It was around this time of the year

It was around this time of the year when I last heard from you. It was before the year I took you for gone. I was waiting for weeks on end for the money you sent me, and I was thinking to myself, Where is my money? Is someone vacationing on my entrails because you are saving on remittance fee? Because you want me to meet family? As though your brother would see a Rimbaud if he saw me. But I actually don’t like remittance fees and bank charges. The heartlessness of it. Plus this what you call my left-wing bumper sticker politics. Then I also wanted to meet more of you.

Your brother was good to me. He looked me up and I said to myself, this is pain and didn’t smile up at him. Wished he just got a crush on me. More bearable than whatever it was you were capable of appraising me for. I took a taxi all the way from Mintal to your house because I had no money for jeepney, not even money for a box of matches. The day before, I volunteered to burn the leaves at the neighborhood plaza so that I could borrow a neighbor’s match, then I could make fire to boil water and make a broth of malunggay leaves seasoned with salt. What I survived on for the last two weeks. But your brother kept on forgetting about money I had to call eventually. We were so nice on the phone, he talking about picking the book on my way to work like I drove a car, and I saying sure he may leave them with his wife and to not bother with me he just fetch the kids at school. That clean. That pretty. So when I saw him, I said to him, So where’s the book and the money? He said, oh yes, the two hundred dollars! He went inside and came back with the book and an envelope that bore your bank’s name and handed them to me. I thanked him and said I got to scram my taxi’s waiting. He said Ingat kayo like I was one of your well-off friends. Very respectful good-looking bastard, I said to myself. Because his eyes went to my oversized rubber shoes as he said that and there was that crestfallen look about him. I slammed the poor bedraggled old screen door on his staringdown face. Or maybe I didn’t; maybe I just went out and the door just slammed itself on itself regardless of me. I didn’t know he was soon vacating that old house for that one in the plush village you invited us to later. Should be housing widows and aged spinsters, I said to myself as I waited for him to come out. But I wasn’t up for anyone, really. All I felt was fatigue, my body looking forward to a change. Rest and food maybe and a new perspective that should come with that. I told the taxi driver to take me to the money changer at Aldevinco. Then I went to a restaurant there where I ran into a friend dating a lawyer boyfriend. What happened to you, you look twenty years older! she said. First time she looked and sounded genuinely truthful with her description of me. First time also that she didn’t call me Manang, her putdown address when she wanted to beat me to a size.

I have been thinking about you. I know you were not vacationing on anyone’s entrails. All those travels home to bury your dead. I probably think more about your dead than mine, mainly because mine are too ugly to think about, how much more write about. I was told they are going to be bulldozed. Something to do with boundaries and taxes. Maybe they had been bulldozed already. I wouldn't know how to speak about these things to you, or to anyone else.

I had been thinking about America, too. How brutal it is. How the best way to go on with life there is to adapt to its cold callous side. I said that’s why you’re a real estate developer. The way for you to survive; a way to be at the top side of the heap. At first I was lost, appalled. Like, you have so much heart in you, don’t you, why that? I couldn’t reconcile so much goodness of heart with a name like Coldwell Banking. Makes me think of pretty girls in sun-dappled days which you are not. So I said to myself, the poet lives in a desert, silent beyond the bog, so a cold well must be a nice place to dwell in.