where the world went once

WILL WE EVER KNOW where the world went when you once held my gaze from across a sea of madding crowd? Was it this place, an unknowable room for things lost? The space between paper and inkblots, between wingbeats: a lesser infinity whose hiddenness rivals the absence, silence of words almost said but ultimately not. Because it's not necessary; not for us anyway, not anymore.

the boxer

I SHALL REMEMBER YOU with a memory I have had in my childhood. One of my very first, really. It was past noon at Lola's, your home. I went straight for the balcony (which was where all the Almenanza grandkids went to hang in those good ol' days). Trudging up the wooden staircase, across the waxed floor, muffled music sifted through from one of the closed doors, that a few steps closer became a guitar progression and a voice, singing.


"Lay la lay, lay la lay lay lay la lay, lay la lay."


I go through a door and out into the blue skies, the melody pouring into the air, the hot laziness of the afternoon. And I listened. Looked into the window where it was coming from and there you were: propped up in bed, fingers plucking strings, lost in a song. Decades would pass before I learn it's actually 'The Boxer' by Simon & Garfunkle, before I understand the joy you had alone with it in that small room: folk songs are the best! I pray, wherever you are, that you can now sing the way you did back then, feel the same happiness deeply etched in your face, rest with the same...calm.


Until then, Tito. The song shall be in a loop, as you are.

what i talk about when i talk about murakami

READING Murakami has always felt like walking downhill, along a strange street, alongside a stream in search of the shortest possible route toward the sea, but gently, quietly, and you follow it with the curiosity of a moth to a flame. And when you finally find your feet being licked by the water, you realize: that street was not so unfamiliar a place all along. You've been there time and again, back and forth. You've always been there, standing on the shore, eyes full of wonder to the distant horizon of a dream.

after the quake

I HAVE NEVER liked the way you make yourself known, like a troubled ghost, sometimes a wave of nausea, a vertigo attack. The way you operate on faults nor how you always catch me unaware when you're there or not there. I have never ever liked the way you shake my world.

leftover

THIS FEELING doesn't get old, does it? The feeling you get as your train pulls away from a station, from a comfortable familiar place. Only, you're not the one leaving, but a leftover washed ashore from a sudden shift of the tide, impermanence at default. Gears turn. The machine whirs. The laundry spins, as does the world, along with everything else sucked in time: all parts working to force change, always. So remind me again. Change is good and ever bittersweet. It never grows old.

there

BETWEEN hello and goodbye was our love. Somewhere there, some place, a glance, a look: we had loved. At what point exactly, I will never be sure; has anyone ever? Like in twilight, in what exact stretch of sky where night ends and a new day begins. But it was there. Somewhere beside a fading star, behind a sliver of silver cloud was a love felt, never realized. There. Bookmarked, written in ink now dried, forever ending.

nomad no more

HAPPINESS. I often wonder if it can be absolute, like love. As if there's no such thing as too much or less of it. It is what it is. Perfect. Full.


But unlike love, happiness is only a feeling, emotion, a room you walk into and leave, sometimes with the door left open. It neither exists on its own nor can it be distilled into its purest form.


So, no.


Happiness is not absolute. Then why does it feel like it is? Right now, right here, as we pull and push for truths in a rhythm set in beats we couldn't understand albeit willing our bodies to act in such yearning haste? If happiness is a place, this is where I am going to live, and stay. Tonight I build a home in that hollow on your neck, achoring myself with an arm under your back, another under a leg, lock it all in a kiss. There is a warmth between us feeding the flame of what's already burning within me, devouring towns, walls, bridges, until there is only us glistening in the dark. But I look into your eyes and suddenly find myself at sea, like a rock tossed mindlessly, disturbing the still surface creating waves, penetrating the shadowy depths. I am a welcomed disturbance and drowning with such ease. And when I can finally breathe, something within me breaks, a string or a glass jar, a beating vital than any organ and you're oblivious to it. My heart is an underground river silently carving its way into anything that does not resemble the happiness I am talking about. Happiness so full, so perfect  it rivals the way my body fits yours, how I cover the whole of your length. No current seeping, no light permeating into the space you have filled in my arms forever locked, and never letting go.

a prose for a smile

YOU have quelled my anxious soul, until there is only lightness, until I'm suspended in space caught between the curl of your lips and the imagined warmth over the stretch of my skin where your last touch had been.

i write for no one

IF you think the words I weave are for you to wear, you can walk naked now. They have never been yours and never will be. You are not significant enough to upset me nor matter enough to stand for even just a blot, to push me to push the pen, earnestly, till my fingers bleed. You think this is for you, but really, it is not.

there we had been

WE HAVE BEEN LISTENING to the same song, in secret, beneath sheets of silence, layers of longing under the cover of night wet with rain that we love, that puts out the forest fires of our fears, and muffles the sounds of a heart thrashing, desperately, hidden behind every thunderclap. Listen, my love. Listen to those distant heartbeats. The song will end soon, and your breath in my ear will be the only thing that could lull me to sleep.

the chase

I chase the light that gives colors to the sad sunset. Beautiful as always, forever out of reach. You.

poetry

And poetry will be our language,
     Shelter ourselves with it,
     Like thick blankets at winter's peak;
     Kisses indelible on our skin.
     We will talk, live, love down to the last word
     Until there is only silence,
     Where words become infinite.

the spark

WHY a spark? A spark that fades, a fleeting firework? Why can't it be an eternal sunset over a still sea, fingers of waves gently crashing at your feet; an abundant blue sky instead of wispy clouds?

shelter

I HAVE ONLY ONE image of you left: You gazing out a car window, almost a shadow against the afternoon sun. Your gaze a firefly I could not catch, not yet. And my fingertips fully awake to the blood pulsing through my hand you held in yours. Each beat an irrational wish to haul you to me, kiss you for a moment, let go. I could make a home right there, in that soft hollow of your neck, I thought. I didn't know then that such a place existed, a shelter hundred dreams away from anywhere. And yet there we were. You were so close I could see through your cracks, find meaning to the words, sadness, joy swirling violently from beneath your skin. It was beautiful. You were, you are. I ached for I had been looking for something I was scared to find, and finally found it, in you. You. And now I wonder: how could I be so afraid?


You looking out the window: this is all I have of you now, your only definition. I will think of you, remember you, half of a face riddled with hope and a gentle smile blunting lines of loneliness I have come to know, until time itself forgets and memory turns into a mere trick of light in the gathering darkness of our story at its close.

yet another year

2015.


What a year it had been, of comings and goings, of being, unbecoming; all things leading to this: I walk into a new stretch of time, ever wondering, loving, under soft rain and explosions in the sky.

spring one

SOME MUSIC MAKES YOU FEEL JOY, while others invoke sorrow. But this music I'm talking about draws and paints these two condradictory emotional landscapes on the same canvas. They occupy the same beats, the same bars, within the same song, like two different voices in mutual conversation. A strange overlap of hellos and goodbyes, a bittersweet symphony. I've heard this music before. And I was given a chance to listen to it again when I first met you. To the tune of vibrating strings, it played inside me, resonating from my deepest corners to the edges of heavens stretched out to nowhere, reminding me of the first actual memory, heaves of warm breaths before the plunge, colors of undiscernable future. The chords have long since faded into what seems like a long distant dream, yet a fragment, a poetic phrase remains in the still air. I listen to both silence and sound with strained ears, and I dance into the night like a kid disturbing puddles after a summer rain. I dance, dance, dance to an empty orchestra, but with hope in line with the drumless beat.

this is how we will do it

You know when conversations abruptly end with "I guess we can just agree to disagree"? As if people are too afraid to immerse themselves deep into an argument, to find a middle ground between two conflicting, opposite ideas? I kind of hate that. I guess what I'm trying to say is talk to me, and when you find yourself disagreeing with something I say, fight for what you believe in. Bring it. For I will give you my opinion with an ulterior motive to make you agree with me, but DON'T. Show me how passionate you are, through words. Stimulate my mind. Seduce me with logic. Assault my intellect with your feet touching the ground. Because this is how we will do it. Us brandishing words: you with a sword aiming at my throat and I, a knife at your heart, until we just lie in silence, satisfied, our bodies sprawled in a bed in celebration of how different we are yet beat with the same frequency. We will speak a language only us will know, the kind that will forever stick to our tongues. So let's talk. This is how we will fall in love.

another earth

WHAT IF the world suddenly replicates itself, that somewhere out there is another you?

in a time of memories

I LOOKED AT YOU, into you, for the last time and I think I saw it again. In your eyes was happiness that pulled the muscles around your eyes and the corners of your mouth into a smile, until you blinked and I looked away, only to hope to see it one more time in that same exact space where it lies, where your soul celebrates in a time of memories.

the love that loves us

SOMETIMES, when I think about of where my strength is coming from, in a time where there is supposed to be nothing left, I feel so overwhelmed, reminded, that I am loved by a Love that’s bigger than myself and that I am actually strong.