You Gave Me the Mood Indigo

There’s this bit about Truman Capote that never ceases to amaze me. According to him, he can remember 94% of his conversations with anyone. And while I can only wish to share his genius, his superb writing skills, and his ability to document about killers in non-judgmental way (see: In Cold Blood), today I can gloat about being able to remember more than 94 percent of the conversations I had. 

Because it was you who I was talking to. 

Despite having said too often how much I don’t like being reminded of you, the rest of me are more fond of you than my words would admit. They like you so much, that I need not see you to know you’re already here. I can sense you from the way you speak, that unmistakable Ilonggo-accented Filipino words being muttered like the way a saxophone could play any notes beautifully. My brain suspends thinking about all mundane things they pass off as logic when you’re present. Every time you giggle the sound of it reverberates inside my ears for hours as if I need to let marinate every nuances of it. You look like a splotch of colors in the middle of an unused canvas that begs to be painted. 

So you did not come wearing that white clothes after all. So it was red. So you made it apparent that the color of my cheeks was trying to compete with that red polo shirt you’re wearing every time you say something too cute. Did you notice, the moment you held my elbow, that I was incapable of talking, incapable of thinking straight besides wishing that this moment lasted longer? Did you count how many times I said something very random and how I would get embarrassed after that? Did you realize how frustrated I was that I only have to remember 5 minutes of the span of time we talked because that was how long it lasted, because the world had set to expedite this meeting? Why did you have to leave so soon? 

But you said you might come back tomorrow. I can tell you this much: I was at the edge of my seat this entire day, probably anxious, probably too fearful, probably could not feel the ground no matter how hard I stepped. Yet if pressed to say whether or not I want you to come back tomorrow, I’m sure you know how I feel. I’m sure you know that remembering the things we talked about in five minutes is less than satisfying to me. I’m sure you know how much I cursed the taxi for arriving too soon. I’m sure you know I’d like to spend more time with you, if only to test how long I can sustain remembering 94% of what you say. Maybe if our conversation went for hours, I’d still prove to be better than Capote in that regard, but I’d still not be satisfied. 

Isn’t that right, woman?

Heart of Mine, Be Still

Remember (Hank Mobley)

Woman, you ought to know how annoyed I was when I heard that you’re coming here at an unspecified time tomorrow. I was neck deep into finishing the job assigned to me, you see, when that announcement was made and it disrupted all my train of thoughts. I spent the rest of the day fumbling about, not convinced that I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown, although somehow I made it home without being carried by stretchers.

But let’s talk about you. I resent that despite my insistence to not think much of you anymore so I can let go of bitter memories, you are some of the things that have clung to my recent musings like barnacles to barge. What irritate me more about you are why I become so invigorated whenever I wonder about you, why I keep thinking with certain fondness of all the possibilities of the day when you’ll come comes, and why I keep recalling the way you promenade gracefully and the way your smile makes me delirious like I wouldn’t believe. We’re not close. We haven’t spoken for months, and days of your absence haven’t exactly been reassuring to me that you think much of me as I do you. So what’s going on, then? Why the uncertainty, mixed with resentment, then hopefulness and anticipation?

I have a request for you, woman. Don’t try to act cute by wearing that diaphanous white clothing that I saw you wearing a year ago. I try to avoid talking to people about what my muse looks like, after all.

May is the Magic Word

In other countries, when people think of May, they think “clement weather”. Where I live in, however, May follows April for being the most torrid. But everything is different this year. It’s just a good two weeks into this month and already I’ve seen dark clouds depriving the noontime its usual summertime brightness. It’s affecting everyone’s mood and behavior: same time last year, I was accustomed to seeing off-duty invigorated yuppies jollily march their jolly way home, but all I see this year are facial expressions as gloomy as the shades of the umbrella they are covered with. And I’m at a circumstance that’s unprecedented in my entire life: my skin is shedding as consequence of the sunburn I got late April, and at the same time my skin is tingled by the rain’s pitter-patters. The contrast coming together felt peculiar, at best.

In a conversation I had with one of my old friends, I jokingly mentioned that this May ain’t May enough, and my life ain’t May enough either. If I am to write an autobiography, this month of 2008 would, hands down, be recorded as the nadir of my life. I have never felt so dead, so languid, so hopeless and so desolated. I wake up each morning with a hollow-like sensation running all over my spine, probably as a result from the world’s refusing to cooperate towards every decent person’s hope for peace. Everyday, I read news of catastrophes and food crises, I see “charity organization” televise shameless paeans to undeserving politicians, I hear passersby talk about unimportant thing as if oblivious to all the problems the world at large is suffering from. Nothing is determined to give me an honest and non-delusional happiness, and at one point I was so down and sick of everyone’s apathy, ignorance and colonial mentality, that I shut myself from the world for 2 days. The nadir, and that is word getting used a lot today, is when I’ve had a shouting match on the telephone with a person I very dearly admire. Yes, I am officially depressed, and as you can probably guess, this is not sadness so piffling as to be called emo. This sadness is more real than that, and I’m too tired to rely on vices and consumerism for respite.

I wish I could get away from everything, to where monies, credit cards, fast cars and government propagandas are meaningless. I want to spend a day surrounded by nothing but the color of water. Or maybe go to a place where I could be lying on fields of grass and under a tree, drowning myself to the music of birds’ chirping, leaves’ moving, and cows’ mooing, and the plants and I each taking part of the circulation of air. Or maybe I could be seating on sands, watching the yonder sky change its color from light blue to auburn, and breathing in a smell of brine. But these places all seem so far away, and like Stevie Wonder who is blind, I could only see them by the visions of my mind. I ask myself just how often modern people get to live days that look exactly as Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” described. It is May, when the world is supposed to look like seventeen. How come it feels nowhere like that?