I strode out of the mall taller than I ever was, looking like I owned half the stocks in there. I had vowed then to never waver on my feet again, to never doubt my sex again.
Sometimes I just want to sit still stand still work still like I do now. Enough that I see you, that you see me, that I hear you when you speak to the stranger, to your dog, to my cat, to the flowers you water and cut, to your mind’s other visitors. Enough that when I look, you look back up, catching what you misses, starting, at seeing me seeing you, in your many different lights, laughing at what went out and went away the moments seconds you weren't looking.
I’m thinking of all the years that I was away and did not know that you were there, the years you were away and did not know I was here. I see you young, pretty, proud of your looks, of what you’ve got – Addidas shoes, maybe, Crispa shirts, a bike, a tennis racket, the high school and college girls you walked the streets with --. Had we met then, you might have not liked me. Too timid awkward and stupid to be dated, too naïve for your smartass richie-kid hat. You might have run past me and not given me a second look, the way the boys on campus did not give me a second thought. I would have not wanted you to see me then, know me then, like I didn’t want the boys to go near me then.
The week I first met you in that artists' house, I was almost certain that you loved me. I could see you from under my lights, holding back, untrusting, because I was going over spilling things out, shoving my way in when you did not need anything from me. Oh danger is real in every step we make. Wounds over closed wounds, words over broken words. What did you fear? I did wonder. Marriages that wear away, love tiring and leaving the house. What to do with me, anyway, a madwoman wearing a pretty mask. Did you really think me vain? I know that was what you thought you saw when you first laid eyes on me. That is what people, poets always say of me. Beautiful eyes. So when I held out my hand to you, you held your hand down. Dear, was I dropped at first sight. For a few secs I thought it was hatred of women all over again. Slut bitch whore you are not beautiful just another cunt you. You must have felt the earth shake under my feet? You talked awhile to comfort, carted a few names, dates, places to help me by. Lost as I was, I promised to look them up.
The couch, fat and dour like a bored host, divided us. The pellets of words thrown around us and between us pulled us apart. The friend who dragged you to me dragged you away. Your own thoughts were calling you away. We were riverbanks away from each other as we looked each other up. What’s another name another face another handclasp in that crowded evening. You were shaking yourself loose even as you were throwing ropes to get us by. I felt like the evil weed that snares passersby, the catch your blind foot caught. You were breaking your toe loose off me. I thought you saw that I saw what you were doing. Saw that I was not totally bland as I was dumb, that I could hurt, human and ordinary and needing a little mercy. After all, I was there in that house, therefore I must be a guest, too, a poet, too, and must have a soul, too. So you chatted up a little, for wasn’t that what we all were there for, wasn’t that what you were there for, to chat up with the poets and the artists of the city you didn’t see for twenty years. I could see you didn’t care who I was, what my name was or ever will be. You were tired of names, smiles, people, you-know-this-you-know-that talk, all of those that kept on cropping up then going, gone, as soon as you turn your head to the wine on the table, to another face ribbing. All contact hurts. And you had been holding your own very beautifully. The moment I turned, you forgot I existed.
You must have been annoyed that someone should bring you to me when the others just came on and hang around for no one in particular. Or that she should bring my name up again, saying I will read like I will save the day if the rest of them did not. You looked agitated. You didn’t like another name, to remember or forget, didn’t like another poet. The city was full of poets and artists as it is and things and people, like poetry, are either good or bad and that’s all, nothing more is to be said. Twice you gestured for me to bring out my poems. Twice I didn’t heed you. I had a fear you wanted to hold them so that you can drop them. You stopped asking after I read. You must have understood that I didn’t want you to hold them under your lights? That I’m past needing friendship, mentorship? That I don’t look up to nobody, that I have no masters and whatever you say will not be of help to me. That I already have my weaponry stockpiled up in my head and won't tell you where I got them or how. Or maybe you too did not really care about my kind of writing. Down here nobody comes to me to say they love my poetry. They just watch, applaud, and wish me a nice day.
Later in the night you and an artist friend must have laughed about me. That girl, such industry.
Jejune. Runaway writing. Or the word “compulsive writer” would have not jumped out of her mouth later over coffee. Lilia? She had to feel the need to write, then she had to write, she said of you. She is not a compulsive writer. What do I have to say to that? That I never felt the need to write, that I write as I cuss, that's why my works are without quality of light? Sure, I trawl my dark. Could you have said that of me? I always hear the worst said of me by the best in my head, jealous as I am of the critic friends that I cannot keep. And now I am jealous and envious that it was another poet-artist you would take in your confidence when you pry apart other people’s works. I think I would always feel the illegitimate child in your family of poets and artists. But that is not what I want to tell you.
All my life I had walked and walked. Cornfields, rice paddies, riverbeds, mountain slopes and funeral trails are cobbled in the soles of my feet. By the time I got to the city and started going up the library to find me some poetry, my feet, large and splayed in the toes to begin with, were swollen and rough and cannot be bound and tidied up again. Ladies’ shoes gave me blisters. The salesclerks always walked out on me fatigued after several changes as no shoe would fit me. One good look at my cleft toenail and the veins crawling out like roots and they would go over to the next girl in between the racks. I always went out of the shoe shop astounded. In high school I limped home every time I went to a dance even if all I did there was stand in a corner behind backs and gawk as the world rocked in high heels and pointy shoes. Until I stole some money and bought myself a good pair of Gibi’s. Without remorse, I discarded all the clothes that I struggled so hard to fit into.
The day I first walked into the men’s wares was the day I was born again. The boys were so polite as I fitted into every pair of Gibi’s I wanted. I strode out of the mall taller than I ever was, looking like I owned half the stocks in there. I had vowed then to never waver on my feet again, to never doubt my sex again. In the jeepneys, I would sit straight and spread my legs apart and nobody would dare step on my feet. Even the college girls who sat with their boyfriends’ arms slung around them looked awed. I did not mind that my arms were empty. I was too delighted with myself that all I could think of was that it’s the shoes that one wears that makes her a man.
By the time I was striding all over the city with my Gibi’s shoes, you were nowhere to be found. I caught your name every time poetry was served like good wine. I never cared who the hell you were. After all, there are so many poets and there are so many names. I did sense they talked about you as just you, like you were your own person, singular. No divorce, no dead spouse, no family or children in the US, like the others. There was always something that stood out that I could not make out. A sore little finger was all I could think of and it always made me wonder, chuckle.
Even after someone said she saw you in the US and that you broke up with a girlfriend of many years, I really did not give a shit. Ah so she’s lesbian. That’s nice to hear, I said to myself. It helped me understand better your poems, made me sorrier for the women there, but that was all. As far as my poetics was concerned, I was still stuck in the woods, gathering dry sticks to make fire out of. You can freeze in America if you like. Then when someone said you were home and will be seen, I thought it would be good to look you over.
The truth is, I felt let down that you didn’t look like Justine Frischmann or one of those Swiss dykes I knew from the net. I was even surprised that you didn’t look Chinese, female, like your name said. The thing is, I really had no idea how you looked or that you would do as you did that night. It was like,
So it’s you, Goddess why, look at you. More than that, I didn’t know that you would speak like a chopboard to beautiful me!
I put away my Gibi’s shoes that night all for you. I wanted to be met as a girl by someone who lost a girlfriend in a little while. The idea was, don’t we all want a girl to comfort us rather than another dyke with a dyke’s sorry life? I put on white socks to hide my ugly feet. I slipped into a pair of leather sandals then already breaking in the middle and got into my stonewashed denim pants. I tore a black blouse out of an unclaimed baggage. Maybe I was thinking of your widow poem, 0
tears seep out from the walls, that I chose that black blouse. It was tight on me I must have been twitching all night without meaning to. I took my place in the circle of women a decade older than me. I sat quiet. I wanted to make myself inert, like Sylvia Plath’s little ones under the potlid before the burners turn up.
I can do no harm. I can do no harm to you, I wanted to say to you.
I will not move about, I will not knock things over. Because you were eyeing disapprovingly at the handtowel which was spilling out of my bag. I could not even sling it across my shoulder or over my neck like I used to, all for you.
The truth is, I needed something to take my mind off the railway track hack that left me gutted and senseless. You were never there where I went, but we all go places and we can never be careful about these things. You are not the only who lost a love, you see. At least you had a love that loved you back. And she didn’t call you names after gutting you clean. I am not telling on the girls, Sir. But girls hurt girls, too. All I am saying is, don’t we all go to hell because we needed to or else nothing will ever be real? I needed to see you because I was looking for an accident that would out-accident the last I met on the railway tracks. Are you following?
I am sorry that I did not try hard enough to reach you before zero hour. But departure is just a word they hang a plenty on a string at the airport. It is not as though this will be our last gibbet. It’s the same sky all over, you just catch your plane, arrive where you’re bound. Oh I did try to make a call on you, but could not do much because always the hands that could have helped had so many things to hold, and the eyes kept on catching things it should not catch, and the feet not always as quick as the heartbeat.
All my life I picked and snatched things up from wherever I could find them. Often, things caught me before I could catch them. As you stood there, stung, I told myself that one cannot look at so many things and take them all home: gifts can overspill like waste baskets. So I left you there. There is no going back to that moment now. The door slams shut in the face as one moves, even if it were my hand that was on the knob. I think one loses the knack for things she was once good at. Like loving, like going to them rather than letting them come to you.
And then there was you full of you, glistening like a carbuncle. Why don’t you come with us, we are leaving just now, I can drop you, you said to me. How could I tell you to your face that I don’t like riding cars I cannot drive, that I don’t like being the first to be dropped, and that I could not take a short ride in an otherwise long night? How could I tell you that I don’t like being deposited among the heap of leavers and goers you shuffle in your car?
How can I tell you that even as you asked me where I was going, even as I asked you where you were going, what I wanted to do was shove your good head into the kitchen door and kiss you there? That even as my feet carried me to the door, my heart was there on the floor, holding on to your hundred-dollar shoe?
I had a good look at your ankles early that night that more than made up for the dagger in your eyes and the bruise in your mouth. The light I looked so hard to find in your eyes was down there bright white between your sleek black pants and your white cotton socks. I could not keep my mind on your poems while you read because the brightness of your ankles shot up a volt in my head that made me see white lights going up to your knees and up to your thighs.
But all night you left me to the furniture, to the wine, to the women I sat with. You gave me your back, your sides, your elbows in between the angles and interstices of women’s bodies, but never your eyes. I wanted to wring the towel I lay about on the couch’s back and do my washing right there. It had been hiding in my bag. I shoved it there among sharp objects as I was entering that house of poetry, begged it to keep quiet because I thought you might want a prim girl and not a rogue. But you hardly looked my way. So it jumped out and that was when you saw me wipe snot, food dribbling out of my mouth. You didn’t even laugh. Had you, I could have winked and told you I had my Warren brief on and that my breasts were just too insurgent to be flattened back with elastic straps.
Once, just once, you shot me a look, angry, as you were shoving your sheaf of poems into your folder. You took it back quick before we could lock eyes and I thought that in that split second of drawing back, I held a girl. I held the softest tenderest girl’s face it made me want to wail and cry. Yet when I talked, and when you talked, there was no tenderness. Words were fences we kept snagging on. How many times did you cut me that night? Better to go home and talk to my cat and to myself, I said to myself. So when you offered to drop me for you had a car and I didn't, I said No. At the door I picked my heart back up as I shouted my goodbye to no one in particular, and quietly said my goodbye to your shoes your ankles and you thighs as I pulled the knob and banged the screen door shut.
I could not remember how I caught you up again after that night. I remember running back to kiss you goodbye, telling you how happy I was to see you. I remember you reaching up for my hand, clasping it like you were sorry I was leaving you were sorry you have been dropping me for dead all night. I remember you babbling about driving home a friend like you wanted to drive me home after you bring her to her waiting husband and son. I remember thinking afterward, as I walked the short distance between that house and the jeepney stop, that you might want me to stay the longest after all.
I remember you looking so lost as you talked to me, like you were afraid you would lose me forever that night or that you lost me already even as we were talking so. I remember saying I would rather walk and don’t mind the slow rain, I have an umbrella, then someone saying very like me to always elect the way of pain to other choices I might have. I remember cutting the air with my hand: I am going this way, you are going that way, I cannot go with you. But that is not what I want to tell you.
What I want to tell you is that seeing you there alone in the middle of the room, shut tight amidst the laughter and the shuffle of women’s bodies, hurt the mind. That you would not even talk to me broke the heart. What I want to tell you is that I am so happy I was able to clasp your hand goodbye, even if all we said was hello and goodbye, or that even if we were better at goodbyes than at hellos.
And I want to tell you, too, that I was happy to know a thing or two about you and can live with that for the rest of my life. And that I don't give a fuck if you love me back or not; or if you know a thing or two about this side of life, or if I shan't meet you ever again, here or in the hereafter.
