BLOGSHOT: Ilostit!

photo by karen dias



I have the stupidest pair of glasses. It is square and big, too big for my bony face. A temporary replacement, I told the clerk at the optometric clinic along Magallanes Street. I don't even remember the clinic's name. It's one of those sidewalk cubicles you will have a difficult time looking around in if there were three customers walking in at a time. I didn't ask for a receipt or the clerk's name. A one-hundred peso purchase is supposedly disposable garbage a day after. If you don't know me.

She was good, the salesclerk. Understood right on life's less emulated virtues when I asked for the cheapest they had. But maybe it was because I said to her not to call me guapa because I'm not guapa, I'm a boy, little boy blue. How she giggled at that. Didn't stop smiling. Made me wonder if she got a girl-bf or got a crush on one, or she was just not used to being spoken to in English like she mattered. Probably she was just counting on my coming back to her for a real replacement of the one I lost. A costly trip that would be, sweetheart, one I'm not likely to make soon.

The one I lost. I could not be thinking of my eyeglasses? Or of the laptop that broke down before New Year's Eve and is still held hostage by the computer guy who I suspect is overcharging this time? Or of the jobs that my friends in the NGOs liked to offer me so that I would talk and talk as I bit into their well-dealt sowhatdyathinks until they knew what to do without me bitching? I had seen how many of my one-pagers and two-liners turned into press relations speeches and three-year programs that took care of children's tuitions, SSS and Philhealth payments, gas and gadgets, while I hanged in the sun to dry until I got to love it there in the sun.

Of late I have learned as well not to bleed too much over what got away or didn't come my way ever again. A dream research project. A writing and publishing grant. A teaching job. Now I'd like to think that what I don't have money to buy is at the moment not worth the purchase, I need not miss them, I will have them in time: a Doris Lessing's latest; a Charlie Chaplin set; a loyal laptop, a canvas as wide as my door; even just a quiet room with a writing table and no man pissing around. The best things in life are free, I count on that.

My life's constant companions are the books that, like the children I once had, I did love with despair but now, I can also freely give away. Let go, I tell myself, each time I hurt, knowing that they might never return or may fall in evil hands, be eaten by the elements, like the son I hanged up the phone on when he said You get me from here, you take care of me! Books don't hurt like that. But I recall how once when friends borrowed then stole, I cursed:

That what they took will not make them any richer like it made me.
That for taking from me they will not be better by me.
That what they destroy of what they cannot have will not grow around them ever.

That what I don't have will not make me less but more and more of myself.

Later, I would learn, too, that the friend who stole from you once will steal from you again and again. At first it may just be an Arundhati Roy or Mrs Dalloway or a bundle of stories on Switzerland and Germany you or a thoughtful friend took pains to photocopy page after page out of Granta, soon it will be a job, a friend, or a network of friends: a rope to get you by in your poverty, in the outway. Next it will be your sheaf of rip-offs incinerated with a blink of an eye, your life's gathered prose on the way to the typesetting machine, your journals of daily hurts searing the skin in the face, your first art works, the hard copy of your first drafts, and finally, your own words, a speaking position, what tiny audience you're left with, what little right to self-description you have: to speak about one's self in behalf of the self, unlaced by jealousy or hate, even the right to love, to burn a path to reach out to another soul in the cold, uninstructed by ethics, unmediated, and unobstructed by proprietary and brokership laws.

Thanks to their graces and harmless ways, you will find yourself walking a land mine of hopes blasting you to pieces.

And yet, ages later, you will have to thank them as a way of returning the favor. You didn't die, did you? You didn't get even, you didn't even get published, you only got better, madder, and bloody shameless as ever. Is that what you read, Jeremy?


So what did I lose? Beside a pair of glasses to see me through?
I lost my way, I suppose, while writing. So now I navigate the road aboard this hundred-peso joke above my nose and I skid as I walk like a boat lost and coasting along craggy mountain slopes.

My hope is that my friend Circe won't be far-off.
Don't follow me!