I Think of You in A Cluster of Thoughts
Published in Slow Disco and Funny Politics
* * *
I think I am two people halved in a crooked line.
My half sleeps uncomfortably on a couch, slouched like an unfit blanket waiting for a wake-up call or news about continuity, vegetation, or disappearance.
When my half awakes, through a window, he watches my other half. Lit in hospice fluorescent, my other half breathes in through a tube, chest waltzing vertically.
I am two people halved in a crooked line. When one awakes and heals, the other falls asleep in suffering.
—
My mother’s god is quiet, and so is mine.
Hers is a painting of two hands quietly together, nailed on her pink wall for many years.
My quiet god comes to me through my tongue.
The food she prepares for my father's soul, she serves on his grave, kneeling: a platter of adobo and rice, a bottle of rum, sprinkled with candle wax and prayer.
If souls could eat, would they eat by way of their tongue, or would they eat with two hands quietly together?
—
If I suddenly died while walking the streets of Paris on June 1, 2023, this would have been my last meal: a cheese sandwich at 10am, pale and cold.
I think about the last supper. Not of Jesus, but of a sinner. On February 5, 1999, Leo Echegaray, a convicted rapist in the Philippines was given a lethal injection. He took his last meal of prawns, beef stew, and grilled fish while smoking cigarettes and writing letters to his wife.
I was 5 years old when the execution happened.
—
I think about caressing carelessly; the absence of the touch as a physical form, the presence of the touch as an abstract form; what a tender way of being invasive; the violet of violence.
—
I learned home is where my mother is.
—
Reporting about El Salvador in 1983, Joan Didion wrote, “hair deteriorates less rapidly than flesh and that a skull surrounded by a corona of hair is a not uncommon sight in the body dumps.”
My body, as it aches, continues to hold my ribs, and it carries my heart. My body, as it continues to ache, holds my head with hair falling out, strand by strand.
What must I shed, skin after skin, when there is nothing left of me but bones? If you raise my body, light behind me, you will see every crevice is stitched onto each other, rips and tears; light leaking through holes.
—
I think about you. When you pulled me out of bed, I thought you would hold me close by my thighs, yet you held my throat like a half-eaten apple in Eden. You begged me to submit to your touch, down on my knees, admitting I was the serpent to blame. Your touch forgot itself; it surpassed any tenderness and formed itself into a violent embrace.
—
Eden was good. A paradise short of being glorious, not yet everything god intended for his creation, unsullied but incomplete. Eden was meant to be dancing.
And so I dance with you. Red lit. Hip swaying off beat. Wearing denim pants. Crotch close to your crotch. Distanced by an inch is a kiss. And I hold your sweaty neck by my sweaty palms. And I dance with you. In Eden, I was nervous to kiss you.
—
It is knowing how it is to be tender, gentle, soft. When wounds become wounds, they begin in pain, they tenderize, and with gentleness they soften, they heal — tenderness comes from pain. It is not an embrace that engulfs a whole, but rather a half that settles on its halfness, succumbing to what it no longer becomes. It is in a form of grace, a state of caress, a formula for forgetting. A narrative stripped of its rhetoric.
—
I desire you in blueness.
And as I desire you, I think of you in blue tint.
And as I think of you, I dream of you in blue nights.✶