Do not double-blade me

Farisha is confused. I told her do not double blade me i hate bisexuals and want them dead. Her eyes stopped dead in their sockets. She had said to me she got married because to her surprise a boy liked her. She heard I and Berkis are getting along and setting up a lesbian organisation and wanted to join. Take me in, I’m double-blade, she said. The way she put it, you would think she’s a slasher two-way and had to be applauded twice for it. I spat the bi word and hissed at her face like I saw double-traitor and she froze afraid. Like I was some lunatic she does not know the name of.

I know her from way back, some 15 years ago, maybe more. I was with Mimi. I was to design a health survey for an intervention they were going to do at Takut-Takut, the slum area in downtown Jolo right by the Mosque. The same Mosque GMA wanted to step into, which the Muslim community opposed, which angered the Bishops-Ulama-Conference bigwigs, which made many a Catholic priest not forgive, and so on and so forth. It’s about one edifice in the entire town that still stands big and tall amidst all the garbage surrounding it, but when it rains the waters can go neck-deep everyone had to navigate by rubber boat to go by.

It was a much happier time when we all first got together in 1996. Maybe 1997. Mimi was facilitating the syeyring sessions and we each one of us had been asked to bring something, an object, a picture, whatever that would stand as metaphor of our self. I am a tree, Faring had said. Storm-ravaged, but I am still here. I am this dry twig, Olive Makayug, so-called because she was thin like a reed, said, showing a picture of a leafless branch with a tiny green on its end. Olive  Matambuk, because she was fat, showed us a picture of a refrigerator. I am this because I only keep fresh things. Rotten things – my husband’s unfaithfulness, the way she used to beat me, all the ugly things I had to put up with before – I throw away. I keep only the good things.

Mimi cued me later. Shi, did you notice? The two of us we both chose flowers? Maybe we are no longer the sore thumbs we used to be? She chose Sunflower, because she likes bright happy things, she said, face always sunward. I chose a wild rose for its thorns because I wound those who get close to me, I had said. But what surprised us was Tina. Whom we thought had a terribly low self-esteem. Because there was talk she was a family abuse case, progressive present tense. But Tina showed us a picture of a shampoo girl, long black hair wavy behind her. Malingkat ha, malingkat. She kept on saying. She’s beautiful, she’s beautiful, isn’t she. I want to be like this, I am like this, beautiful. We all were stunned into uneasy silence. Then Sheena spoke up and showed us a rock rough and sharp. Lord, that girl. I am a rock! Mimi enthused. A tomboy, is she?

Now back in Jolo I could not find Sheena. Who was that girl who said she was a rock? I asked Berkis. Berkis could not remember. Now she cannot sleep without Valium. I blame Mimi. She was the one who first gave her the prescription. Medical practitioners’ quick-fix, I accuse. I cannot recall Berkis’ metaphor. I brought a poster of Kurt Cobain, she now tells me. Which I must have rejected then as noisy music punk rock star. And a suicide case at that. I was a relapsed Catholic. Hated drug addicts. Suicide cases more so.

You used to be pretty, Shi, Berkis now tells me. And sweet. I thought she was going to say I used to be so self-righteous. But it is she who has become so conservative. A recidivist Islamist, I tell her, but the phrase escapes her. Now she refuses to read, refuses to hold pen and paper, refuses to use a computer. Interchanges "kung" with "kong", also "ask" with "us". Every other day she threatens to go back to the Bangsa Moro rebolusyon, kill an American soldier, kidnap a thieving colleague, bomb a peace conference.

It was so much better when people did not have school learning, they did not know how to steal, she argues, for the nth time. Her educated friends, she says, now tell her: If you don’t change your ways and forget about principles, Berkis, you will die from hunger. So now she is under her friends’ employ and calls them names -- baisan, kawatan, gahaman and so on.

So what happened to that girl who said she is a rock? I ask Berkis.
Which one, Shi? Hindi ko ba maalala.
Your Valium-addled brain, I say.
Farisha remembers. That was Sheena. The two of them used to go out together.
Yes, Sheena. The tomboy.
She got married.
She got married?
Yes. And died a year after. She haemorrhaged to death.

I can’t recall if they said the baby was a girl or a boy, and whether it lived or died.