Etc.

1. The moist and mist and musk of the body. Sometimes, I smell my fingers and wish you were there. Between.

2. I wasn't trained to be highly olfactory, as most of us. I suspect that the things I can't fully comprehend are those that require a keen sense of smell. Take womanhood, for instance. Even my vocabulary isn't wide enough to dissect the little I know. But you: copper, earth, wood, fresh milk, salt, soap, chlorine.

3. I must forget your scent. You linger everywhere, touch everything, without me.

4. Sometimes, it's not so much as your perfume. Only a lightness of air, the morning dew, the musk of earth.

5. Then the substitutes become bearable. As the rain mellow, I remember you and replay Before Sunset. You'd be Jesse, I, Celine, who had the audacity to say We had sex twice, you idiot as I stared, accusingly. Instead of Vienna, we would roam Manila, the only city our melancholy could afford, watch the night eat the aging light.

6. There were more of those in my sleep. Or when I'm awake. Since you, there's not much difference anymore.

7. But you adore her - your eyes are trained to follow the curves, the softness, the suppleness of a body. While I tend to look the other way. Or overanalyze: your words, your gestures, your pauses. Sometimes, I fancy being delusional.

8. You tell her the loveliest things. I hear them and swear to Van Gogh every piece of her body. 

9. I badly want you to badly want me to badly want you. Kill me for the syntax, but all I care about is resonance: you say what I say you say.

10. How do I put it? You are boulder and I am talc. A little gravity and I was pulverized.

11. That last over-coffee conversation was probably our way of saying over. In the end, all we needed was a full circle. To talk about anything other than ourselves. But there were footnotes. Subtitles. Marginalia.

12. For example, the hardest thing to let go of is the one you don't own. Or you linger everywhere, touch everything, without me. Don't make much sense, probably. But trust me, somewhere there is the point.

We Make of It

1. Say yes like you mean it. Sometimes, our own vocabulary defies and destroys us, words slip out and away from our intention and we articulate by not.

2. Funny how pain brings out our inner animals. I am snake, you are vulture. I tear up my skin and you flee from life. This is our way to survive.

3. Confusion is a curious thing. With it, everything and nothing is possible. There's so much ripple but not enough water to make a wave.

4. Happiness is hard to come by. We all demand the simplest things when there's not much supply. I say I only want a hand to hold, you say you don't want mine and somewhere after is a consequence of a mistake not corrected.

5. Growing up is all about getting down to the details. You still write about the same ache almost a decade after, but now you specify: We content ourselves with each other's reflection, us seeing each other through this pane, within this pain. Or I dread you saying no, like you mean it. Or You knew it all along and I'm here figuring out what else should.

6. Dreams are accurate as they come. They tell us clearly what we need to see, sometimes even to a fault.

7. The Tarot reader nailed it. The cards only guide you. You know what you know.

Free Thought, 1

Optimistic, as I see it, some man searching into the sickly streets of Manila for something he doesn't particularly know, yet is compelled by a sense of emptiness, almost a sense of loss.

It is easy to imagine a indie take on this mood: grainy, the lights and hues and shapes blurry but distinguishable, the protagonist walking along an avenue of low-lit, cheap, vespertine establishments, the dark cars roving past; the voice-over low and hoarse and almost whispering, the topic meandering from loss to anguish to desperation and then back again.

I've seen a number of these local films with the exact same aesthetic, approach. I've seen so many men who come like these movies: yearning, but distant, resolute, same as all the others.

Sometimes I wonder if there is ever someone who complements my asking, my search, and the human population - the extent of it - doesn't even begin to get me out of the question. It only signifies that there are billions of others that are not you; to use it as an argument in saying that there is someone who fits makes quite an obnoxious leap for a conclusion. It's like saying that there are thousands of different colors in this crayon box so maybe two might just match.

But maybe we don't necessarily have to find something that already fits, as this is not about shopping for an underwear. Maybe there is such a thing as us also fitting in and into and within someone, the process always a vice-versa.

Maybe the whole point is malleability. That our steel, eventually, must find its way into the burning, to be a part of that other steel.

When lyricism is removed from the poem,

what remains is acid, bruising, tearing up the skin, tendon, bone. I want to write you this way, without the words I've been used to, with all the wreck I reward myself with.

Despite the silence, you are here, within, tearing me up so well that it might as well be this way from now on. Somewhere, I came to realize, there is this plunge that goes on and on and on,

which might as well be precise, predictive, and precautionary. But now I know better and understand nothing,

and this might as well explain everything.