Not Just Yet

Make no mistake---it is July, and not April, that is the cruellest month. Sometime in July I looked up my monthly horoscope to find something that I could relate to my own experiences come August. True enough, I became preoccupied with house matters. I had been wanting to get a new shelf put up for a certain wall of our bedroom, and that is actually how most of July was spent. But nowhere in any horoscope did I see that while I was busy with wall measurements, I would lose something precious. For days afterward I  looked at dozens of other horoscopes, looking for something to the effect of: You will want to lie down and not get up. You will spend nights crying, and you will start wondering how people more alone than you are can weather their own disasters.

Someday I would be able to type up a proper goodbye to Letty. But not today; when attempting to post a send-off via Instagram can still send me crying in the middle of a coffee shop, not caring about the concerned looks of the baristas. I had caused more scenes at the end of July than I ever believed I was capable of: I cried in buses, in restaurants, in a fire exit, in earshot of my roommates in Quezon City as they were watching their soap operas. One of these days I would look back to this time, and find what the universe is trying to teach me. Just not yet. Right now my grief is in puddles all over the place. My Gmail is full of unfinished goodbyes, written during the three nights I couldn't sleep at all. A notebook under my pillow is full of disjoint words that came to mind the first weekend I was going to go home to Cavite and Letty would not be there. The words are in two columns and here are some: Flood. Weight. Well. Shrink. Disappear.

So July has taken off, leaving cleanup of the ransacked house to August. I don't think I have ever hated anything more in my entire life than the past month. I hated last year, but last year I didn't want to just pick up anything jagged off the side of the road and smash it against all the glass I can find, or watch everything be swallowed up by water.

I hate July. I want to bludgeon it, or weigh it down with chains and watch it sink to the bottom of the ocean. I hate it so much. And I don't care if in all the other months, people lose bigger things than I have. I know people lose jobs, houses, or other people. I know that all I lost is a small animal, but I loved that animal as much as my heart would allow.

A few days ago I was thinking, please God, just let me see Letty in a dream. I tried to recall every single detail, from the way he would leap up, to the expression of his face. And I was able to do it. I dreamed briefly that he was sleeping, and I could see it. I don't think I'll manage to do it again. But it's something I have fished out of this murky, misty time. I hold it to myself day in and day out, until I can finally say goodbye to Letty. But not just yet.

I Don't Have Nightmares Anymore

When I was a kid I was too afraid of ghosts and evil spirits. I couldn't look directly at the TV during the annual All Souls' Day feature of Magandang Gabi, Bayan. The white face looking out at passersby from the darkened window of an abandoned house, the noiseless woman that climbs onto passenger seat one moment then disappears the next, the unknown child that looks at the unsuspecting human from under the bed: I couldn't look at them, despite my full awareness that they were actors. And as a kid I really believed that ghosts were everywhere, and all waiting to get me alone. I couldn't enter rooms whose lights were off; I couldn't stay too long by myself in rooms that were fully lit. I  was always half-expecting an old woman with long white hair to hover outside the window at night, grinning at me trapped inside, so I couldn't look out the windows at night either. (But now that I'm older, I follow on Twitter the old, long-haired, white-haired woman that seemed to play every lost, evil spirit on TV come November.)

It did not help that I had too-intense dreams. We had an old woman as a neighbor. I rarely spoke two words to her, but every day at 5am, she would be outside, sweeping her front yard. She died when I was in elementary school, and I cannot remember why. But I never forgot her face, or the rhythm of her sweeping, many years later. And If you asked me to close my eyes and visualize the lines on her forehead, I can do it, in an instant, without thinking hard. Because soon after she died, I dreamed that I was washing dishes facing a window, and there she was, outside, staring at me, inching closer and closer. Finally her face was touching the window, and for an agonizingly long time, I stared back at her, because I couldn't wake up.

There was another time, when I had a fever for a good three days. I was a small kid, and when I was sick the adults would have me lie on a wooden sofa, its back just high enough to reach the bottom of our front window. At some point during my three-day fever, I was sleeping on the wooden sofa, and I dreamed of the window above me. In my dream there was a young Chinese woman playing with the jalousie window, opening and closing it, peering at me all the while, teeth bared in a smile.

And for a time I believed that these dreams were actual visits. My sisters used to agree, and we would recount these dreams, over and over. To some extent maybe I still believe in visitations. But one day, the fear just disappeared.

I think it was because I read a story somewhere about an abandoned cottage, where a husband and wife died horrible deaths. Years later their orphan comes to live in their cottage. Her friend tells her: "People died here." And she replies, "People die everywhere." And she moved in, and the story didn't go a supernatural route. Something in me clicked; my fear went out as if by a switch.

And now, here I am, remembering my childhood terrors, seeing in my imagination every white detail of our old neighbor's face. The lights are off, I am alone in bed. Yet I type sleepily away, feeling absently for other nightmares I haven't thought about in years. Generally, I hate sleeping beside anybody now that I'm grown. I hate it when something mars the perfect quiet at night, and in Cavite, I sleep in the darkest room in the house, often alone. Occassionally I leave the window open so my cat can walk in and out without fuss. The fear has disappeared.

My nightmares aren't as otherworldly as they used to be, either. The last one I remember was during my undergrad days. Quite some time after my grandfather died, I thought I saw him. I was sleeping on the top bunk of my appointed bed, in my college boarding house. I was hovering towards wakefulness, and I half-looked at the empty space beside my narrow bed. I thought I saw him with his hand holding the bar that kept me from falling off the top bunk. He was watching me, and he was dressed in the barong we buried him in. I shot awake and screamed, fully waking up. My roommate nearest the bed turned on the lights, and I found my bedside empty.

Maybe the nightmares stopped because I couldn't be bothered with them anymore as soon as I was fully awake. Was my grandfather really looking at me from beside the bed? Maybe. But what did it matter? I couldn't see him looking anymore under the flourescent lights. In fact, after his little visit, I climbed out of bed, and wrote a somewhat unflattering essay about him, which I passed in class.

Now, when I have nightmares, they are most often about rats. (Sometimes about being the victim of a crime, but more often about rats.) Less interesting, but infinitely more plausible. And more horrible, considering that a pattern I notice about my own nightmares is they start off with me lying in the actual bed I am sleeping in. And they always go like this: I would find myself in bed, in the middle of the night, in the dark, and a rat would crawl across my blanket. It's infinitely more horrible, because I'm never sure if I'm dreaming. I woke up from such a nightmare once, while I was staying in a house in Pasig. I woke up, and jumped to my roommate's bed. In my haste I think I kneed him in the liver. And I insisted that he scour the house for the rat. Of course he couldn't find one, but by then fear had taken over and I couldn't go back to my own bed. Since my roommate was gay, there really was no happy ending for this one episode.

Believe it or not, sometimes I worry because I don't have fanciful nightmares anymore. It must be a failure of the imagination, I think. Now, I am so earthbound that I can only be afraid of the things I know for sure are real. Oh I don't want another dream about the dead, of course. But I wonder what it says about my state of mind, now that my subconscious no longer surfaces the possibility that people that may be right beside you without you knowing, when you're by yourself in the dark.

And I know it's a stupid worry. Logically, I should probably worry more about my waking fears. But they don't even make for fun storytelling, and they feel pointless to think about. So last Sunday, I watched a YouTube video about an antique haunted doll. After it scared me sufficiently, I put down my phone and closed my eyes. I slept peacefully.

How Deep Do Ferns Grow?

There was a fern that wanted to attach itself to a tree, the way an orchid hangs off driftwood. But ferns (such a goofy thing to be called) are supposed to sprout out of dirt, unkempt, like a full head of curly hair. The tree told the fern so. And anyway, there wasn't anything that the fern could do; it was not a vine that could creep along and wrap itself around the tree. It was staying where it was.

The fern dug its roots deep, long tendrils of root snaking their way deeper and deeper into the ground. Maybe the tendrils snaking underground could wind a path to the roots of the tree, and meander up, around the bark, latch on, and not let go. The fern had no idea that its roots can only dig down, and not all the way across another part of a garden. Maybe the tree had roots deep deep underground that the fern's roots could tangle with eventually. But how could the fern be sure? Do fern roots go that far?

The pain of the whole thing is that the tree was just there—had the fern been a weed, it would take only a week or so to cover the ground and join the tree's base. Had the fern been a vine, it would have been a matter of nothing to crawl over branches of the one or two plants between them, and say hello. (Or would it? The fern really wasn't sure; it was a fern and not a vine.) Best yet, if the fern had been a sunflower, it would have faced towards the sun, period. No more orienting itself towards a tree, perhaps. Needless to say, if only the fern had been a whole host of things that it wasn't, things would have been different. And needless to say, amidst all of this, the tree was just there.

The fern didn't even know what was so important about growing on the tree. It had never wanted—does not want to be—an orchid or any other aerial plant. A fern it is, and a fern it intends to stay. Just growing on a tree.

And so the fern digs its roots down, knowing that it is digging down, and not across to where the tree was (just there). Someday, the fern would learn that some things grow in pots, some things grow in water, and not everything grows on trees.

My Cat and I

I'm not a fresh 19-year-old anymore. Yesterday (Sunday) I went to Moonleaf. I've only been there once or twice before, so on a whim, I settled on a peppermint milk tea in the only size they have (which is huge).

In other milk tea shops, I would order only 25 or 50 percent sugar. This was a hundred percent. I sat down on one of Moonleaf's low benches, put my feet up and read some stories on my phone while sipping. Thirty minutes in, and I haven't even worked through a fourth of the liquid in my plastic cup.

I thought something salty would help me finish my milk tea, so I found a place to order a 5 o'clock dinner. By the time I had eaten as much as I could of my chicken (and some fried rice, which was oily, as fried rice always is) the plastic cup was three-fourths of the way empty. It was only six pm then. I went home, threw the rest of the tea away, and did not eat anything else until the next morning, i.e. today.

I woke up dry-heaving and dizzy. I spent the better part of the morning this way, heaving but having nothing to show for it, so I decided to just go on sick leave. I know how incredibly lame "sugar overload" looks on a sick leave form---only toddlers and probably midgets get that, for God's sake. I put in "dizziness" instead, which is no less lame, come to think of it, and slept off my sugar hangover until it was too late to even go on halfday to work.

Bedridden from sugar. When just last May, I was chugging two liters of Gatorade a day and it didn't faze me at all. I quit my Gatorade habit when June rolled in, and only less than a month later, here I am, getting stuck in bed for pigging out.

And how did I spend what was left of today? Oh with nothing much: just folded my clothes, picked up my laundry, then went to Globe to get my postpaid plan downsized because I find it wasteful. Maybe next week, I'll find a tai chi class in a park, get healthier. Then I'll get fitted for dentures and find a lawyer to finalize my will.

Coincidentally, my pet (and spirit animal) Letty, must be feeling the onset of undue age, too. Letty has this habit of climbing into my mother's bed when she isn't there, and gets all whiny when we take him off it. Now that bed is really luxurious, and really important to my mother. Our whole family can fit comfortably into that bed, and it's fitted with this huge orthopedic mattress that's so heavy, you can drop it on someone you want dead. When I see my mother sleeping in the living room, I suspect that she has sinned, maybe gossipped at the office or something, and doesn't want to lie on the mattress until she has confessed to a priest.

And today, Letty got into that bed, and pissed in it.

This is so unlike Letty. There was a time when he almost came into the house with a rat. We all yelled our disgust and refused to let him in, and he seemed to understand, because for the next few days he kept strictly to the floor, a deviation from his habits. And during typhoon Yolanda, when it was pitch dark and really really windy and stormy outside, he still begged to be let out to do his thing. And at two years old, he's no candidate for bladder failure. Besides, cats won't piss in the same place they like to sleep in. What's going on?

I tell my sister that Letty is probably angry at something and is letting us know about it. My sister says Letty just has an attitude problem, and wants the big-ass bed all to himself. My mother is just---

Reportedly, Letty has been banished to the box of shame, an empty, rectangular laundry basket that was lying around the house. I don't know if he feels punished though. Cats love boxes.

On Carrying On

It was one of those days when everything seemed determined to go wrong. I woke up late; while putting on liquid eyeliner my hand slipped and i got a zebra line running up to my eyebrow (and this after I've put on eyeshadow); the bus I was riding to get to work was tailing an asshole of a bus that stopped quite lengthily in the middle of Edsa (to drop off a bunch of passengers), stopping diagonally, taking up two lanes (God typing that phrase made me really, really angry); I forgot my mp3 player at home and had to listen to "Sana Ay Ikaw Na Nga" in the bus (and I emoted, which made a good song a bad thing); and last but not the least aggravating, I got late for work because of the office building's elevators, which were probably programmed by a piece of shit. By the time I got to my desk I was just ready to die. Time check, 10am.

I tried to finish all my pending work, because next week I want to attend a 2-day seminar, and I havent even finished a third of what needs to be done. I edited from 10:30 to 12:45, went to lunch, came back at 2, and lost my work by 4, when MS Word crashed. I decided to stay at work until 8:30, to redo everything. My work is unfinished.

On the bus home I caught myself grinding my teeth so I decided to go to Friuli to make myself feel better. I ordered a three-cheese pizza, that emerged as everything I love: earthy, salty, gooey and soft. Problem was, a really really loud group of three were at a table beside mine, laughing really really loud. If I could, I would beseech Satan to reserve a circle of hell for people who don't even try to not be loud in crowded spaces. (On a sidenote, if such a circle exists, it's probably full of Filipinos. We're a noisy bunch.)

The loud group was laughing because apparently, a loud girl among them went to a sleepover, to find that she was the only girl attending. Now it seems that I really really needed my peace and quiet, because at the moment I didn't care if the sleepover turned into a full-blown orgy and loud girl would be willing to share the sleepover address for future reference. I started daydreaming of myself leaning over to their table and yelling, "SHUT YOUR FACECUNT." And then I realized that I do swear really colorfully when angry (whether to myself or out loud) and wondered whether I should try to change, once my rage over the level of noise in that teeny tiny restaurant has passed.

I walked home and now I'm in bed, really exhausted. I'm really exhausted but at the same time still really twitchy, which is a really shitty place to be. I was just going to close my eyes and wait for exhaustion to take over, but I remembered that eating lots of dairy before sleep makes dreams really vivid, and even without dairy, I have really vivid dreams that amuse everyone but myself. Given my dreaming track record, I wouldn't be surprised if my dream just replays every single moment of this day, from waking up late to working overtime to getting angry over hearing what sounds like a porno plotline. So here I am, writing it all down, hoping that none of those things make an appearance when I close my eyes.

Instead, I would much rather dream of how my bedroom is, this hour before sleeping: The fan is blowing a cool and gentle wind. It is almost completely dark, just the way I like it. There are no barking dogs or passing vehicles or singing neighbors. Everything has gone quiet. It's as if the world has thrown up its hands, saying, "i'm done with you for today. You win."