Dear Lia.
I didn’t get the job with the natdems. Maybe I will not ever again. Goodbye struggle. Goodbye rebolusyon. Goodbye Mao Zedong, goodbye marx love of my life, long live consumer capitalism. Are you through with me? Then you’re through with me. What could I do. If I didn’t get you right the first time. So here I am. In the garden, growing revolutionary petunias thinking of you and got a black eye instead.
A black eye. It sounds like a pulitzer to me. You get that, normally, for fighting a man. A natdem man maybe. Except that these aren’t normal times for me. I didn’t get into a fight. Not yesterday, not last week or last month, not in the last nine months. And that’s the hard part. That I didn’t get into a fight. That I had not been fighting. It’s depressing demoralizing. Like I’m not myself anymore. Like I’ve turned vegetable. By and by someone will again take pickings of me and steam me, sprinkle with a little salt and vinegar, spice with garlic and onions, and I am done! Deliciously done.
Yes, I am done. Finished. Hello world. Etes vous fini avec moi? Bien. Merci. Merde. I feel murdered. Am I a murder walking? No. I am ice waking. Waking everyday to everyday everydayness trying to forget it all the lost wars the unfought fights. Who was it who wrote Who will find me buried under the days? Some lesbian poet who ended up marrying a rich man I forgot her name. Maybe she does not want to be remembered the poor thing. I hate days. Their insensateness. The stupid mindless grind. Buy buy buy is all it says. Pay this pay that. The solution to every problem, be it a noisy street , a neighbor’s stinky poultry, or the unbearable heat. Before long you don’t notice anything anymore. Say how bright the light. Because you always stay home these days. And when you go out into the street you always look down, anyway. A way to keep away from trouble. Before long you don’t mind and couldn’t care anymore. How sad the country. Or how fucked up the artists, or how good the food. That’s where I had been to before I got my black eye. My hands heavy with goods. A sackful of fruits and vegetables and mushroom and asparagus and white corn. What could I be thinking? The carbonara you served for dinner? I was thinking maybe of writing about the urge to privatize. Of Tita's advice to aircondition one’s room if you don’t want toxic intrusions into your study and rest; of the rage nowadays to go on a vegie diet if one doesn't want poisoned by canned food. Or it could be that I was thinking of your saying to take care of one's self because no one else will or does. I was also thinking of the backriding eighty year-old woman I met at a durian fruitstand at Toril uplands. Wanted to grow old healthy and strong like her. A racket I know. A stupid lie. A bourgeois lie. As though one could privatize comfort, patent as one’s own the enjoyment of peace, good health, happiness. Was crazy enough to be telling myself and believing me too that one should not miss out on her macro bio diet if she wanted to keep on producing estrogen; couldn’t quite take well to the idea of an early menopause. So it was with a breath of vengeance that I picked up yesterday my weights and began on a regime of muscle-toning exercises. Something I had forgotten to do in the last two three years. I had been all flab. Sags all over. Arms, waistline, stomach. Depression. Maybe a bad diet. Malnutrition. Who cares. Then I said No. Couldn’t live for long disgusted with one’s deteriorating body. Sylvia Plath’s terrible fish rising.
Then that: I hit ground face down on the day I rose from vegetative state and took up my weights in both hands because I decided I was done with sleeping muscles I want my old strength back, defy the years if I must. It’s like being told by a niece I hardly see that You are wrong, Grandma, you’re through! You’re way way down over the hill!
To get a black eye without nobody there out to hurt you, just a day settling into night? How humiliating. To be reprimanded, berated, by no one but a slippery ground and a stupid stone on an unlighted street one evening of coming home to cook one’s dinner? Degrading.
How did that happen?
I got scared, I guess. Got nervous. Confused. So I slipped around. Took the long way through the main gate to the subdivision because I didn’t like walking through the crummy hunger-stricken squatters area weighed down in both arms by bundles of goods. Because the past weeks, I had been quite harassed by people’s niceness in the troughway and I had been wanting to slap Misay. Only twelve year old and already a bit like me: so stupid and shameless around money. "‘Te, ‘Te," the whites of her eyes glued to my grocery bags, like what makes me think I have the right to what I bought? Made the mistake of giving her a twenty, and she didn’t stop collecting twenties from day to day if she could find me. “Work, ‘Te, you have work for me ‘Te?" So last night I took the long way to get away from her and her mother and her grandmother and as I stepped up to the rickety backway gate, my supershoes which never in the past three four years of wear and tear betrayed me, gave me away. I slipped and in a sec my face hit the crumbly edge of the slab of cement that should have been a foothold.
And how's my face now?
About fine. Just a swollen brow and a swollen right eye.
The real hurt is somewhere else deep inside, in a place I still have to find.
