THIS ENTRY IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE DEPT. OF CHEESE.



I'M SORRY THIS LOOKS LIKE ONE OF THOSE BAD STUDIO-PIC PICTURES BUT I SWEAR IT'S JUST IN MY FRIEND'S LIVINGROOM.

happy first anniversary, my one & my lonely, sleepyface! 365: the smallest biggest smallest number all of a sudden.

and maybe it's not like neruda says. one year is so short! and my love for you, my love: that's so long.


*

anyway, here is something something syrupy + something fluffy, like pancakes in bed:



yesterday was like this: scrambling to school late & sleepy, after staying awake fruitlessly for 17 hours straight, working on orthographic diagrams for design class. i think that this could be a metaphor. the fight for accuracy when you try to take real life measurements and put them into the small scales, millimeters and centimeters. in the morning cold i fold myself into a thick white sweater to stave off the shakes, i wear gray socks with yellow stripes that go to my knees. i wear boots with grass-stains on them that i will never wash off ever, partly because they are stubborn stains, mostly because they are stains from the grass on a hill on which (before we were together, before our mouths ever met) you breathed soft shh-hhmmh sounds over my hands to keep them warm, folding them into yours. later, on that same small hill, the roots of trees digging into our backs, we would kiss again, in a drizzle, in a rainstorm, cold and shivery and laughing, until the rain stopped. you are not a romantic but you grinned at me so widely then, "the rain stopped, i can't believe it, you kissed me and the rain stopped!" and thank you, you're silly.


in the classroom i am the first to arrive (early & bird are two things i'd like to be), and i smile at everyone like i always do, but nobody knows the reason why. nobody is really asking, but they don't know that it's different from the usual reason, but coexistent with the usual reason, which is you, most of the time.

when you come bounding into the classroom, 10 minutes late, you are wearing your glasses, and under your polo (a burnt patch in the front, from rushing through ironing) is a tshirt i bought for you in manila. it has cameras silk-screened on it, and while everyone and & their brother has it in my city, in this city everyone thinks it is the greatest shirt ever. you like the tshirt but you hate wearing your glasses; you only do it because i love them, you know i love them, and i want to tell you again, you look perfectly paired with any and all of my favorite books ever. you are not a big reader so i don't tell you this, but oh, your wide wide smile, your searching eyes. i want to tell you: yes, i am pleased. everything you have done, all the time you spend, shhh it's okay, it's paid off. my love, you owe nothing to no-one. every debt is paid in full.


at 12:15 you get a call on your cellphone; a confused look crosses your face and you leave class early & in a rush. you tell me to meet you on the sidewalk, on the corner in front of our school, and i am completely suspicious but agree because look at you! look how serious you are, secretface. ninjaface, trying to be stealthy.


12:30 and class is out for real, and i am outside and i see you waving frantically at a courier who has lost his way. your surprise was on the verge of being spoilt but luckily the courier has spotted me spotting you, saunters over to present me with the largest bouquet of lilies and carnations and yellow mums ever, it weighs four pounds in my hands and i can't put it down to put my arms around your shoulders and never let go. there is just so much that could be trampled under the feet of all these inconsequential feet of all these inconsequential people on this nothing nothingness of a sidewalk on a street in the middle of whocares and i love you. i love your silly face, i love you. i love your utter surprise at how good it turned out, your weak little are you surprised? and of course i am, you silly git, i am surprised i haven't just jumped you on the streetcorner and mauled you with my immense and untethered happiness.


we are walking towards our mutual friend's apartment to see them off on their thanksgiving-weekend trip. we see some people you know or i know, and they stop us in the sidewalk, or ask me on the bus, what are the flowers for? and your only answer is a sidewards look at me, a love-y look that crinkles at the edges of your eyes and oh how i want to punch you in the face sometimes, you are so so so good, how can you be so good? i look like an opera singer on her last performance, a ballet dancer at her opening night. the size of the bouquet obscures half my view but i hope everyone can see my whole wide honest smile. at our favorite afterschool sushi restaurant, the entire korean family who runs it has come out of the back kitchen in order to ask about these flowers. the daughter smiles and asks me where they are from, even though she knows the answer, winking at him. they think we are the funniest couple to ever walk through their doors and they know that whenever i am in a rush and ordering two vegetable maki, extra wasabi, i am not going to eat it myself but instead am taking it out to you somewhere.


when you go off to your afternoon class, i take a nap at the apartment. the mattress is lumpy but 17 hours of orthographic drawing will slay anyone, and i am out like a light. i wake up to the sound of your phonecall and i run downstairs to let you in. the apartment is on the twelfth floor, and i want to tell everyone and i want to tell no-one, elevators are our favorite places. i live on a fourth-floor unit, you live on an eleventh-floor one, and we are always trying to hold our breaths or keep our eyes closed _{(or kiss)} until the exact moment the doors open, if you stop too soon, you lose.


i like being delicate about certain subjects; let's just say that being alone in a room with you is like discovering arson and switchblades and cure-alls and a talent for graphed math we thought we forgot after highschool. it's like finding lost socks in the dryer and drinking water in the desert, all at once.

afternoon disappears in a haze of catnaps. we sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake hungry.

at night we go out to the supermarket, where we buy whole pineapple to eat later, with nothing but a hunting knife to cut it. but for dinner we decide on chinesefood instead, broccoli and stir-fry and oolong tea. we seem to have a thing for asian foods when we are celebrating occasions, and i find that funny. our fortune cookie fortunes don't make any sense and we ignore them, and i want to say we make our own destiny but we don't. we are just living / loving and it's suddenly a cooly quiet night and the wind whistles through my hair when we walk back to the apartment.


we play truth or dare but get bored (what don't we know? what don't we already do?) so we play hangman until i have to head home; i get words like "plurality" and "octagenarian" while your little stick figure swings and swings from the gallows and we find this funny. i have the smartest girlfriend! you whisper into my temples, like you want to tell it straight to my brain, and i laugh and protest, come on, let's be honest and you say, okay, i have the smartest prettiest best girlfriend.

you jerk! stop being so cheesy in real life so that my journal entries will be less shmoopy.




who am i kidding, i do all of this romanticizing in my spare time. with eyes closed. one hand behind my back.






*

my love, no matter how bad it might get, in the future, in our fights and long nights, i hope we remember: our small simple days fit like catching oranges in mid-drop. how bright and how fragrant and how easy, to fit something so sweet in the palm of your hand.

 

all it takes to keep my heart:






this is -- and it continues to amaze me -- the second time a ladybug has flown into your hands by mistake, gotten confused, walked around for a moment, before leaving softly & swiftly as it arrived.



i told you before; you're the kind of person stray things trust. even ladybugs.

i think the coastline loves you and fits you quite nicely. it breaks on the shore at the same pace as you breathe.

i wonder sometimes who loves you like i do. it's not that i think it's particularly unique or rare or different to be loved by me (although i hope i make all my good friends feel that way) - it's just that i wish there were more people in your life who love you soft and love you sincere and love you open. who could be as constant and safe and unflaggingly loyal as you tell me that i am. actually, i wish i could always live up to the consistency and brightness you always seem to see in me.

in my time spent with you i realized today that i have grown up enough to be beyond the need to be the only one who means anything. i no longer need to be at the top of your priorities, the most cash and time spent on. i don't need to be the funniest person in your life, or the cleverest, the most beautiful. i will still smile quite widely when you say these things but i am happy to be the same person you were friends with before you were girlfriends with. i think now more than ever i can exist without you just as well as i exist beside you, and that's exciting for me.

i take the bus home without the seat next to me feeling empty. without opening and closing my hands so much anymore in search for one to hold. even the tiny spaces between the molecules of my heart, you've filled, somehow, and the wind doesn't whistle right through me anymore.


you are the kind of person stray animals trust, and that's why i'm still here, maybe: the nape of my neck under your hands sometimes, or a scratch between my shoulderblades that my own hands can't reach.





( when you asked me if i ever thought about what it would be like, if we were married, a Huckleberry house, one cat and one dog, I said, No, not really, I don't, not much, not really. what i want to tell you now is: i was lying. it was not an obvious lie, and that's why i'm sorry. sometimes when you're napping next to me i think about mending all the holes in your shirts and socks, adding buttons in all the places the buttons have fallen off. )

i don't know if the images really describe anything. i don't know if they are there because i feel this way or if i feel this way because it is like this outside, inside, so much of the time.

sometimes i want to go home because i don't know if i am still growing. i feel like ever since winter started i have slowly gone into hibernation, which right now is at its deepest depths. i feel buried, not dead, but buried anyway, under snow and dust and far too many empty seconds.

but

sometimes i really think i could stay because of days like yesterday:


Easter Sunday afternoon, just napping against each other until 4:10 p.m. which rapidly became 4:15 Please Get Your Shoes On Now You Will Miss Your Bus. at the bus stop i was about to say goodbye when you said, no! not yet! not yet! and took my hand and got on the bus with me. quick as a rabbit! on the bus we met one of your old friends from highschool, on his way home from rehab -- he's six months clean now, and i didn't think of this at the time but we've been together for just a little more than that, half a year, and isn't it wonderful how much half a year means to me, and to you, and to your friend who was on his way home from rehab, six months clean? he looks well, he has the soft, quiet hurting-healing blue-eyes of someone on the mend. we all shake hands before he steps off the bus.

our stop is next: St. Mary's Basilica, Easter mass. my mother sings in the choir and you know the boy who plays the piano (and the drums, you say, and the Charlie Brown theme on the electric bass). we sit behind my father. our pew is creaky and squeaks when we kneel and until mass starts we whisper jokes about LAN parties and religious truths. is it the right place for this? you ask. i say i'm sure God gets the jokes as much as we do.

we hold hands quietly during the homily and at peace-wishing time you press a chaste kiss into my forehead. you are probably the only unFilipino face in our quarter of the church and after mass one of my friends asks me, nagsimba kayo nang sabay, seryoso na kayo, ano? and i reply, buti nga di kami nakidlatan pagpasok eh! how is it that you always know exactly when i am talking about you in a foreign language? you give me a questioning curious look that curls at the edges with amusement and i laugh and assure you, it's only nice things we're saying. everyone is impressed with your behavior, but i was already proud of you without reason before any of this happened, it's not as if i needed any more reasons to be proud of you, but here they are. my mother is happy to see you at mass.

Easter dinner is agedashi tofu and miso soup, avocado rolls, vegetable soba, tempura with no egg. sushi rice topped with tamago and mushroom. green tea. i show you how to pick up a single grain of rice with chopsticks and you struggle to compete, until all the failed single-grain-pickup attempts cause you to drop the sticks, and i get the waitress to bring you a fork.


after supper we sink into my living room couch and watch Extreme Home Makeover. they are in the midwest and football fans, and so a football team has come to demolish their old house so a new beautiful one can be built in its place. i'm sure our attention was on the show at least 60% of the time. the other part -- well.

well; at least we knew what the Before house looked like, and we oohed and aahed a little at the new After house. we can fill in all the other details, you said, distracting me again. i pressed my nose into the curve where your neck meets your shoulder and didn't mind at all.




please forgive me for these long long stories. my memory is so weak and i'm afraid i might romanticize the truth into something else entirely, pulverize it into some unreal dust under the weight of all my imagining. i had to write all this before the truth changed in my head.



...

p.s. i'm coming home in four weeks or so, and i can't wait.

It's been a problem so many times; of wanting to remember something, write it down, because who knows where we'll be a week from now? I have never understood more than now the appeal of snowglobes, the way that some people want to freeze singular moments in time and keep them in glass globes, perfect and pristine like the kind with water and fake snow. In full motion when you revisit them, but unmoved by shaking or stirring. Sooner or later everything settles in peace and returns always to that perfect perfect perfect one moment, quiet and still.


I used to think, why one moment when you have a whole lifetime? But now I know it's all life can be sometimes: one hundred beautiful things all strung together, but with spaces in between. But like christmas lights, moving from spark to spark. And so we move from light to light, unable to take away one from the whole without killing that glow.


.



all day breakfast.
pyramid cafe, 1:15 p.m.
january 2nd, 2008

taken with canon g7

.


I haven't written anything properly in a long time -- I didn't even take the time to document all of this, all of us, while we were happening to each other. Two thousand and seven seems to be split up into the eight months I spent becoming the girl who I was when I met you, and the four months I have been the girl who loves too much and too deeply.

Now it's a new year and at twelve midnight on its eve we kissed softly and lightly and quickly and chastely as people yelled their countdown and didn't look anywhere near us. For the exact turning of 12:00:01 we held hands and jumped up together, instead, because we've been doing it every year since we were both seven, back in the days when neither of us could have imagined the other -- one jump at midnight to get taller in the new year.


And so here we are: two towering figures who will help each other get flour and cane sugar from the high shelf when we are puttering about in the kitchen, trying desperately to get a cake to rise. Having leg-lift contests and competing for the great championship of who can raise their hand the highest? which you will win and I will accuse you of cheating and you will give me the consolation prize, which rapidly becomes the best prize of all.


I want to remember everything: the fold of our hands like church steeples or cardgames. the scratchy-sandpapery press of your cheek on mine. bad robot dancing. goodnight sleeptight wishes at 4a.m. because we've been on the phone too long and we have class in four hours, but who cares and more pressingly, who noticed? our smiles too wide, our music too loud, our late late hours.

you buy me a lunch of chocolate-chip pancakes and i buy you strawberries you can take to your evening drawing class.

how your blue shirt is my favorite and the way sometimes your socks don't make it past your ankles. eating baby carrots and clementines with faces Sharpie markered on, one after the other, and then making theories about turning orange. the taste of the spaghetti you cook everytime it's your turn to make dinner and how we threw noodles at the wall until they stuck and we were sure they were perfect.



The truth of all this is that there are still so many times I will forget the specific things that endeared you to my heart, that I love about you. And that will almost convince me fully that this is all there is for us, this has to be enough, we can go no further so it is time to turn on our heels and walk away like cowboys in a bad western at high noon. And then another second will tick by on the watch you gave me, so certain on my wrist, and I'll fall right back into my place at your side again, never thinking of leaving, wondering how I could ever consider it.




You're the kind of person whose face lights up when I take your hand in a crowded elevator, and I hope we never lose that.

thank you so much everyone, for all the nice things you said about the miniminiature! it keeps me going and you do mean a lot to me, even when you think i'm not paying attention.

this week is actually the most productive and fulfilled i've felt in a long while! the difference between working deep into the night now versus back in school is that now, i go to sleep everytime with my eyes hurting and my bones aching and my hands (usually) dirty, but my heart full of love. fresh, new creations sitting on my desk very pleasantly is a fairly regular sight for once! and revisiting some old things that don't make me cringe.


i've been working on my design portfolio nearly 75% of the time -- i'm sorry for how snobby that sounds, i just have no other words for it. but bookmaking is such a lovely, tactile experience. i go to the supplies store and examine all the stock paper, taking things out and looking at all the different shades of white and cream, all the variations of smoothness and weight. and then when i get home i print things out, cut them down to size with a blade and ruler, and then stitch and glue and fold until things come together properly. it's so calming, even if it's hard work.

i don't have a picture right now of how the book and its accompanying cd turned out, but here is how i designed the cover pages:



the cover is two layers -- an upper layer printed on semitransparent parchment paper, and a stiff cream-colored board that has the title of my portfolio printed on it in thick, black, obnoxious (hahaha) lettering! i haven't taken any pictures, but when you hold the book in your hands the two kinds of paper make a neat layered effect.

the illustration details are of a bird held inside a ribcage overgrown with weeds and flowers! three motifs that i have always loved. it's a mixture of vintage anatomy diagrams and botany illustrations.

( full view (800x600 px) )


the cd sleeve is also printed on parchment paper, which is fun because plain data cd's are *~*SHINY*~* and the layered effect is different (and sparkly)!

( cd sleeve design feat. more birds )


lastly, i need your kind kind kind help please, with this:



you can see the full view here (650x870 px).
colored in photoshop.

i tried out a new coloring style on an old illustration of mine, and while i'm happy with how the colors turned out (i tried very hard to limit it to something very primary-based), i'd really love to know the kind of mood that you get from looking at it, what kind of situation you think she must be in, to feel the way that she does? tell me things you think/suspect/conspire about it! this was designed to illustrate something specific, so i'm interested to know if it communicates properly.

also, i shaded it quite differently than usual. she's supposed to be lying in a patch of light through a window, or maybe a half-open doorway. does that come across to you?



&

thank you so much, everybody. for always being patient with me and putting up with me. i don't know how you do it. you could write an instruction book, 'dealing with the katrinas of this world', but really, who would buy it? not everyone wants to be nice to me. and yet all of you continue to do so out of the kindness of your hearts.

i'm preoccupied with the superstitions of changing one thing to change everything: the doubling back on your path after a black cat, the saying goodbye on a bridge that makes the farewell final. tying a knot in a handkerchief to change your luck. crushing eggshells to keep a secret. turning your coat inside out after a funeral, so that ghosts don't chase after you.


superstitions to warn, superstitions to prevent, superstitions to cheat bad luck and death.

i'm imagining decades and decades ago, a time and place for these things to come from: a clumsy girl knocks over a saltshaker, doesn't know what to do, scatters a little everywhere; maybe many small spills, small mistakes, will be more overlooked than a large one. a shepherd sleeps under a red sky, his flock all lays down. a man stops himself from walking under a ladder; something fell recently, something killed his wife. all of them do these things because there is not much else. here is some bad luck, here is death. what else can you do in the face of that.


how long does it take, how many people will it take, until one single ritual becomes a superstition? until all these things i do begin to be believed in by people beyond me. it's these small actions that are left to me, when my life is so full of uncertainty. when will stepping over cracks in the sidewalk finally mean i'm not thinking about you anymore? i'll only use scissors in my right hand, i'll never sing when it's raining. i'll turn the pages of books with two fingers only. i'll gather the debris from your haircuts, toss them to the birds to make their nests with. i'll ask them to keep me in your dreams. i'll ask them to be kinder when they sing.

more often than not i am deceived by one act and its simplicity. i keep making the wrong things powerful, i keep making the wrong things weak. i'll write your name backwards in cursive, slowly repeating and repeating, to change the way you think of me.

i've been thinking about this article i read in LIFE magazine when i was nine years old, about this girl born deaf & blind & mute, a helen keller type, but not famous. how since her hands were meant to speak with and sign with and spell with, she hardly used them to identify things with touch.

instead, in the silent dark of her life, she'd learn things by pressing her mouth to them, the sensitive stretch of skin behind her bottom lip. it's this way, she explained - spelling words out with her hands and fingers, so we could understand - that i can really tell what is different, why each is different.



*

think of all the things & wants & ones you can't have, that you can't press your mouth to. i can think of exactly one, and i won't allow myself to, ever.

i think courage sometimes means you don't let yourself have what you want. i think i am brave for all the wrong reasons.