A dream recurs

of people's faces cracking, or slowly falling apart, skin peeling away from the skull, or heads breaking in half. After dreaming of the same thing several times in the last month I have to acknowledge and try to recall how it felt to hold the head of a loved one with both hands. And so, this is the plan: I return to reconstruct the dream and must remember to identify people in the dark. Darkness,a narrow passageway, two people, hands, a face. A center into which everything and everyone must fall in order to be whole.

Occasions for the experience of grief

I was with Nora for about two years, but there was never a day in that brief relationship when I did not feel like it was the last one I would be spending with her. And I do not mean this in any romantic way. The feeling bred not an exciting sense of danger, but a terrible sense of insecurity and utter worthlessness.


I met Nora shortly after her parents died, although I learned of this fact only a year after she moved in with me. When I asked her why she never told me such an important thing, she stared at me for a long time before getting up and taking out her black folio. Then she started talking about her experience in the field, about how the attitude of non-grieving people towards grief only makes grieving an even more painful and difficult experience for the survivor. She went on to tell me about heavily militarized communities that she often went to, and described the impact of media coverage and military presence on people have who lost loved ones. She showed me photographs that did not make it to the mainstream presses which, Nora said, put out only those images that manifest grief in ways that people easily understand.


She spread out on the table several photographs of women sitting in corners, hanging colorful clothes to dry, or standing by trees and lampposts staring into a distance. There were pictures of gaunt men huddled in groups or going about what looked like ordinary tasks, feeding roosters, chopping wood, things like that. And then there were photos of children playing, and actually laughing, looking like any ordinary, happy children. I looked and looked at the photographs and did not find anything to help me understand her point, though I tried very hard to convince myself that I saw what she saw – various manifestations of grief.

***

Those photographs, the way she dealt with my question, haunt me to this day. Clearly, I was tested and I failed. I was accused and I had no valid defense. To be accused – for it surely felt like an accusation – that I had no capacity to understand and empathize with her, rankled. I am, after all, what many would call a sensitive guy, someone who’s in touch with his feminine side, having been brought up by a household dominated by women. I may have never experienced as profound a loss as death in my immediate family, but I had a very deep well of reading and viewing and listening experience to draw from. I should have been given a chance to feel, at the very least. Her utter lack of confidence in my capacity for empathy should have warned me. Everything about her should have warned me – she was older, worldlier, and wiser. She was also strikingly beautiful – long limbs, luminous skin, huge eyes, and breasts so full and shapely they make you forget about the other attributes I just enumerated.


I met Nora in a segunda mano thrift shop along Kamuning. I was there negotiating with the owner, Valentino, to let me go through his collection of 1960s beauty pageant photos, and to let him lease out to me the unit above his shop, so I could turn it into an apartment. She was there to look at post-war Manila photos of someone called Teodulo Protomartir, and to convince Valentino to lend her the negatives so she can have them scanned for a book. Nora had a keen interest in photographs and in wars, I later learned. She was a correspondent for a foreign press agency. I had a keen interest in vintage photographs as well, especially those of beautiful women, and in finding an affordable apartment for myself. I was an instructor of Freshman English in a mediocre state college.


When I met Nora, she was on a brief break from work which required frequent travels to Mindanao, or to wherever the insurgency was most heightened, wherever mortality rates were highest, as part of her regular assignments. For my part, I was then involved in a protracted war with my sisters and my parents whom I had been trying very hard to convince to let me live away from home, or at least somewhere outside Roxas District where I had lived all my life, as part of my bid for independence. She was thirty-five. I was twenty-five. It was a match made in second-hand heaven, witnessed by a man who called himself Valentino.

*** ©Daryll Delgado

And on the third day

she rises, takes the longest shower of her life, and puts on the most dressy she can find in her suitcase -- which is to say something that does not resemble pajamas. She then plays Patti Lu Pone and takes out her makeup kit. Once she starts arching the brows with a dark brown pencil, she cannot stop. She makes it a little heavier than the usual. She curls and thickens the lashes with grayish brown mascara until they look plastic and false, like the ones used during performance. Then she lines the eyelids a lighter shade of brown, and layers them on with bronze shadows, and a touch of glimmer just under the eyebrows. She outlines the lips a fine deep burgundy and fills it with the brightest cherry red. A pinch to the cheeks, a sweep of rouge, and she is almost done, when the door opens. The doctor, followed by the day nurse, enter the room, and they both do a double-take. Their audible surprise calls attention to the caregiver who has been glued to the TV the entire time she has been painting her face. And he asks in surprise if she is going out, and where. She checks herself in the mirror and is almost shocked at how heavy her makeup is, how she looks almost unrecognizable, more so to these people who have gotten used to seeing her barefaced, in jerseys and leggings and cotton shirts, and now so heavily made up, so early in the day. Malakat ka? Makain ka? Yes, to someplace, to meet with some friend. She tries not to sound too defensive. She cannot think of a place to go or anyone to meet. She stays in the hospital the entire day, giving anyone who enters the door a mild shock, to see her on the couch reading, or next to the hospital bed tending the loved one, or in front of the computer surfing the net, surveying the facebook landscape, joining in on conversations without actually typing in anything by way of response. In heavy makeup.

Chivas and chika

with Bookworms. Best way to spend Saturday nights.

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My first

book is coming out soon.
I am grateful.



After the body displaces water
stories


By Daryll Delgado

automatic writing 3

unbearable, awkward constrictions; the increasingly loud syncopation; the too-fast rhythm that you can barely move or breathe to; neither walk, run, nor lay to; much less dance to. tonight, when you lie, and tomorrow, when or if you awaken, what must you do with the rampage, the iron hooves and angry feet, the wild race that continues -- the entire history, really, in and of your child heart? hear this, can you hear my plea, you seem to be saying with your flailing little hands, with your eyes which stare back at me from inside the little glassed-in room, eyes that see through me, beyond me. measuring eyes i cannot not read. ready, alert eyes, even when they can barely keep themselves open, pulled in shut by pain, sucked in by valves and vessels that are about to explode, from exhaustion, from keeping the little organ intact all these long years. years spent growing up too fast in a household that has slowly, ambivalently taken you in, out of pity, out of fear, out of nothing but those eyes, that tiny body. dying now, i can see that, i recognize that release for which that body is begging. in generosity, in service, it made no difference, that little body always seemed to be begging for something, always. all ways of forgetting i have mastered are now rendered useless against the memory of those eyes, the only indication of the furious little beast about to burst out, finally, from its cage. age: fifteen; time of death: 6 in the morning; life on earth: painful and brief; struggle: never-ending, never known; smile: wan, always, and unforgettable; grace: utterly unbearable.

(in memory of maimai).

automatic writing 2

How do I do this without implicating myself, revealing too much? Much of what i know of theory is that everything is about me, and in my dreams, therefore, you are I. I want to tell you, I feel I should, warn you about a dream I just woke up from. From what I can remember, there was a dark alley, and we were being pursued by a menacing figure. Figuring out the chronology, forcing my own logic onto the dream scenes is wrong, I suppose. Suppose, however, I tell it this way: we hid in the bushes, and then watched a musical. Music, almost, that I still hear humming in my pillows. Low, slow, now bouncing against bare motel walls, now entwined with this unexpected Virginia rain. Rain fell on us as we squeezed into the impossible space between the ground and the thick thorny plants. Plant, skin, breath, pebble, knee, forearm, shoulder, stone, bone, neck, thorn, chest, nape, branch, elbow, collateral ligament, that soft inside edge. Edging closer, heavy steps approaching, and then it's the musical, again, a bare stage, you and I, or, fine, I and I, singing, pressed together, don't ask me how.