There would be days when

There would be days when I feel heathen, friendless, like Cain driven out of Eden to the edge of the earth, eschewed from the company of men, and I feel an utter shame. Shame, that social thing again. I am a bad strategist. Too many bridges cut before I could cross them. But maybe that is really what I wanted all along. To be an island unto myself. To be cut out from it all. All social relations artifice -- to survive in an artificial world. 

I will make no noise! I will do no harm! Said Plath. I will be quiet, I will be courteous and resolute, said Susan. Too late for that now. Such graciousness is not useful to me. Long have I been dragging my entrails behind me. I should be glad I did not have distended uterus.

Technically speaking I should be dead. Politically speaking I should be long dead. When friends see me,  they ask how come I am still alive. I cannot tell them that even to me it is a miracle without sounding like God was with me all along. But a miracle it is that I still manage to thieve along the precipices of the sewers like that stinky rat of Patrick Chamoiseau in that Granta edition Germie ceveted so much. The rat. The child. Who grew up obsessed with catching that rat and ended up crying for the rat when he was an adult, having grown old and shrunken, the rat not the child, stealing a life that never became his.

Broomstick sister

Of course I feel schizophrenic. My body here my heart there. Always craving, craving hungering for a life you cannot call forth and hold in your hand by sheer desire. Maybe Momo feels this way in the US of A, her gifts stifled, subverted, driven underground all because she needed to survive. So she goes from one no-brainer job to another like the catatonic that she is. In a way that’s how I feel down here. Except that I am a more dysfunctional catatonic than she is. You cannot be dysfunctional any in the US of A without losing your job or your hair.

What am I doing here watching people watching spiderfights when I should be in Jolo or Zamboanga taking things up with people I’m supposed to take things up with. So I take on work I don’t have the least love for to get the measly pay I need just so I can keep on. Rather Sisyphusian, is it not. My Mother gave up beaten, cervical Ca for a reward. My Aunt arthritis. But it was a  knife in the heart that released her from it all. How ironic.

So the work suffers, suffers and waits, and the friends who gave me the work suffer, or are inconvenienced having to put up with me, with the terrible weight I seem to carry when I do the things they ask me to do. I suffer, too.  I shriek in my head, furious that at my age, with my gifts, I am still everyone’s slave, no command over anyone or anything. But maybe I am mistaken.

Sometimes I wish I will get compensated for doing the work I love, like my more competent consultant-friends. I am amazed. They like doing child rights lectures like they really believe in it, not because they’re doing it for the salaried job. But when I look at the best of them, I am utterly repulsed, I don’t want to be an inch like them. Maybe they are not as happy or contented with themselves as they seem. Maybe they are just getting by, bearing it all, gritting their teeth. Or maybe their happiness has been simplified into being able to pay for the tuition of the college son or daughter, buy them a tab, whatever they want, on installment if needed be. The way they look at me, I am sometimes glad they do not have the language of hate, being thoroughly programmed to be post-conflict oriented, so we need not savage each other.  Maybe they don't want to hurt me either. Maybe if they had their way they long flew to the moon to get away from it all, too. Maybe I am not as stuck as they are. I have out-traveled them.  I am their broomstick sister colleague and I am already on the moon, they are not. Maybe that’s what their look means.

If I am as well paid and competently on schedule as they are, if I were as smart and articulate,  I wouldn’t be as acute, not as cut-throat sharp.  If I damn asked for good pay and became a fucking consultant like them, I wouldn’t be where I am and won’t see the world as I do. Maybe I will have a fat thick hide like Vanrusell or be fucking adored as EQ. Or be Big Daddy like Pancho. Maybe never. Maybe I became their wife or their secretary girlfriend doubling us research assistant and therapist and baking mango cake in their kitchen.   Fucked up beyond recall that I am, I am forever on the road and in that island  without hope. Maybe if I ever  did so much as  became a fucking gender lady consultant, a gentleman gender consultant with the Unicef or the World Bank would have fucked me and I would be limping up and down the steps of ADDU, wearing clic-a-toc heels, announcing my sex appeal if nothing else. Then I wouldn’t be consorting with dishrags and doormats and trading crisp Tausug cusswords with Mherz and our ilk.

I would have not known what I know, would have not touched what I touched.

Maybe I will I feel less about myself and about my work.

Maybe I will have nothing to write about, too.  

I perhaps should thank my stars, dirty slob  as I am, I at least can still say truthfully that I have not separated my life from my study: my life is my study, my study is my life, and I am doubly educated for it. To live what one knows.  Isn’t that something? Maybe I am like that person in Lia’s poem, the one who lives in the heat, never burned, never charred. But then I am charred. To the bone.  My Mother and my Aunt and my Lola will cry, wouldn’t recognize me as the daughter they loved and raised to be good. Or maybe not. Maybe they knew all along, maybe I did them proud and they brag about my achievements to God and the angels all day long until God and the angles dropped.