch of five years away from Cebu, from the weekly drives up the spiraling mountains, past the structure, wondering if the future would ever come.

Meanwhile, in my new country of residence, the future was already here. On the relatively flat land and efficient public transport systems of the promised land, I was the foreign girl with a G as the first letter of her national identification card compared to everybody’s S, stuck in the nineties of landlines, dial-up internet, and afternoons sitting on staircases in train stations, not knowing that it was illegal to do something that that popular kids in my home country used to do to assert dominance. I was laughed at: for my accent, for liking a senseless subject such as literature, for being a teacher’s pet. I was in a country that indoctrinated its youth with a love for math and science that made them feel like the sky was going to collapse if they did not enroll in a tutorial center that promised to boost their F9 to an A-star in the span of eight months leading up to the national exams.

In an attempt to avoid drawing attention to me, I drew attention to me: I had to quickly change myself---the assimilation theory simultaneous to the chemical reaction of my body cooking my hormones in a slow cooker to create my final semblance to a human. A human that could live comfortably enough to navigate public transportation without an adult on my ass about how I pressed my card into the gantry wrong. In those five years, like every other Filipino teenager salvaged from the paragon of cement-gravel aggregates, I lost memory of the start divide of the mountains and the sea, the structure on the cliff, the Cebuano word for pail, the way bananacue tastes, what kwek-kwek was.

In its place, I am inculcated with fictitious roads placed on soil dug up from the deep ends of the Singapore River and the Siloso Beach to widen the island city into the popular shape known today. Instead, I forget how to climb mango trees in favor of learning how to find elevators to climb up a building that’s one of many on the curated skyline of this island. I used to sit on beaches littered with snack packs of Boy Bawang and the orange lumpia, shards of broken Kulafu bottles from undocumented sojourns spent here nights before us. Now I fear stepping into open water whose pH level is not what is government-mandated to be safe.

A week before enrollment into college I flew back to the Philippines for the first time in a long, vague while. Immediately after I stepped off the plane, I was careened into a borrowed vehicle headed to Medellin. In the drive from Lapu-Lapu to the north I see that not much has changed: Cebu was still Cebu with its underaged plants in the center islands of roads potted with grey ash. The jeepney engines are a distinct high pitch as they drive past my ears. No sidewalks, people walk on the ditch like death did not exist in the Philippines.

Singhapala against Singapura. I miss the comforts at times---the walkability, human-centered urban planning, a strong currency. But this heat. This heat, from a sky that looked higher than the one in Singapore even if it sat on the same earth not even the tallest coconut trees could reach. This nineties time capsule had people speaking the language of my childhood, of the grilled pork on the glassy shores with my grandfather who was waiting for me up north. Up north, where the ruins of the abandoned structure still stood over the cliff, the only way telling that time had passed is the brown wear-and-tear of the NO TRESPASSING tarpaulin hung on the fence next to it. The land still intact at the roots of the ruins, but the spiraling vines have fully encroached down one full wall and up two pillars.

This is not a taking: in its good condition, making it theirs.

This is not a reclamation: space once there that did not exist before.

This is a subsuming: with the things put on this earth without its consent, the earth absorbs until it is ours.

We think controlling fire implicates fearsome power. We think ice in our veins indicates riches beyond our wildest imaginations. We think bending water allows us to unlock wisdom never seen before. We think pushing air frees us into the boundless sky. But we forget the earth where we come from and we begin from, and the power it holds.

I am proud to be of this scorched earth. many leave, many not just my mother who, like her too, is of this scorched earth but no longer brave enough to breathe this new-age petrochemical smog. but the land never forgets who is part of the people who burn to protect it. I belong to it, and it belongs to me. and like a lover yearning by the window for the day his husband returns, I sit in the window seat of the plane, antsy, in the loading screen of transience, waiting to be home.

[gisapot]

how long does it take for a person to fall in love? i could say 3 months after i left the show. i could say 2 minutes when i first met him in the conference hall. i could say 7 days on the first week of work. i could say every night we spent going over the words he would say to him that i wish he said to me. or in the second afterwards, when he would smile and ask me if he could do it over again and not let me get a line of my own in because he wanted to make it believable. in the multiple times he kissed him. in the multiple times i wished that was me. in between every heave i breathed behind the speakers. maybe in the five hours in my dreams every night, i'd pretend i could hold his hand. he would hold mine. it's never enough. the sleep or the delusions, i don't know. i woke up: i'm in love. a light smile, then the realization. this is dangerous, you are dangerous, and you've let me play too long with you; you're going to hurt me, but i could never blame you.

after watching red white and royal blue i had this au idea for our ocs, adrian and eli. adrian is of thai descent so what if he was an up and coming bl star/main character and eli is in the supporting cast for that bl as adrian's love interest's classmate/close friend? eli and adrian would get close behind the scenes, and eli would misunderstand his relationship with adrian. in the fictional show eli's character would have to be written out because they're graduating from high school and the night he leaves the set he posts this on his dump account forgetting that adrian follows him on dump oof

[gisapot]

about oppenheimer

there are parallels to be drawn with nobel and oppenheimer's lives. nobel successfully retconned his reputation as the inventor of dynamite when he created the nobel peace prize to promote peace and no war. however oppenheimer's life diverges from nobel's beaten path: his advocacy against the h-bomb program and nuclear disarmament, his basic human empathy has him redtagged by the us government. he's questioned, recorded without his consent by people endorsed to ensure his downfall because he might pose a threat to homeland security, something the us has been constantly on guard for since the dawn of time.

we are subject to the retelling of oppenheimer's life in medias res, anchored by the talking points during the hearing of the various witnesses brought in by the biased grey board and in the just as biased recollections of one aspirant for the secretary of commerce position, strauss, out of paranoia, humiliation, and anxiety of how one man is perceived by the people he is working with. for strauss, it's the scientists who he is in close contact with, most especially the strangest character of all in terms of their presence in the movie and relevance to the manhattan project, albert einstein himself.

now you'd think einstein was way in the past but to find that oppenheimer saw einstein as a mentor (not a contemporary, as oppenheimer would have you know in the first 20 minutes of the movie because apparently his last academic work was published 40 years before the recruitment of oppenheimer for the manhattan project even took place) not just in physics, but in the ethics and morality of his work, is a fun little easter egg with a dark inside, like a tea egg. the sighting of einstein and being oppenheimer's "work dad" emphasizes the idea of seniority in the field equating to wisdom and foresight, and the humility of oppenheimer to admit his fears as they comisserated by the pond, something strauss had missed out due to his grudge and humiliation from an off-hand jocular comment oppenheimer made at congress. we are reminded as well that the people we put in power, or attempt to, much like eisenhower nominating strauss as secretary of commerce, are human. and with humanity comes the lack of critical or rational thinking, or maturity, especially in the workplace. people react personally to things that should be dealt with professionally. case in point: strauss. his humiliation at congress, his disbelief in oppenheimer's vehement disapproval of teller's h-bomb, and his convoluted interpretations of oppenheimer's attempts to reconcile and apologize for the literal war crime he committed by inventing that bomb, turning to pacifism and military disarmament - they all add up until he loses it, and sees oppenheimer as the enemy to his cause. it's a lesson to be learned about how it looks like when you are not amiable, both for oppenheimer and strauss, and for strauss, how to react in the workplace.

in all of this - men talking over one another and making fun of the inventor for having emotions like guilt and regret, seeing deaths not as people that deserve reprieve but as mere statistics that weaken the blow of mortality, being shallow to avoid a certain city because it had a sentimental significance to someone in higher power (smells like padrino, slightly) - we find reprieve in the woman. not florence pugh, but in emily blunt's kitty. the loyal wife of oppenheimer, a "biologist promoted to housewife", she is consistent about her disdain for homemaking, but in the words of the gen z nowadays, siya ang naging pahinga ni oppenheimer (t/n: oppenheimer finds rest in her). what is interesting is he doesn't coddle him. she throws a glass bottle in frustration because oppenheimer is not seeing the point. he should be defending himself, not letting them walk all over him and feeding one another lies. she is not just another hollywood-written doting wife, she is a scientist in her own right, one of the very few allies oppenheimer has in this movie who know the truth and are willing to fight for it. she too was redtagged, and in defense of her husband she keeps the fight. other hollywood-written housewives would have given up, had a breakdown about the drama surrounding their lives, then run away into the night. that is the weakness of hollywood when it comes to writing the woman. the sexism is showing, not only in the numbers, but even in the writing. against the grain, kitty is loyal to oppenheimer, advocates with him, stands her ground even if oppenheimer is already willing to be civil with the people who once betrayed him; she refused to shake teller's hand because she remembers him as one of the people whose egos were affected by oppenheimer's intj-like personality in the lead-up to the detonation of the test bomb.

in contrast, despite being a big fan of florence pugh in her work as yelena in the marvel series, her character here is just... sad. she's objectified, shown as a sex symbol, and then she kills herself. closes that sub-plot pretty quickly.

who i truly love in this movie other than kitty is hill. played by rami malek who for some reason has still not readjusted to the normal shape of his mouth and is still clamping his lower lip sometimes lest freddie mercury is showing in a movie that is years before his time, dr hill is the only one who sees reason in this whole movie. he turns the tables, goes against the grain, advocates against the instatement of strauss as secretary of commerce because of how he conducted himself professionally - he cited lack of integrity with the manipulation of the members of the grey board to be his relations, his quest for personal approval, arrogance, and vindictiveness. overall, as per dr hill's summary of the entirety of strauss' personality, he's a child who lacks emotional maturity for the job he is nominated to enter. why would he be voted in to be part of government when he has to manipulate situations to make him look good, and holds personal grudges towards people even if the reasons are perfectly valid.

the entire character arc of strauss is a lesson of humility: since we are using greek mythology in comparing oppenheimer as the american prometheus, strauss is the american icarus. he got too close to the sun, he played with its flames, and burned into a crisp. on his wikipedia page it is documented that he is considered a villain to the american public once dr hill had made known that he was manipulative of the situation.

oppenheimer as a person is someone who is genuinely good, but was just put in a position where he assumed the face of death. while death in some religions is just an entry to a new life, it is not humans that should administer it, a lesson that the film projects, among others. we have an illness to play god, to feel infinite, to believe ourselves to be powerful and invincible against our enemies. in the case of the bombings, people who were had nothing to do with the war - civilians, who by loyalty to their emperor, were involved in the war.

with that being said, one realizes that loyalty is a strong theme in this movie, and so is empathy, and morality, and the ethics of science. in the "before potsdam discussion" scene, we see military generals discuss the possible number of victims not remembering that this is not a game of cops and robbers, this is real life with the possibility of casualty. they speak coldly about these numbers and when to drop and where, saying "then our boys can come home", referring to the american teenage boys who were sent off to war to fight for the advocacies of senior citizens in positions of power. there is very clearly a lack of empathy to prove loyalty to country, something that oppenheimer endeavors to undo but comes with the risk of being questioned and redtagged for suddenly advocating for pacifism. to the characters in this movie, oppenheimer was either black or white. he could not exist without intersections - to read communist literature but not be in its party, to want to stop the development of arms for future wars to protect human life but still be loyal to the us.

questions were raised by people who have already seen the movie about the lack of visualization of how japan and its people were affected by the bombings, and they have missed the point of its lack. the lack of it is equivalent to the lack of empathy of the people who commissioned the manhattan project of the lives that will be lost and its ecological impact still felt in these cities in japan today. once the bombs were dropped, however, and radio and newspaper covered the ash-covered cities after the war and we see oppenheimer having a panic attack on stage in the form of seeing how the skins of americans would peel and burn if the bomb dropped on them, we are shown to the moment oppenheimer felt empathy. the last scene, where oppenheimer says that he believes he has started a chain reaction (implied: of a new form of violence) that would change the world, throws back to that moment, and so did the second panic attack when he was harassed by the grey board for his motivations for making the bombs anyway if he felt empathy for its prospective victims. if he didn't make it, then the germans would have, or the russians would have, because the science was already there, and the bomb would have dropped on the us. he thought he was doing the right thing. sometimes, it is in grey.

i remember a friend of mine, he's a physicist. i asked him what he thought about the movie. he said you can see how warlords and high ranking military generals and admirals are so desensitized to the concept of war and conflict that they do not realize that they are inflicting pain upon people, displacement, injury, loss of homes, and lack of peace. while oppenheimer's contributions to physics should be lauded and never forgotten because they are really pivotal in the field of physics, it does not mean that we must only exist to partake in cold calculations like this. it is important to also be involved in the humanities and social sciences. when the movie ended, a quote from the movie dead poets society came to mind. "medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." to be in touch with our emotions, to build community, to participate in culture, to draw and to sing and to dance, to find people to love.

while i am normally not a fan of movies like this that talk of violence and war, art, especially film, is a good method of evoking to the general public the art of thinking critically about certain situations, such as the events that transpired in world war 2 that have truly affected the way we operate today. nothing is the same anymore, we know it. it is up to us, as the older generation says, to fix what they have broken and destroyed in their ego and greed and politics and bureaucracy.

the movie ends not with oppenheimer being acquitted of the accusations (although it is implied he is with a flash forward where he was awarded and teller tried to make peace with him by shaking his hand, which oppenheimer does, but kitty refuses in defense of her husband; another part i truly loved, especially with albert einstein's voiceover saying that people will be congratulating you not for you, but to forgive themselves, ergo, oppenheimer's acceptance of their laurels will ease their guilty conscience of the accusations they threw at him when he tried to stop the h-bomb program), but with another quiet moment in front of the pond with albert einstein. oppenheimer says he is afraid that he has started a chain reaction that will destroy the world. in the back, we see strauss' frame sauntering into the garden. we are reminded of the scene before this, strauss' lawyer tells him that no, that moment you found einstein and oppenheimer by the pond, they were not talking about you. they were talking about else far more important.

humanity.

[gisapot]

gadja after graduation: about growing up, losing games, and getting a grip. (with hypertext and intertext, because that is the module of the week)

There are things that I did not try when I was in college: going on outings with college friends, clubbing and partying with classmates, day drinking an hour before an exam and pretending to be sober, sneaking out to make out with a boyfriend in the ladies’ bathroom of the school chapel, among many other anarchist things that straight teenagers my age did presented with the prospect of freedom and taking free licks of it like mountain goats standing on an inch of cliff to get a hit of that sweet mineral. I used to have distaste for my parents for it, and honestly I still do because my inner angry adolescent stuck at 19 never let me experience the world as a 19-year-old should. I was raised a stickler and I remained as such until I turned 24 and desperate for human interaction after the pandemic took the prime years of my twenties away from me. For something so uneventful as me getting sick in the earliest weeks of 2022, I was robbed.

It was both a resolution I made due to the combination of the fact that I turned 25 and I was finally away from the lovingly old school adult-er adults in my life that I will take back the years I lost by actually going outside. It started out by waking up early to go to work even if I was so used to the online setup of interacting with teenagers. As much as I wanted to stay home out of a developed fear of people being cruel despite my most fervent wishes that they are not, I left home with a grudge and came home with contentment. I did not know I missed people and face-to-face interaction the way my students did, and like a baby being weaned off breast milk, I slowly stayed longer at the faculty room, talked to more workmates (despite the crippling fear that one of them might fuck with me like some people in an older faculty room did the last time), allowed students from other blocks to perceive me when I used to cover my eyes when I passed by gaggles of seventeen-year-olds in the corridors of the Engineering building, which slowly transitioned to going to the mall after work, finding an obscure café to walk to in the scalding sun, and even when alone basking in the energy of the earth around me bustling from here to there as I walked to the Basilica to pray. Can you tell I love the city? It’s so adventurous and so alive; a friend of mine once said it was like a beating heart that powered the whole of Cebu with its foot traffic the blood cells going from wherever they go. Maybe that’s the reason why some streets are called arteries when we talk about public transport.

While I’ve gained patience for the people around me, maximum tolerance without being pushed over, I cannot help but think that yes, I am making up for the time lost by getting lost in the streets I used to pass my eyes over, I am too old for all of this.

You might think 25 is too young, and if I contextualize it to the life my mother lived at 25, it is quite young. She had me and my brother was just born in January. She had two kids at this point. my father was my age when he got married, and when my parents had me.

he still looks virtually the same, and so do i -- i guess it does run in the genes to look younger than we do, people still think he's 40 and me, 15 -- but i am this old, this young, and not have the life he has.

i am not married, i don't have kids, and while the sun is down i think that's perfect for a person as now is the only time i have to slow down since now i am the one in charge of my time... when the moon is high and the rain is falling, one or the other or both at the same time and you realize it's three am on the sunday and you realize you're reading about fictional couples getting married instead of being... them, insecurity starts to fester and seep into the cracks and crevices of the walls, and they leak in.

you get what i mean?

at three am it's all silent and you struggle to sleep, and you think to yourself while another side of your brain decides to play anti-hero by taylor swift in its own chamber with accompanying rain sounds to really augment those emotions while the rest of your brain just hears the bass line, you ask yourself: is something wrong with me?

You worry about the signs of ageing. Earlier this year while looking up ways to get rid of dry acne I came across an article about how it is best to start using anti-ageing skincare products at 25. I never feared ageing before. In fact, the idea of being even older and even older opens up the door to freedom even wider for me. People at work wonder why I am always so mindful of my parents, always letting them know my every move. I don’t know how to explain to them that they still treat me as their daughter. (Honestly, as they should.) With years behind them and four children, they’ve gotten better at parenting, but as the prototype child blessed with female genitalia, it is difficult to get my parents to let loose with me because of my scientifically assigned femininity. I am not providing for anybody but myself, I can pay for the trips I go on and the things I buy, and I am not saying I am being treated like a child, but there is a difference in how they treat me as a daughter versus how they treat my brothers as they are their sons. I wonder how the logic goes: at 25, still a child in your mother’s eyes, a lady in your father’s eyes, and hurtling towards grandmotherhood to these skincare brands should you not partake in the products they offer to stave off the natural development of the human body. Even if you have no kids or even married to a man.  

Another sign of ageing includes disillusionment and boredom in party/festival settings. the stuff they do just isn't going to keep me entertained anymore. I went to Gadja earlier, that’s what sparked this whole reflection essay, and other than the fact that I am just painfully an introvert being put in a social setting in the peak of the Philippine summer, the loud music, dancing, bands just isn’t fun to me anymore. I refuse to say I am old, as there are people my age who still have the capacity or the MBTI type to stand these kinds of activities (some even on the regular). I think, however, that this is not about age. It’s more of how I am no longer the target audience of these events and spaces like I thought I was, brought about by how I see myself. It’s times like these despite losing on time that I could have used to find myself on the outside, I found myself on the inside and found I prefer the silence. Quite recently i've even taken to praying for peace of mind, another form of silence. security. stability. shut the fuck up.

another sign of ageing is not necessarily the raising of standards, but the lack of patience for people who don't have their mental health sorted out when they want to get with you. they project onto you and drag you into it like a doll they can toy with and drop once they're bored, but can't let go to a new owner -- they hold you back with quotes from that taylor swift song telling you not to be in love with someone else. i almost fell for it because what am i if not a daydreamer. too bad for them i'm a new age taylor fan who began paying attention during the 1989 era so i like to pretend i don't know what the fuck she's talking about.

but you float through the day as I did today, at Gadja obsessively refreshing my Instagram inbox, wondering about the what-ifs of waiting, the potential of a relationship with someone you're so compatible with if I just ignored their commitment issues, but you reel yourself back: you don't root for someone's potential. I know that well enough. You root for who they are. you know as a senior high teacher that everyone has the potential, i mean, why do you think the older generations are so intimidated by them? (i jest.) but hope for potential can only go so far. hope can only go so far. knowing, knowing, trusting, understanding, assuring can go even further.

i wonder if i am even enough in the first place. i can never… inspire? someone kindly to be better for our sakes, for the sake of a possibility of a relationship. i remember on my 25th birthday wondering if something is wrong with me. what is it about me that allows people to be complacent? to not want to be better? does it look like i can carry a relationship for two with my self-discipline, quirky conversation, and dreams of what we could be?

Am I asking for too much to the point where I feel like I am at fault for a heartbreak over a person i've only talked to consistently for two days and showed me what it was like to be listened to?

i know in my head that this heartbreak is only because of my daydream, not because whatever we had was sincere. she herself said it was only for fun. so why am i nursing heartache? i was deluded by the possibilities. now i want her attention like no other. but i know it's not because i truly like her, but because adulthood is so lonely i want someone to welcome me home with a hug and tell me tomorrow will be a new chance to do even better.

Expectations, expectations. It’s the cause of ambition, it’s the cause of disappointment. To be a Filipino woman, you are expected to be born a woman, marry a man born a man by the age of 25, and having kids before the age of 35. A Filipino woman is dedicated to her two jobs—whatever career she’s made for herself after graduating from college, and homemaking and preserving a household where the man is the head of house.

A year ago I had a conversation with some co-teachers, six of us in the conversation, about a professor some three of us had years back. This professor we were speaking about, a brillian woman well past her 40s with a PhD in education and is one of the most brilliant minds in english education in cebu today, never married. I never knew this and assumed the whole time I was under her tutelage in my third year of linguistics education that she was spoken for. I must have misremembered a ring on her finger. Her parents were gradually getting distressed as the years went on and she kept on working for the university. Dedication to her work on the next level—no, levels above ours. Distress grew into concern into panic that they went to simala to light a candle and pray for her but you can never stop a woman who loves her field so much she got a phd in it, i think. I think if i asked her why she never married or even tried to get a man she would probably say she was married to her job. It looked like it. Our head teacher worked with her before, he said she used to downplay her dedication to her work. She’d say she has so much to check that she doesnt have the time to go out and get a drink with the other faculty members. think thats equal parts introversion and love for her job. I know I feel the same.

That conversation, lighthearted as it was, made me feel heavy that until now I still remember it. I think back to the professor with the phd. I remember i told her i was bisexual casually while i was sitting with her in the tc speech office. She reacted the way i dreamed my mother would—so kindly, so gently, with a smile on her face and no further questions. I begin to wonder if it was because she really didnt mind my queerness or thought it was any grounds for discussion or curiosity. Or if it was of something else—of kinship, of understanding, of knowing in her heart that she was one of us. Maybe bi. Maybe lesbian. Maybe aromantic. Maybe asexual. Maybe maybe maybe. Maybe many labels, maybe none. I cant tell. I dont have the ability to. I shouldnt, anyway. Its not my business.

But it made me think. Is womanhood really only about heterosexuality? marriage? Gaining a man and settling down before 35 and having kids? Where do i fit? Born with the right genitalia to be called a woman, but in my discord server with my students they see three different pronouns. Where do i fit when my thoughts are plagued with a woman who is giving me false hope of the possibility that we could be together if I just waited (implied) for her to get over her commitment issues? just because we had some sort of tension between one another that I could not allow us to explore because I did not want to put out for my own reasons (the reason is I am demisexual).

How fitting that as I write this, Daniel Caesar is crooning in my ear, “Emily, please don’t be my enemy / you were such a friend to me / I’m sorry for my energy”. These kinds of situations bring up my worst insecurities about my personality. It’s been a year since I last felt like this, when my muse (read: ex-girlfriend who I based Celia on in “They Don’t End Up Together”) decided we shouldn’t be together anymore after I had a meltdown for overthinking. It’s been a year since I worried about how I was perceived to people. People apparently see me as stern and unable to relax. I like to think I have good self-discipline brought about by 70% my Singaporean education and 30% strict parents (being educated in a different culture and education system at an age of constant development is really pivotal to a child’s growth, more so than my parents trying to raise me as a prototype child that they constantly called while at a Bastille concert with friends). This girl that’s messing with my head was one of those people. I used to see this person as an acquaintance that I was okay with (we met in college, you see), we had some fun talking about K-Pop like normal (read: chronically online) people do. But there was something that she and I as both halves of Pandora should have never opened up, and now what? Heartache over something not at all substantial that informally went on for like, two weeks?

And at the bottom of the chest pandora opened, after all the pain has left, still hope sits there. And hope, like Lana del Rey has said once that I shall say again, is the most dangerous thing a woman can have, and I have it. Hope for this person, of course, I am forcing to wear away as I resolve that once I publish this I will avoid Instagram to stop hoping that she communicates with me and sort this out with me because I know I cannot trust her to say what I want to hear since we both want different things and I cannot force her to want what I want.

But still, my hope remains, as a delusional daydreamer, for the person truly for me. That someone will come my way and treat me like Joe Alwyn treats Taylor Swift: lets her flourish and create as she does, and holds her hand through it, reads the things she writes and helps her in turning them into gold, to make them sparkle and shimmer, but also tell her when it is already good enough, and she is good enough to keep and protect. To not see my independence and be intimidated by it, to not see my bare minimum as too high, to not see me as a channel on a TV or a profile on Instagram to flip through when they’re being uninteresting posting photos of their forehead with commentary about the world.

To see me for me, and to hold my hand while letting me be.

Is that too much to ask?

[gisapot]

life check! (i got published.)

hello!

i haven't been updating this blog for a while because of writer's block my job i shifted to talking a lot more than writing when it comes to processing my thoughts because i find that it is faster to do that so you can find me on youtube absolute self-hatred all of the aforementioned reasons that i've lined out. hahaha. because this is the only free time i've ever found for myself in a while, i thought of coming back to fix up the themes on my main blog, this one, and this other project i'm working on for my friend's christmas gift that's super overdue. then i thought maybe i should post an update for posterity.

i've been meaning to come back for a while, but a lot happened to me externally (half of it out of my own doing, from what i understood in the aftermath. aly says it's not really. the other half aly and i agree are not of my own doing) that i had a lot of internal shame, remorse, and pent up rage for, so i buried myself in my work to forget about it, since the people i've wronged are no longer available to me so i can offer my apologies and the people who've wronged me i no longer speak to. there was a lot of learning how to mind my own business, isolating, and interacting only when i'm desperate to. yes, i do not have access to therapy so it's better this way. it's so high school, noh? i know that much about myself. self-awareness +5.

while i was looking at this blog to start cleaning it up, i realized there were things i wrote that were forced. so arty-farty. writing for the sake of writing, writing for a deadline i could never meet, posting things i am not proud of, just so i can keep this blog running. i am barely inspired anymore that i constantly reflect back on the past ten years of my life (wow, i've always imagined to myself how it would feel like to reach a point in your life where you say 'the past ten years'. feelsbadman) and wonder how i was so motivated to keep writing and how i was so quick to bounce back from writer's blocks. i had over 50 word files at a point, just ideas and plot bunnies and lines of poems i hear in my dreams saved in various folders, meticulously organized and labeled, 'FIC' 'POEMS' 'ONE-SHOTS' 'CHAPTERED'. while i appreciate the hard work younger me put in to become better and better that now i write the way i do, i wonder where the motivation and inspiration went.

maybe inspiration died when i got to college and i noticed that writing was not about putting your imagination into words and hope it sticks like my childhood led me to believe. in reality, literature is so tactical and precise that you have to make sure everything sticks. that there is reason for everything. there are editors that are your second eye and tell you to close holes you never even realized were there. everything is circular. i am so afraid to write now that even if i did it for myself i just stay in the planning stage and turn in for the night since i had my fun and now i have to do the grittier thing, which is to describe it with adjectives and verbs. milan kundera never did that and he wrote the dry-but-wonderful "the unbearable lightness of being", while if i do that i feel like i'm doing something wrong. something inherently lazy. and if i am too vivid, i am toeing the line of exposing myself as someone with roots in fanfiction writing and admitting that harry potter was pivotal to my adolescence, which is always looked down upon in mainstream literature communities as "kiddy" and "underdeveloped". there is shame wherever i go. i wonder if this is because of tiktok teens - the younger half of generation z - constantly expressing their disdain for everything and anything even when they professed their love for it not more than two months ago. i wonder if me feeling this way is my way of wanting to fit in. why do i always want to fit in? why is it such a shame for me to stick out?

i wonder how people like ursula le guin did it. she woke up early and sat down to write complex and critical tales the whole day with such precision, minded her own business without humans and shallow drama, then retired for the night at exactly eight and did it all again the next morning. i want to say it is a luxury; i have been made a slave of capitalism and i do not have the capabilities both mentally and financially to spend most of the day hating myself for not writing words onto paper or my computer screen.

speaking of computers, i am so easily distracted like a goldfish in a fishbowl. when i was 11 years old and so full of life, time, and inspiration, whenever i was on a computer the first instinct i had was to open up a word file to finish up whatever daydream i had that i decided was good to post on fanfiction.net (god bless that site, i hate it). now that i am 24 (and a month!) and those things seem so abstract, so out of reach, i turn to something easier to digest: videos. not brightly colored ones. i open a tab of youtube, find a video essay to watch, switch to a different tab to open twitter while someone talks my ear off about how the upward trajectory of lindsay lohan's career led to her mental breakdown. i don't even like lindsay lohan. (that's not to say that i am a hater. i just stand on the line of indifference because while i was aware of her and i've seen herbie and mean girls, i am not american so i've never held or cared enough about the monthly j-14 or people covering her breakdown of whether or not paris hilton was her best friend.

i've also turned to making my own videos, especially since it's much easier to make if you have a webcam and a microphone. what takes me days to write and edit is easily rambled in an hour of total silence in front of a camera. what's great about videos as well is i don't plan any of them. it's like an hour-long impromptu podcast that i just stitch together and upload for the culture.

this was not the future i imagined for myself.

while i always knew i wanted to write, to be alone with an occasional friend, i constantly fuck up by doing everything else but write and talk to people that aren't aly. i have two and a half different friend groups (because kim and i are only two people) that i am very dedicated to. i never thought i was a social person. i used to be an extrovert as a child but things happen during your upbringing that make you think your thoughts don't matter and inculcate this belief that people hate you and talk shit about you in secret. (never project your insecurities onto your kids, they will project it onto their friends who they will lose because they cannot believe the adults in their life were putting things in their mouths.) on top of being a strangely social person, i'm chatty. hence the channel.

i never realized my mouth was constantly open and i would talk someone's ear off if they were just willing to listen.

i fell in love, too. she's one of the people i constantly talk to about everything, even if she's never really considered those pieces of media before (the same way i never really considered her interests before). we've just hit a year together and all i do is talk to her about everything that's on my mind. and i think a lot and i get excited a lot about the things i read in books and articles online, so she's like, the net to catch all my thoughts. i told her the story of joseph and his colorful coat last night because it just popped into my head after i made a joke about selling my baby brother because of that meme on facebook.

i found a draft i wrote for this blog dated march 25, 2020. it's been a year and it will be another one older this coming march. i talked about wanting to write a book over the quarantine. i never finished this book, and i never wrote the book either. i had plans and people can attest to this if they're in my workspace server on discord (another place where i realized i was chatty as hell and i actually am social, just forced to isolate and into silence because of eldest asian daughter decorum). they see my notes. countless rows of them: original stories, poems, personal essays, character studies, fanfiction that i never finished. there's a parallel to be drawn here between unfinished stories and the unfulfilling lives we lead now that we are entering the third(? i'm weak at math) year of the pandemic. i don't know if i am good enough to write it.

sometimes there is an ego boost. in the early half of last year a call for contributions was posted on katitikan, an online literary journal for the southern philippines. it was for the pride month issue for the month of june. it was preferred that stories about queerness and coming into being and the concept of the closet were submitted. like a person with the impulse to get attention, i geared myself to submit a very vulgar piece about a gay (as in mlm) couple written in second person that i wrote years back when i was helping someone do their homework. of course it fit the theme, i didn't think of submitting that story just because it was gay. when you submit something to a literary journal, it's much more stringent, since literature is tactical and precise, not whims of fancy to bring on the kilig factor and gain likes and comments like how wattpad writers operate. and i know that for a fact, i was once one of these teeny-bopper writers. i still am, to be honest (well, not wattpad, but ao3 now).

the original work contained a lot of religious imagery in it. there was implicit discussion on the dichotomy of good and evil and how the way sex feels as well who does it puts the act in a grey area. it was below a thousand words. that kind of story with that kind of word count is already a feat for me, i'm generally stuck in establishing exposition within the first 1000 words and barely no plot in, especially if i'm writing something original. that story, despite being so crude, was full of everything a creative writing teacher would love, i think. they would cry reading it. (see. ego boost.)

i remember the experience of writing that story. the kid i was helping out was a senior high kid i met online who was taking a creative writing class. while helping her (both of us were close to tears at this point because she did not understand my point), i came to the realization that writing stories isn't easy. that creativity is not a cute skill to have. writing is deliberate, choices in names, items, places are not arbitrary. they always stack up to create this effect that doesn't topple down one way like a line of dominoes. it ripples outwards like a drop in stagnant water.

before i submitted the story, i sent it off to aly and asked her to comment on it. the first thing she said that was very pivotal for that story to morph into the body of work it is now was that while she understands that i'm used to writing fanfiction with mlm pairings, we don't have a lot of wlw stories to go around, certainly not cebuano ones (this was before i met doc jhoanna cruz, a professor from UPM and an author. shes a lesbian who writes short stories and personal essays about wlw experiences). it would have been better if i rewrote this entire thing to be about a wlw love story.

i was thrown for a loop, to be honest. i've never written a wlw story before. but then again, i genuinely thought writing for journals and calls for contributions were challenges to your writing capabilities because they had themes that you had to abide by (and there's a deadline to meet). they wouldn't even pick you if you didn't fit the theme, that's generally the first criteria. but i took aly's words to heart because she was my best friend, and started.

of course like a lazy piece of shit i ctrl+f'd that story and changed the names and pronouns of the original characters to names generally perceived as feminine. i know i wanted the "top" (good god) to have the same name as a saint, so immediately i thought of st. alexandria and st. cecilia. st. anna was also an option, and st. elizabeth. i chose cecilia in the end. you'll know why i chose cecilia later on.

i started building cecilia as a composite of my girlfriend, who used to be a beauty queen for minor pageants in her city, and the new money chinita girls from cafa i've gay-panicked over the years while at college. someone straight-passing. someone pretty and tall, with pin-straight black hair, pale, had nice hands... yes, i'm describing my type (who also happens to match very well with my girlfriend hahaha, di mo ana? standards = met). as they say, write what you know. write the world around you.

i tried rewriting the original piece to fit with the wlw idea that aly presented me and fitting cecilia in it, but in all honesty, it seemed pretty hard because in my opinion, while wlw can be promiscuous in their own ways, i had my own reservations and despite writing gay smut taking place outside surrounded by religious paraphernalia, i'm pretty conservative about sex. i'm guessing it's because i was raised catholic and educated in catholic institutions. i personally couldn't imagine a pair of lesbians going at it in a living room that looked very much like a pope's mausoleum.

it reminded me of a conversation i had with a co-teacher before the quarantine hit in 2020 and i was still teaching humss students. for some reason we got to the topic of him getting shamed for getting laid before marriage on his own personal facebook profile (we were in a faculty room and we were not surrounded by any students, i wouldn't have this conversation otherwise if i was in campus). he noticed that i flinched slightly, and he asked if i was conservative. i explained to him that it was a product of my upbringing, but i do know a lot about sex and... other sex-related things that start with the letter k. (just a disclaimer: while i am conservative, i've been aware of my bisexuality since i was three years old. i'm a prude, not a homophobe.)

this same co-teacher was also a bit of a somebody in the cebuano literary community. he had his own writing group, he had a book he co-wrote, he was sought after as a speaker and all that fancy jazz. he was way elevated compared to me who's stagnant and writes like, once a year, if i'm lucky to be hit by motivation. i had a personal essay i wrote. i don't remember which piece it was that i had, but i sent it to him to look it over because i couldn't bear for my personal essays to be rejected by literary journals again, taking them personally as if refusing publication was invalidating my pain (sidenote: why do people apply for universities that require admissions essays? don't you also feel as if rejection from those universities is also an invalidation of your childhood trauma? why do you wave your trauma around on paper and hope your story is painful and scarring enough to award you a spot in archaically ranked institutions?).

after he read it, he got back to me: "you really like the vignette style." "it's easy to write. i have a hard time writing continuously."

the conversation somehow shifted to the books he ordered from book depository taking forever to arrive, but my brain was still processing. vignettes. vignettes. individual scenes. is this a vestige of my past as a fanfic writer writing one scene per chapter, each chapter around 500-800 words? i don't know, i don't want to analyze that. vignettes.

play to your strengths. write in vignettes. write what you know.

if i were to write what i know about the girls i've crushed on as the basis for cecilia, i decided that the main character, who is still nameless at this point, was going to be based on me. teacher persona, conservatism, socio-political opinions, music taste, judgmental personality and all. if i was going to write what i know, i was not going to continue writing the architecture major that the original main character was. it was going to have to be more familiar. play to your strengths, and all.

if you've read the story prior to this blog post, you'd realize that the main character is annoyingly perceptive. she is quick to make judgments on the people around her and writes mental essays about how to dismantle the person she's talking to with all the knowledge she possesses of the world. i am the same way, to be honest. i don't know a lot about science and math, but i do know how to read and listen and i'm quick to judge based on what i hear. it's both a toxic flaw and yet a golden quality, i think. it's easy for me to know who is worth talking to. (but to be honest, wag tularan. or do. don't get into cars with tinder dates who genuinely stan the chainsmokers. i'm looking at you, sty.)

there is a scene in this story where the main character, cecilia, and MC's friends are gathered together to discuss the limited availability of lesbian films that do not sexualize women or lesbian films that depicted women in poverty or living an honest low middle-class life. i've always held this opinion after i watched the movies baka bukas, blue is the warmest color, and that one lesbian film where they just stayed in their hotel room and had sex for all two hours of the movie before they broke up at the end. i've resolved to write about my hatred for lesbian movies but i never really found the words, much too irritated to ever articulate myself in a clean fashion. more things i wanted to write in a more formal, academic manner is why queerness in media is only chalked up to coming out, having crushes on straight people, and just plain boring. there is no kilig factor like there is in het or mlm romances. i never cry during lesbian movies.

i decided to express these opinions in this story because my lack of eloquence and my self-perceived shallowness will make it difficult for me to express this distaste. i was always going to sound shallow and childish whenever i wrote academically. i wrote a rant as i would have said it myself, put it in quotation marks, surrounded it with more gossipy judgmental shit about how MC cared about how people perceived her when she's in her angry activist mode, and signed it off with MC's name.

to be honest, i was afraid of writing this part for many reasons, one of which is that ranting in fiction is kind of childish, especially if a writer doesn't know how to write dialogue. the message would be so ineffective. i remember ayn rand's john galt speech towards the end of atlas shrugged being the same way. i had that part read through by many people like aly, zai, aliyah, kuya toff, and my girlfriend, because i was so afraid of sounding preachy or, god forbid, like ayn rand herself. i have some fears.

this scene was also very important to me, as it introduced the people in MC's life, her queer friends. this part of the story was intended as a platonic love letter to my college friends. they were my first queers-only friend group. i personally do not have straight friends. that's a flex, i know. i just don't continue talking to straight people unless it's for work. i made it the same way for MC, and these characters were modelled after my friends that aly and i met in college. in that friend group i was the only linguistics major in a friend group of literature majors, and i built my socio-political opinions while listening to them discuss the philosophical theories they learned in their lit theories classes that they could anchor their literary analyses on. i don't know a lot of literary theories, only being able to read on them in full (as opposed to hearing about them in conversations) when i started teaching literature for senior high school students, but being friends with them gave me a headstart in that direction.

this scene also helped me paint a contrast between cecilia and MC. in a deleted scene from this story, MC asks cecilia where her friends are. they do not appear in the story until the very end (the ending was not deleted, it was the fuente crossing scene), but cecilia explains that she doesn't have many gay friends, and if she does, they're usually her pageant handlers or her makeup artists or stylists, and they're strangely lesbophobic or biphobic. i do not know much about the pageant community, but this is from stories from my girlfriend's own experience. they're catty in the backstage and make comments that they think do not hurt. while MC has a support system consisting of only queer people who challenge each other intellectually and personally, cecilia's circle of queer "peers" consist of other side of the coin, the stereotype of what queer people are as presented in reality and in media: mouthy and ruthless.

there is so much bitterness in cecilia's life, i don't know how a person like that manages to keep living. while expanding the world of this story to be more fitting to a wlw pairing and to include as much of my immediate world as i see it now, i thought of keeping the "prop" of religious paraphernalia in the household, and introducing cecilia's mother. if i was going to make cecilia the composite of my girlfriend, she had to be someone finishing up university while still living with her mom who was projecting her fears of a queer daughter and religious promises that go unfulfilled, only fulfilled for appearance's sake, or only because they were afraid of going to hell, not because they truly loved God and were thankful for their lives. i immediately modelled her after one of my friends' mothers who was also pretty conservative to the point where she would combine both religious and homophobic tirades in one breath in front of her closeted lesbian daughter (whose name i will not include in this post to protect her privacy). while her mother's cooking is lovely, not every human is perfect.

it made me think of my own parents while writing. they do not live in the country, and i rarely share to them about my love life. while they know of my sexuality, we treat it with a "don't ask don't tell" policy. my mother rolls her eyes whenever i bring up my sexuality. my father, i don't know what he feels about it, but he does care about his niece who is proudly out with a girlfriend who's butch. while i'd like to take that positively, there might be a possibility that he's only ok with queer people if it's not his own children. but in a way it works that they aren't present in the country, so i reflected that too in the story. in the story, the main character makes only few mentions of her parents (one being a reflection on where she thinks she inherited her judgmental personality from), but they never truly appear.

the title, and subsequently, the plot trajectory of this story with focus on its ending, came to me in two different ways. first, it came from a youtube video of a youtuber reviewing the books she read that month, one of them being "they both die at the end" by adam silvera. i haven't read the book, but the title did help me decide the ending. it was going to be tragic. of course, no death involved because i hate that kind of thing (from a writing standpoint i think it's a copout , and as a reader i try my best to filter it out of my ao3 results), but it was going to be a bittersweet ending. while formulating the story in jagged pieces, i was having a hard time picking out the music i wanted to write to. of course zayn's mind of mine album is a staple in my writing playlist, but there is only so much of the same songs on loop i could take before i got bored of myself, of zayn, and my own characters. i got distracted quickly, ending up looking up k-pop songs on youtube. even if they were difficult to write with because i just end up dancing to what little choreography i know from repeated watches of the live stages, at least it was something different. autoplay started from itzy's not shy, to ateez's wonderland, to loona's so what, butterfly, then vivid.

vivid is a song about putting color into the world, and it pushed me to write the first scene of the story in one sitting: the MC is at a bar that's very obviously basic in mango, behind the national bookstore, with her friends. strobe lights were described. i remember my own experience at basic. it was too loud to have a conversation, tall straight people were around, the lights were too bright, the bathroom was literally on the stage. i wondered in that moment, as i mulled over this idea much like a writer of speculative fiction, what if my friends brought me someone to meet? it flowed from there. part i. part ii (now a deleted scene). part iii... i decided then if i wanted to start with vivid, this story would have 12 parts, as 12 members of loona. each vignette will be vaguely inspired by their solo projects. if the first girl was heejin with vivid, the next vignette would be inspired by hyunjin's around you. the last vignette would be inspired by olivia's egoist. wouldn't it fit so well too, with the idea that the ending was going to be bittersweet? love myself today... let you go today...

i decided then the title would be "they don't end up together".

at the time i wrote this story i was exposing myself to new kinds of music as well, just to expand my library a little bit because i was kind of getting sick of the same brockhampton album on repeat even if my playlist was on shuffle: lil nas x, taylor swift's folklore and evermore albums, and a kpop girl band called dreamcatcher that specialized in rock metal type music (of all the genres a girl band could do). with that, i added more songs to my writing playlist.

during one of my writing sessions for this story, taylor swift's evermore played in the background. i wasn't too familiar with the music on that album quite yet, but the ambiance of it just felt right for the general idea of writing. in my periphery, i could hear her crooning, "my house of stone, your ivy grows, and now i'm covered in you."

at the expense of sounding very zoomer, i was like, "f e l t, omg." so i opened my minimized spotify window and found out the title was ivy.

ivy, as in i literally have a bisexual character named ivy in my sims 4 game (that is also heavily based on zai and her personal aesthetic).

are you fucking kidding me? this is perfect. it's like, poetic justice or something. ivy is the name of the main character of a wlw story, perfectly encapsulating the way she is "haunted" (a bit of an overstatement on the impact of cecilia on her) by cecilia's coming and going in her life. and the song that shared her name was accurate in its lyrics to describe my character too.

it made me remember the name choices i had for cecilia. i initially wrote her as an alexandria around this time, but it honestly didn't stick for me because 1) i had a friend named alexandria, and 2) i found it a bit ostentatious, very twitter-roleplay-name. when i found ivy's name, it was also around the time my favorite ateez member hongjoong was talking about the filipino-american musician dominic fike, and he recommended the song "why". hongjoong and i have very similar tastes in music, save for the fact that i also listen to girl band music while his music taste is very curated to the theme of "i am a 2006 myspace emo" with linkin park and the vamps... whose meet the vamps album i used to listen to in high school. one of the lead singles of that album was a song called "oh cecilia (breaking my heart)" (whose chorus sampled/lifted from simon & garfunkel's "cecilia"). isn't that also a saint? by the end of it, i decided to go with cecilia not just for the purposes of religious imagery, but also because it sounded more "rich old money filipino" (see, i told you literature is deliberate and tactical). the moment i started using the name cecilia, her whole backstory for that character flashed through my eyes. her pageant experience, her mother, her opinions on coming out, her ignorance on queer politics, her very large xpander-like car that i just lazily called a "Jeep".

with the names finally established for both cecilia and ivy, i threw myself into writing this story with various songs sprinkled in references here and there; music is pivotal in this story. as i said in an earlier paragraph, ivy shared my music taste, so not only are my favorite songs reflected in the story or used as names, but they are also part of the symbolism that contributes to the building of the plot. there was a lot of k-pop included, mostly songs that were easily misunderstood as queer. we always see what we want to see, and if MC (and by extension, me) wanted to see queerness in the k-pop songs she listened to (despite south korea being a homophobic ass country for no valid or religious reason but are misogynist as fuck), then so be it. heart attack by loona's chuu, jazz bar by dreamcatcher, all night by f(x), and satellite by loona (as a group).

the deadline for the piece was nearing. i was nowhere near done, and i was way past the maximum word count of 4000 words. i was inching into 5000-word territory. i started crying to aly that i was unhappy with where i am at and i feel like the story isn't done. i had every intention of writing this story as something that would be kilig as hell like how fanfiction would be, palatable to young zoomer readers, something that, if they wanted, could be characters for fanfiction. i hated literature at this point. i hated that there was elitism in the community, that established writers shit on the young adult genre and we try to quash it out and invalidate it because it's "fanservice". we end up dissuading children from reading because we force them to read "the classics" whose, while their lessons are timeless, language is archaic and dry and difficult to digest or relate to if you are under the age of 17. we laud ayn rand's masturbatory speeches and her selfish objectivist perspective because it's literature as if our realities are not represented in the presumed "braindead" young adult fiction. and i wasn't able to do that, because i was running out of time and i was cramming for more words to fit.

i had to delete the haseul vignette. the vivi vignette. the jinsoul vignette. the yves vignette. the chuu vignette. the gowon vignette. i don't really feel bad about the gowon vignette because it wasn't my coming out story to tell but i did feel like it was important to add because something someone said to me was very important to help ivy move on from the travesty that was her not-relationship with cecilia.

in the end, fuck it. i submitted the work a day or two before the deadline, and i pissed myself not knowing if i got in or not. i don't know what impostor syndrome is and i like to believe i never got it ever in my life, but i did get bouts of insecurity where i was sure that what i sent in was trash, they hated it because it went past 4000 words and it was a crime and i was going to get in so much trouble because they didn't have the word space... i was so afraid. i've been rejected twice by two different journals and i never talked about it. those were the first two times i was ever rejected from a journal before. this was my third try over the pandemic. if i didn't get in i was completely done for. pandemic depression and losing my job wasn't enough. i was going to be doomed to be talentless for the rest of my life. why did i think writing was a good talent to keep practicing? why didn't i continue with singing?

Inbox (1) - s*****

oh my god. *i'm_gonna_fuckin_k*ll_myself_tiktok_sound.mp3*

open the damn email, you loon, what does it say!?

oh my god, i'm GAY FUCK AAAAAAAAAAAAAA- IM NOT A JOKE I CAN WRITE OH MY GODDDDDDDD

Here's the link if you want to read it in full!

anyway, we are nearing the end of my most stressful pride month of my life (and i snuck out in junior high to go to a pride parade!) working on a short story that could have been shorter if ivy just wasn't so much of a bitch like me. christ, i need water. this is my first ever fiction piece too. i always get by with poetry, and i also coast through with personal essays because not a lot of people do it here in cebu that i always manage to pass by just to put my name on a certificate printed on fancy glitter paper. i'm considering a shift in genre, to be honest! i didn't think this was possible for someone like me with roots in fanfiction, whose characters were pre-made and i never had to describe their physical attributes to help my reader imagine who they were. i didn't think i would get here.

the story of ivy doesn't end here despite getting published. the one up now is only the abridged version with many vignettes from their love story cut out. i still have the full unabridged version of their story that i want to finish and publish, and there are so many people in ivy's universe whose stories i want to explore, kind of like the novel let it snow by maureen johnson, lauren myracle, and john green. i want to write a short story collection about all these people, people like mia, valerie, simon, ate alex, kuya seb (and an unmentioned other friend who i'm not sure how to name yet) - the people in the queer friend group who have their own queer stories to tell. kind of like friend fanfiction. like i said, this was a platonic love letter to the friends i had in college. if only i can find my motivation to write; these characters are so vivid in my mind and i know the stories i want to tell.

today is january 15. it's been 6 months-ish since they don't end up together was published but i'm still riding the high of that publication because i am mindblown that the first time i deigned to write fiction professionally is also the first time that i get published. suddenly it no longer matters to me how many times i'm rejected and how far behind i am compared to my writer peers, but the one time that it mattered to me, i wasn't. i have such low self-esteem. but i know as i should that putting yourself out there is the only way for reward to return to you tenfold. the world is difficult to please. effort sometimes will go unrecognized. but trying. trying never fails. i'm reminded of something aly and i call "the goat essay", more professionally known as "i know what you think of me" by tim kreider and published on the new york times. the last paragraph, the way it ended, aptly put how i feel towards this entire situation. it went like this:

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

[gisapot]

how to read poetry.

break my heart. let me write the night away and shred the pieces. wait till morning when i am gone, and piece it together. read it aloud and return it to me, whole and fixed, taped or glued or any way you see fit. i decline, say it is yours and keep it. post it. sell it. read it again, to an audience of thousands: “i once was loved by a boy who wrote poetry, who wrote me a song, an ode, a rhyme or two, and he gave it to me in parts, so i might make it, for him, whole again and new.”

[gisapot]

i write poetry with my blood and my hands for you, signed it off with your last name attached to mine; i can only dream of you, pray for you, delude myself with the rose petals from which the thorn comes from, the one i cut myself open with: pick, pick, pick, pick, pick me, pick me, pick me, pick me. he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, loves me not, he loves me not, he loves me not, he loves me not, he loves me not, he loves me not.

in the pomegranate garden with pothos.

[gisapot]

In defense of Dionysus (written 12-03-2017, posted 12-03-2019.)

It is officially the anniversary of the last creative nonfiction piece I wrote. 

I did not realize it has been two years since I wrote this piece, the piece that I consider my magnum opus; two years since my grandfather had passed.

Posting this today of all days was not intentional. I did not intend to post this here because I had bigger plans for this piece; a greater exposure than this tiny blog only my friends and students know and avidly read (not that I am ungrateful for your support). I wanted to see this in print.

I wanted to submit this to Katitikan for its ‘places and spaces’ issue, but to submit this means to remove a thousand words from this five-thousand-word monster, and removing a thousand words is an insult to the integrity of the story I want to tell. To remove a thousand words is to break the legacy of my grandfather.

Another reason why I wanted to post this is to address a comment my mother had received on a photo she posted on her Facebook of her and my grandfather. I do not know if that was their last photo together. She shared the post to share to her world that it is the second anniversary of her father’s death, and someone said, “maayo gyod an badlungon kay ma mis gyod sa tanan!” 

Instead of posting a position paper in defense of my grandfather and his merits, looking only one-sided and biased towards the man who raised me, I want to show you this piece, in its entirety, in my grandfather’s entirety. 

Who really was Antonio Gulane? 

Dear Grandpa: A Story of The Kulafu Warrior.

Dear Grandpa, today is the third of December, twenty-seventeen. I am in the new house, the one you begged my mother to buy for you before you passed: the one-story house made of cement and stone. It has barely been a month since we got the house when you decided to christen it with your quiet passing, bringing in faces old that I’ve never seen in years, and new ones my mother insists I’ve met longer than my brain can recall.

Dear Grandpa, this asphalt house is the first permanent one we have had in a long time. How many houses have we lived in? I don’t know the number, but I know each and every one of them, complete with tiny slivers of memories that are distinctly of you, Grandma, your white chino shirts with her tie dye skirts and half-slips. I remember your loud insistent shouts and your ribs protruding through your thin brown skin as you sit at midnight half-naked, inhaling the smell of Mighty Red, Marlboro, or some lumboy leaves you roll on your own. The smell of it mixed with Kulafu has permeated every household we occupy, radiating out of your rotting yellow teeth as soon as the clock strikes one in the afternoon. Textbooks always told me these were signs of a broken home life, a dysfunctional family. To me, it became a sign that told me that I was home, no matter where I was.

I.                   Basement

I remember very little about the basement, but I do have pictures of it developed like pictures used to in those times Kodak and Konika were the epitome of photography technology, Richard Gomez’ face on the packs of the finished images. There were blue green walls, and it was constantly dark down there because there no natural light came in. The wooden jalousies were sealed shut and dusty, not really helping our cause. Our TV was a small black box always tuned in to ABS-CBN, and one picture showed it frozen on an old Colgate commercial along with my memory of my first Christmas. You were there with Grandma, candid shots of you making me laugh so that I would smile for the camera. I was a chubby child with skin as pink as the girls endorsing Pond’s for a healthy pink glow, a vast contrast to your dark lumad skin, even more elaborated by the harsh automatic flash of the film camera. Grandma always shied away from the light of it with a bashful grin that took on not only her face but in the lift of her shoulders, carrying me up to cover her face. You, however, were not afraid to show your grimace to a device that immortalized your state: displeased that your photo was taken, but not mad enough to be violent.

           I am thankful these photos exist to give me a sight of my childhood that I remembered better through scents. I remember nothing, no experiences and no objects, but I do remember the smell of a very big pink bottle of Johnson’s baby powder, your alcohol, Tatay’s aircon-scented laundry, pungent socks, and your cigarettes.

II.                Village

There is always this notion that when the word ‘village’ is present in the address you write on forms, you were someone with money and stability enough to live in a place that had security guards stationed at every entrance. We were renting this house, and I do not remember what it looks like nor do I have the pictures to actually believe that we lived here. There must be a gap in my memory, but I forgave myself long ago for not remembering anything. But I do hear stories from you and Grandma about my childhood: I liked Uncle Dennis’ Lucky Me mami noodles – the one in the blue packet (is it still in production anymore?) – because it smelled like gas. I didn’t eat it, I just smelled the smoke coming out of it. Every afternoon at five, Uncle Dennis and Grandma would take me for a walk to ‘get some Fita’, which was a codeword for fetching Nanay from the corner. You recalled that I never went with them if there was no Fita involved, so my mother resolved to buy Fita before she got to the corner leading to our house so I would greet her by sunset.

It was a quaint village but we had to move away for reasons I still cannot understand to this day, but know well enough that what happened made my mother lose the face to show to her in-laws. Just because she was a tiger does not mean she held the power; her in-laws were kings of the jungle. Grandma maintains we were nothing at the time. We had no one to our defence. We were ants next to them in the grand scheme of things, we could not talk back when the perpetrators had money and we did not, ruling the gated compound as they did. I never believed you to be one to run away from a fight. It did not seem like you or Nanay to be quiet or behaved when mouths start running the way they did towards us, but you just let it happen like it did. We moved houses before I could remember anything constructive of it, or take any pictures to remember it by.

III.             Pardo

There is something in Pardo that always drew me in. It seemed like a place that was alive, crowds of people coming in with the setting and rising of the sun every day, judging by the plethora of jeepneys that headed that way. I know that because of my constant commute to school, a small Montessori school, girls in bright red uniforms and at least one boy per batch in grey t-shirts. Other than that, I remember nothing that had to do with what was outside the house except the potted plants lined up by the patio that you sat next to, where you were supposed to be smoking your afternoon away. But you were not there, not at the house, not in any of the pictures. I never saw you in that year. I think you hated the place, or the stampede that came with it, or something else. All I know is that you were never there. Your sister stayed with us instead, a skinny woman with short hair who took orders for empanada from Nanay’s friends. I don’t remember you, but that does not mean I have no recollection of whether or not you were there. It means that I know for sure that you were not there, so I had nothing substantial to remember you of, unless it was Christmas.

I remember you distinctly during our only Christmas in that house, hiding in the darkness of the alley behind the back door where a big blue tank stood. You crouched there, smoking while Nanay and Tatay took pictures of me posing in front of the Noche Buena. I have a picture of that moment, smiling cutely while Grandma stood with her back turned away from the camera facing the door that led to the blackness. I remember she was scolding you in harsh whispers to turn the flame of your cigarette off and come inside to join the festivities, to not be a Grinch on Christmas. Once the photo was taken I got down from the chair I used as a stool, towering adults walking past me – both uncles, Nanay’s younger brothers – who tried talking you out of sitting outside. If you did not feel like socializing, there was always a TV. Your indifference towards Christmas was evident.

           The concept of time is longer the younger you are. I look up at the clock as they plead you to come inside and eat some bread or ham, or an apple, whatever; it was eleven in the evening. You finally got up at three minutes later, but it felt like three hours. I wonder how that is so. When you walked past me, I wanted to ask – something, nothing, I don’t remember what I wanted to ask from you. But you just moved me aside and did not give me attention, and you sat on the sofa and I just stared, and I brushed it off. You were offered alcohol, and you asked for a bottle of Kulafu. I did not move. The moment I write this is when I remember that was the first out of two times where you did not make time for me. You always did.

 IV.             Sugar Apple

Since I was a child I always amused myself with the thought that Tisa backwards was ‘atis’. Of course, now that I am older I have come to realize that this is not true. But it also entertained me that this presupposition of mine was proved true with the sugar apples growing by the barbed wire fence right outside our house that closed the compound in. We were renting a bigger house this time, in a compound of three houses owned by a nice drummer amputee named Tony. I remember the whole town calling him Tony Kimpay like it was his full name. The house had light blue walls and a smooth ground floor that required a whole box and three-quarters of red Starwax and two coconut husks to shine. There was a second floor (a second floor! Only rich people had second floors, thought three-year-old me) where the floors were made of wood, and it was in this house where I learned that you never slept at night.

You sat outside from ten at night until six in the morning with a box of cigarettes, a mug of Nescafe coffee and three bottles of Kulafu, guarding the house in lieu of a dog or a security guard. You would entertain yourself with the ducks Tony owned, chasing them away once they started quacking at four in the morning along with the crowing of the chickens. It was from you where I learned to not fear ducks. And when Nanay’s cousin Dinah came to live with us while she went to college and told me to stay away from ducks because they bite, I did not believe her. They always run away from me because you taught me that I was bigger and more terrifying than any bird.

Sometimes you plucked the sugar apples and cut them in half to share with the family, but I never ate them. Instead, I was interested in the eba that grew next to it, eating it raw and with no salt to neutralize the taste. I loved how sour it was. I have pictures of me giving eba to my cousins who visited the house. Behind the camera, you turn your nose up away from the eba, because you did not like that I like them and preferred that I ate sugar apples instead because at least that is a fruit that made sense.

My first brother was born by then, and I did not remember an instance where you touched him. By then, people from the neighbourhood or Nanay’s friends from work came by to visit and coo at him. I would get jealous and insecure, because there is a baby stealing my mother’s attention, like all three-year-olds would feel when they have a new sibling. Because of the afternoon crowd on the second floor of the house, you woke up from your afternoon nap and went outside for a smoke to calm down to avoid snapping at someone. I followed you outside because I hated how Nanay did not give me any attention, all given to that stupid baby. An adult grabbed me, I don’t remember who it was but I know I insisted on going with you. You took a seat on a plastic stool Grandma uses for the laundry, and told me to go back inside once you lit the cigarette stick. I obey. I walked towards the door when I accidentally kick over last night’s Kulafu bottles. I turned around to pick them up, but you told me to leave it and go inside in that annoyed tone you spoke in when everything is not in order. Despite that, you crouched down and picked the bottles up without further complaint. Irritation was a trademark on you, a trademark I have come to not just learn, but to inherit.

 V.                Parrots

From the house with the ducks and the star apples and eba, we moved to a white house with a gate. It was not that far from the previous house, it was on a hill right behind it. The house was white, the inside also white except for the master bedroom which was decorated with faded yellow wallpaper. A few months after we moved there, Tatay bought me a pair of birds – a boy and a girl – for no reason at all. He just thought it would be nice to have a pet. They were yellow-green birds and I thought they were parrots and insisted that they speak after me. Under the cage of the birds was a wooden stand for your own rooster. It was then I learned that you liked cock fights, you bet on it and joined it even with the constant reports on the radio that these betting games were illegal because it went against animal rights or some random reason I thought of as a child that would rationalize the world.

I still do not know if the birds Tatay got me were parrots or not, but it is an appropriate analogy for you and K: at the age of three with a head as big as a basketball, he admired you for everything you did to the point that he copied your every move, especially your skill in many types of martial arts. Now as I am older and I look back, I think of the credibility of your claim, if you were really an expert as you said you were. But at the impressionable ages of seven and three, we believed you to be the Filipino Bruce Lee as you introduced yourself to be. You taught K how to use nunchucks and a bit of arnis with a stick you conjured out of nowhere, and I wish I had pictures to prove that you really did teach him and he learned well from  you, but all I have are pictures of K alone carrying his nunchucks obsessively everywhere he went. He threw a fit every time he was told that he could not bring them to social events or inside malls because it was ‘unfair’ and he really wanted to show off what he knew.

He was so much like you. He copied almost everything you were. You two were so alike in the shortness of fuse and how you both wanted everything to go your way or you would have to resort to violence. K would wrestle anyone who said no.

Despite the contrast – K a pale milky white while you were a reddish brown like Kulafu – you taught him to be like you and he had grown so attached to his childhood hero that it no longer looked adorable to me as the older sister, but scary. This turned terrified the moment you took an afternoon nap and started kicking in the air like you were fighting someone, asking if your enemy in your dream was going to fight back. K thought you were so cool.

Nanay always tells me that she understands because she is always at work that K was imprinted by you and grandma instead of her and Tatay as the actual parents, but I could not understand what she meant. It just did not reflect the families on textbooks, where the children were close to their parents and their grandparents lived in a separate house. How close he became with you and Grandma was beyond me. He insisted to sleep on your bed, eat out of Grandma’s hands, and sang the lyrics you whispered in his ear before he ever learned how to read. There was no doubt in his mind that you were invincible, and you were the best example.

 VI.             Dog

We lived a year in that white house. Half of that year I dazedly spent in hospitals because of a severe case of dengue. That year was a bad year for us, it was some sort of bad omen. Nanay decided to move us to Mandaue, a whole city over, because it was safer there from mosquitoes and it was closer to her workplace. Other than that, Tatay was an architect for a new private elementary school that was just erected there, and he decided to send Yelcin and I there. It was in a big compound owned by a chubby old man with droopy skin that made him look like a wrinkly dog. He looked even worse with his constant frown. You did not like him. You liked his sons instead because they drank with you Kulafu with you at two in the afternoon to stay awake instead of being so uppity like their father.

We got a dog too, a female golden retriever we aptly named Goldie. You did not like her at first because she was a non-human creature that came into the house and chased after me because she liked me. You got very angry with her because she wormed her way to the bedroom I shared with Nanay and Tatay, but then insisted she sleep at the foot of my bed to watch over me, and suddenly I see you sneak out chicken leftovers from my breakfast to her dog bowl in the morning. That is when I knew you started to like her.

You sat outside with her in the afternoons. With that you brought some noise, you talked to her and told her to behave and you would give her a dog biscuit shaped like a bone whenever you got bored. You were not quiet anymore. You would bathe her religiously on Saturday mornings before I woke up, and fed her strange things for her meals like fish and some malunggay leaves. She ate them gratefully, like it was not dangerous for her poor dog stomach to eat such things.

You did everything for Goldie. You treated her like your own child, spoiled her with all the dog treats in the world and reprimanded my mother if she did not bring home any more treats for the dog when you ran out. You built her a cage made of metal grills and spare raw coco lumber that you demanded  Tatay to bring from his site visits in Catmon, the plastic flooring for the only thing authentically pet-shop about that cage. You made Dennis buy some metal roofing  from the construction supply shop around right outside the corner of the street, and you built her a home with your bare hands. When it was done, you put Goldie inside, locked it, and hid in your bedroom with Grandma without a word and took a happy nap.

 VII.          Protection

We had a house. It was in Opon, it was bound to PAG-IBIG housing loans, but we had a house. It was in a middle-class subdivision whose houses all looked the same, so our minimalist white and brown and green house with a terrace and an outdoor garden with Bermuda grass stood out. We had our own rooms, mine was pink and V’s was blue with a bunk bed since Nanay was pregnant with her third child and we were preparing for him. Nanay and Tatay’s room was a bright yellow with brown furniture. And yet you refused to see us sleep in our own rooms, us kids having to sleep in our parents’ room, on the floor with some mattresses, so that we do not get too hot in our own rooms. It was apparently better in the air-conditioned room, and it was so you could keep an eye on us all together.

We had a car too. It was a secondhand blue Nissan Terrano with a spare wheel on the back that we bought from your cousin who married into a rich family. We did not use the car much, but you took it out for spins around the subdivision so that it would not ‘gather dust’. I still do not know if that really is a valid concern for cars.

Your habits did not change: you still sat outside the house at midnight with your coffee and Kulafu and cigarettes, except now people stop in front of the house to take pictures, and you ‘shoo’ them away to keep them from plagiarizing my father’s work. (I will find in later years that they still succeeded in copying my father, what with subdivisions being erected that now use the same color scheme and the same layout and plan. It irritates the both of us. Whatever happened to intellectual property rights?)

           You hated the location, however. You hated that it was an entire city away from where we went to school and we did not get enough sleep. We passed out in the car the moment we get inside, to catch up on some sleep, wake up dazed and lost in school, then come home tired and lethargic to do any of our homework anymore because of how tired we were. We were practically in hell.

           Location was always the problem, wasn’t it? We just moved to the new home that was finally ours when it struck: Nanay was laid off of her job and had nowhere to go. With piling debts and deteriorating health and a baby who had more needs than her grown children, Nanay decided to work overseas.

           You were so violently against it. You were so mad. You did not want the family to be separated. Everyone should stay in one home, together, no matter the circumstance. It was all or nothing for you. But Nanay had already made up her mind, bought a ticket out, found a job that was waiting for her, all that was left was to leave for it. You did not look her in the eye that day she left, staying outside right in front of the car, like you were a boulder that could stop it from moving.

VIII.        Following

I remember very distinctly the moment K cried at the airport as we left Singapore after our first Christmas there. He was crying terribly hard, hating the fact that the family he grew up in, his own universe of discourse, was pulled apart into two different fabrics of time and space. It was difficult to be together now. He rolled on the floor of the then-existing budget terminal of Changi Airport, causing a scene, asking why we could not stay with her and be a happy family like those families in textbooks. He wanted to be with Nanay, with Tatay, but also with you and with Grandma and Uncle Dennis and Uncle Julius and their wives Elsa and Janice respectively, both parents and parental figures. K used to be the type that got so attached.  I cannot say the same for now, however.

When Nanay said she was working on our immigration to follow her to Singapore, K was excited. You, however, did not say anything. I think you have learned from when Nanay left the country, but you made us promise to call you by Skype every day while we waited to start schooling there. You could not bear to part from us, you and Grandma, but when was the best time to leave the nest, to be honest? And we belonged with our actual parents.

And every day like clockwork since we left, we called you through video call, your brown skin a bright white like the shirts on Tide commercials, asking how we are and what we are doing, same as yesterday. The call sits for two hours as we watch you nap on the wooden floor of the rest house, and when the computer overheats, you tell Dennis to shut it off and you slither away on the floor to your room, not showing that you are crying because of how you miss us. But it is okay, I know you console yourself, because Janice is pregnant, and you are sure this kid is not a kid you will let go.

When we left the country, you had no reason to stay in Cebu anymore, so you loudly declared to the entire family that you were all going back to Medellin where they grew up and where you raised them. There was a rest house there that Tatay constructed for us; somewhere we can sleep in whenever we visited Medellin for the weekend. It was a hut, brown with nipa leaves weaved together for the roof. Everything was made of wood except for the foundations and the bathroom, the cement wall painted green on the outside. Inside was tiled and decorated with seashells Tatay paid your nephew to collect from the beach behind the house. You spent your days there lying on the ground like a dog, never breaking your afternoon-nap-and-Kulafu-at-Midnight ritual like always. Sometimes you got bored and killed flies, made your own barbecue, and even built an extended hut for Grandma that you used as a convenience store. You would participate in secret games of masiao that another one of your nephews is a runner for, you and Grandma arguing about the how she calculated her own numbers and why yours is different, until the tumor in your stomach you kept joking about started hurting too much for you to laugh about it anymore.

 Dear Grandpa, throughout these homes we have come into, you repeatedly made me promise throughout my childhood to build you a concrete house that you can call your own. You called our constant moving a hassle and the hut that my father made for you not sturdy to withstand storms. You told me you were tired of the city, and asked me to build you a house in your hometown of Medellin, as big as I want, as long as it was strong and brave and could shelter you from the heavy storms.

Dear Grandpa, we have a home now. It is a bright yellow house in a subdivision a little ways away from the park that displayed an old train from Central that used to carry the sugar cane. The time is one-forty in the afternoon; I am sitting in front of your white coffin with a towel in my hair, and if I move to tilt my head rightwards I can see the bottle of Kulafu I bought for you as an offering. I am alone, save for the people passing by to get food, more ice cream, beer, or arguing about the wi-fi connection. Your Photoshopped portrait sits on top of your viewing glass, staring at the flurry of movement with your intense judging glare and thick eyebrows. You look angry in the photo, but Uncle Dennis says you were about to laugh as the photo was taken, and if I stared hard enough, I can almost see the moment that you do.

Dear Grandpa, you were powerful and strong-willed and loud for all the right reasons. You were never weak, and you never allowed people to spread nonsense about our family. I pretend not to know that the reason for your loss is not deterioration, but a dangerous formation. I pretend not to know that your every day habits are the cause of your passing. I pretend that you’ve never participated in vices in your life; it is in the Filipino culture, Nanay says, that once someone passes, he is an angel.

Dear Grandpa, I miss you very dearly. As I write this I keep erasing words and adding some more, getting distracted by the noise from the children and doors opening and San Miguel bottles tinkling against each other. This is the sound of our family, even as the shape of our living arrangement changes like the sky when it nears a storm. Dear Grandpa, in the years I have grown under your care we did not have a house whose deed was truly ours, but you have shown me the meaning of home and helped me remember it as my own now, as part of who we are: we are fighters, the heat of your Kulafu blood flowing through our veins – we are warriors.

Dear Grandpa, we might be so far away from each other, even further now that you have passed, but as I grow older and help Nanay and Tatay finish this house in your name, I will remember the way we have come, and how much further I have to go. In front of your coffin, I bow my head to mourn, but my blood boils hot under my skin – I will stand like you on this ground and do what I can, defending your name.

And if I can help it, Dear Grandpa, we will not move again any time soon.

[gisapot]

...

sometimes i think flowers are growing in my lungs and i can hack them up and hand them to the people who give me water and a pill, but there is blood on the petals and they turn their nose up, and maybe it is difficult to breathe sometimes when you have leaves fighting for your own air. take and receive, take and receive, take, and take, and take, and take... please take.

sometimes i think i can give people my heart in pieces like they ask for, it's a part of me that the poems say is the most sincere. but i break it the ceramic and there is blood running down, shards from my hands and people refuse to take it.

there is so much love i can give, but it is the wrong kind of love.

[gisapot]

Dear Grandpa, I miss you very dearly. As I write this I keep erasing words and adding some more, getting distracted by the noise from the children and doors opening and San Miguel bottles tinkling against each other. This is the sound of our family, even as the shape of our living arrangement changes like the sky when it nears a storm. Dear Grandpa, in the years I have grown under your care we did not have a house whose deed was truly ours, but you have shown me the meaning of home and helped me remember it as my own now, as part of who we are: we are fighters, the heat of your Kulafu blood flowing through our veins – we are warriors.

Written in grief, this is yours, Lo.

[gisapot]

SEMBREAK!: The Academe is a Pretentious Piece of Shit

It’s finally sembreak! 

Usually I would be all up and celebratory about the fact that school is out for a few weeks, because I can stay up and fool around on the internet, or I can focus on writing things that aren’t related to education, or watch the movies I’ve been dying to watch.

Except all that I’ve been doing is dying.

I haven’t been very inspired lately, and that’s what’s killing me. I’ve been having very intense writer’s blocks that have been around for months. I can’t seem to write my usual poetry, or even try to write a creative non-fiction. Reading stuff that I write kind of irritates me, and it hurts to add to existing plots in my head. 

The last time I wrote a poem that I liked was in July. The last time I actually wrote a poem was around late September to early October. All I’ve been doing is learning how to write concisely for thesis, and if I write creatively, I pay more attention to the technical aspects like the shape instead of getting the point across in the form of art.

The best rehabilitation for writer’s block is to read more. And it’s not just fanfiction, but actual books. Collections of poetry, award-winning novels… But the thing is, the book I’m reading now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is more of a man waxing philosophical about his realizations in life using four characters as less of characters and more as plot devices to give a hint on these epiphanies. But it’s not to say that the book isn’t great; I’m actually feeling very enriched reading that book because of how deep it goes into the human psyche and mental growth and trauma and the demented image of love. It’s just that it isn’t as descriptive of movement and dialogue and setting like it is in other books of fiction or short stories. It’s written differently, and while it’s amazing, it’s not what I need.

I have no source for poetry. I don’t have any collections on hand to read, and when I do, it takes me a long while to emulate the style. And when I do manage to finally learn it, it looks wrong in comparison to the original, like I’m an amateur who tries too hard. Like I’m a wannabe poet with no real talent and only want to do it for fame. 

What even is fame? People lauding you for your poems as you perform it in public? I don’t want that. I don’t want anyone to put a face to my pseudonyms, I want to publish it because I’m proud of it and I want to share it with the world, the way I managed to articulate the pains of life in my own words, no matter how recurring it is in the world. I don’t write to gain attention, I don’t perform to be famous.

Speaking of wanting to be famous, there are people out there who are writing about narratives that aren’t theirs. I see straight people writing about queer struggle like they have a piece of our hurt, like because they’re a supporter suddenly they have the same right to talk about it like actual queer people do. Yesterday I was on the jeep and someone said that they used to experiment and called themselves bi-curious, so they have just as much of a right to speak about queer issues

Am I heterophobic? Am I unwelcoming to prospective queer people? You can call me that, I don’t care much. It’s just that when the platform to speak about queer issues is a poetry night for LGBT people and you’re a so-far-straight girl performing another ambiguous ass poem that can be translated as queer but is so clearly about that one boy you can never forget about who works as a pilot for Philippine Airlines, it’s really damn disturbing.

This went on a very angry tangent. Which is true, I am angry. At various reasons. And while writing this I realized I should take a year off from school after graduation to find my muse again. To find my will to write stories and poems again. Because I would be a fool to jump into a Masters for Creative Writing without a portfolio, or any will to write. 

God, I want to shift. Why didn’t I shift over the sembreak of first year? I am so so so uninspired, high and dry, motivated to write but never inspired. Trying to write vent-pieces to warm up my skill, to melt the frozen block of ice that’s constant of my talent. This is so sad. When will I be able to write freely again?

What would you do if you were creatively challenged?

[gisapot]

Yellow, a poem

PREFACE

I have returned with a recycled piece. 

Well, not exactly ‘recycled’, per se, because it’s not really trash in the first place. It’s quite the opposite actually, if you ask my friends about it. They say this is the best poem they’ve ever heard from me, but then again when I first showed this to them, they never really knew what kind of things I wrote, or my style. They just knew I wrote poetry, but I never showed it to them, so they didn’t really have anything to compare this piece with.

I will not tell you what this poem is, but it starts out with a color that I never really liked that much. I don’t hate it, but it’s not my favorite color. At the risk of being bullied by my friend Eloiza (again), I wrote this thinking about my friends’ favorite colors. My friend Donna’s favorite color is yellow, and I just got so fixated by that color when it’s not even my favorite. 

Yellow reminds me of the HYYH series (is it because of the Young Forever album?). It makes me think that it is the epitome of youth. (Okay, yeah, it is the Young Forever album.) What was the epitome of my youth before I went off to college away from my parents, restarting with new people I don’t know (but I was supposed to connect with because we shared a language and culture)? I don’t remember, but I do know I have more of the compulsive (not compulsory) romance arc, and a very small friendship arc. Everything was so experimental and honestly, now that I look back on it, very cringe-y. Ugh. Why was I foolish enough to think I would find true love there? True love can eat shit.

I say that, but honestly, when is everything I have written in poem form not been about love? I have written essays much more mature than this, but I guess before being mature you have to chip off the im- prefix from being immature to become wholly you. 

I look back on this poem with all this in mind and I honestly think this is... very protected. It doesn’t shell out as much as my newer pieces because I was so careful when writing it. I took care of the form and the points I wanted to cover. Technical-wise, this is a perfect poem (no time for modesty, I am truly proud of its shape). But as the loud and over-sharing writer wanting to convey something, especially something so personal and important to me, I think this falls short. It didn’t say as much as I desired for a poem like this to say. 

(I wrote a follow-up piece to this after a year of publishing this though! I used it in addressing all the holes I had in this poem in terms of my personal thoughts. Although I kind of thought that the shape was something questionable unlike this one, I finally was able to clear the regretful air when I wrote this poem. It’s called Leviticus 18:22, and I kind of got that published in a national spoken word folio. Let me know if you want to read it as well!)

And with that, I hope you like this piece. 

Yellow. You realise at four – five? – years old That there are different shades of yellow: There’s the yellow of a ripe banana, The yellow kind of white of your grandma’s half-slip, The yellow of a neon Stabilo you jab into the wall, The tip no longer sharp, no longer straight.

Straight. You realise at five – four? – years old That there are different types of people. There is the straight: boys like girls like boys, There is the gay: boys like boys like boys, There is the lesbian: girls like girls like girls, And some people are in between.

Between. You realise at seven – six? – years old That you’re one of these different people: You’re an in-betweener: boys like girls like boys like girls, Girls like boys like girls like boys. He’s so handsome – “coffee, tea, or me?” She’s so pretty – “buy one, take me.”

Me. You realise at six – seven? – years old That it’s wrong to be not-straight: You’re sinning against God, You’re disappointing your parents. You’re a freak of nature, you’re a mutant. Queer, strange, gay, faggot, dyke. You’re not: You’re a Catholic school girl.

Girl. You realise at ten – nine? – years old That you don’t fit into the mold: You’re not boyish, you’re not a tomboy. You like pink, you like pastels, you like flowers. You like looking pretty, you like soft and smooth. You like lipstick and eyeliner and doing your hair. So why do you like those of your kind?

Kind. You realise at fifteen – sixteen? – years old That how the world treats you is not right: You’re hurt, tortured, hidden, locked away, Never to be seen or heard at all. You retaliate in the same bitterness and anger – no one’s ever been kind, So why should you?

You. You realize at sixteen – seventeen? – years old That you’re in love with her: She doesn’t know what she is but, She knows she’s in love with you too. And you hide in places and steal kisses in the dark, In the stench of parking lots and dark stairwells, And you wrap your arm around her waist as she sleeps, Limp on her stomach as it rises and falls with her breaths, And you are content.

Content. You realise at seventeen – eighteen? – years old That the world will never stop: It’s always going to be cruel and insulting, And it’s going to be painful, They’ll call you fickle and childish and non-existent. No one will ever be okay with who you are, Even if you’re a National champion in another country, Even with all these accolades and accomplishments. You’ll never be real, You’re still a make-believe.

Believe. You realise at seventeen – you’re sure it’s seventeen – years old that comprehension is not far-off anymore: not when the day after love won, you are approached by a pretty psychology major with brown hair asking you if you could fill out a little slip of paper with five check boxes, “what is your sexuality?” “Straight male?” “Straight female?” “Gay?” “Lesbian?” And smack in the middle, the third word glares at you like the three-o-clock sun, “Bisexual.”