Ponkan. Christmas. Nick Hornby. Bob Dylan. Blah blah blah.

* * *

The Catherine Theory

I.

Michelle took her overnight bag, and put what she could inside it. Always, what was necessary: the toiletries she wasn’t allowed to leave no matter how frequently she went there, some underwear advertised as decadent, a change of clothes, a packet of mints.

It was Friday night. In a couple of minutes, she would go out the door, and hail a taxi. In less than an hour, she would be at Jim’s house, where he would be waiting for her with a glass of wine, because it set the mood for what would happen the whole weekend. On Sunday morning, she’d be back in her apartment again, her overnight bag would hold what she was wearing now, the panties she had gone through, shampoo bottles that were lighter. On Sunday nights, Jim always had dinner with his girlfriend, whose name Michelle always seemed to forget.

It didn’t bother her, that he had a girlfriend, it didn’t bother her now the way it did before. Things like that happened. She supposed she loved Jim, and perhaps Jim loved her back, but that wasn’t important, hadn’t been lately. Jim would always say, usually after they made love, “You’re beautiful, Shell,” and she supposed she was. She was pretty enough, with her long dark hair, her full lips, her light skin. Her sister Alice always said she’d give anything to look like Michelle, then she could be taken seriously.

Seriousness, did she inspire this? Did it matter? Commitment, a voice in her head chided, and Michelle thought of how she’d never felt the urge to ask Jim, “Who’s more beautiful then, me or her?” She felt noble for this; it somehow made her seem admirable. She had no desire to know, beyond what she already knew: a girlfriend, Jim’s, who had him most of the week, and especially on special occasions.

At least he wasn’t married. She never dallied with married men. Her mother would never forgive her if she did, if she somehow knew.

Michelle’s father had had an affair. Beth claimed she’d known from the very start. “It’s those Catherines, up to no good again,” Beth had confided in Michelle one night (she was ten then), as they both waited for him to come home. Michelle asked her what she meant, but her mother had shaken her head, saying, “I don’t think you should know yet.”

A moment later, Beth said, “You know, before I met your father, I had this boyfriend. I thought I was going to marry him. I was so in love.” She sighed, looked at her daughter. “He was so handsome, you know. I often thought of how our children would look like. If they’d have his eyes, or my chin, or something like that.”

What Michelle thought of then was that possibility that she and Alice might have never existed. She asked her mother, “And then what happened?” thinking, for the first time in her life, how lucky she was to be alive.

Beth smiled, her mouth arranged into a crooked line. “One day, I let myself in his house. He always left the key under the mat, the one where you wipe you shoes on before going inside? And so I let myself in, thinking I’d surprise him.” Beth saw how Michelle’s eyes had widened. “Oh, honey, no, I didn’t find him in bed with someone else, nothing like that!”

But Michelle hadn’t been thinking about anything like that. She was amazed that someone would leave a house key for anyone to find. Terrible things could happen, she thought. And, with her mother’s tone, this story was well on its way to that. (Imagine that, Michelle thought still, someone left a house key for my mother to find.)

“Anyway. I was going through the kitchen drawers, looking for a peeler. I was making dessert, see? I wanted to surprise him with homemade dinner, to show him I could cook. Remember, I was already planning how to be a wife to him.”

Michelle nodded.

“But you know what I found?” Beth asked, and in answer, Michelle shook her head. Her mother smiled, pleased to know her daughter was listening. “Pictures. I found pictures.”

“Pictures,” Michelle echoed.

“Yes, pictures. I can’t tell you what those pictures showed. Some of them were innocent enough, I guess, but the others, my god. I was looking at them, kept looking at them over and over, just standing in the kitchen. I’d all but forgotten about the peeler. Just standing there, alone in his apartment, looking at those photographs.” Beth sighed again. “And, Michelle, I thought about it. I thought, I couldn’t marry a man who still had pictures of some old girlfriend lying around in his kitchen!”

No, Michelle thought, she supposed her mother couldn’t, shouldn’t. (Wouldn’t, she would think years later.)

“One photo had a dedication scrawled on the back,” Beth said. “It sickened me, really. It said, ‘Sweetie, always thinking about you. Love, Cathryn.’ That’s what it said. And to think what that picture actually contained.”

“Cathryn,” Michelle murmured.

“Yes.” Beth looked at her daughter for a long time, then looked at the clock. “Of course, this has nothing to do with your father.” Beth sighed, rubbed the side of one hand against the corner of her right eye. “Nothing much, I suppose.”

Later that night, when Michelle had returned to her bedroom to check on Alice, their father came home. From upstairs, she could hear her mother screaming, not an uncommon occurrence. She went to the door to close it, to let Alice sleep on, but when she heard Beth gasp, “Kathy!” and, not a heartbeat later, a jarring crash, Michelle tiptoed to the stairs, and peeked into the living room, where her parents were.

Her mother was hurling wedding china toward her father, wedding china she’d taken out of the cabinet as Michelle said she’d be going up to her room. Michelle had left Beth as the older woman swiped the surfaces of the etched disks of glass, humming a tuneless song to herself. Beth hadn’t seemed to hear Michelle’s murmur of Good night.

“It’s that secretary, isn’t it?” Beth shrieked. “You slept with her, and you came home to me, to your daughters, and you slept with her! Kathy!” And her voice had grown shriller, and shriller, that, Michelle saw, even her father was wincing. “Kathy, of all people, her!”

And Michelle saw how her father had stood as still as he could, knowing Beth would always miss her mark. The plates zoomed past him, hitting tables, counters, walls, the glass against the hard surfaces punctuating her mother’s words, each newly formed shard falling to the floor like cold, clear ice. Michelle looked back at her bedroom door, which was, thankfully, closed.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” Beth screamed.

And Michelle saw her father open his mouth, but she couldn’t hear what he said. Her mother was still screaming, chanting a name.

*

Her parents separated eventually. Michelle had known something was wrong even before her father had come into the bedroom she and Alice shared, and talked to them about having to leave. “It’s not like we don’t love each other anymore,” her father said.

Michelle nodded. Alice, five, asked, “Is mommy in bed because you want to leave?”

And her father started to speak, but instead nodded. Michelle wanted to tell her sister, “I don’t think Dad really wants to leave,” but she had a feeling she didn’t know everything that was going on in her own home, and so she kept quiet. Besides, she had seen a curious sheen on her father’s eyes, and what suspiciously looked like dew clumping together the short spikes of his eyelashes; she didn’t think saying anything right now would help. And so, she kept quiet.

Beth had refused to leave her bed for the past couple of days. As soon as their father had gone for work, Alice would scamper into the bedroom, and ask Beth what was wrong. Beth never answered her, and so Alice would call to Michelle (who had been skipping school to take care of Alice and the house), saying, “Shell, come talk to Mommy, please!”

Michelle kept her own vigil. At lunchtime, she would walk into her parents’ bedroom, which was slowly starting to smell of sweat, and something rotten and curdled (in a fit of whimsy, Michelle imagined it to be her own mother, decomposing in the bed). The curtains were always drawn, and so it was always twilight no matter what the clocks said. “Let’s eat,” Michelle would say. “Come on, Mommy.” But Beth wouldn’t move.

One day, Michelle on her vigil: she went to the bedroom, urged her mother to eat, knowing as she spoke that Beth wouldn’t. Her mother was all but a lump in the bed, her head bolstered by pillows peeking out of the blankets. Her thick hair was matted around her face, knots raised at her crown. Beth’s eyes were wide open, though the skin around them was pink and swollen. There were gray circles under her eyes, too much like bruises.

“Come on, Mommy,” Michelle said, just as she prepared to leave.

And then, there, in bed, her mother spoke. Her voice was strong, and it surprised Michelle, made her rush back to her mother’s side. “The Catherines of the world,” Beth said. “Michelle, remember? Watch out for the Catherines of the world.”

Michelle was quiet, trying to remember all the Catherines she knew. She had two classmates of that name, though one of them spelled hers with a K. And did the Katrinas count? And the girl next door, her name was Caitlin, what about her?

“The Catherines,” Beth said, her voice growing more vehement. “Ask me about the Catherines, Michelle. Ask me.”

Michelle asked.

“You know, my first boyfriend, his name was Warren, we were having a grand time, really, we were young. My first love, on all accounts, but you’re really too young to know what accounts exactly.” Michelle saw the smallest smile appear curve her mother’s lips, watched Beth shake her head. “It was my second year in high school. Around Christmas time. That day, I’d been walking around, thinking how lucky I was, that during the Christmas parties, I’d have someone to hold hands with, Warren. God, I was such a girl.”

Beth fell silent for a few moments, so Michelle asked her to go on.

“Good, you’re listening. Anyway. I saw them. There was this girl I never really liked, her name was Kate, just Kate, although she made everyone call her Katie. I called her Kate anyway, which is probably why she did what she did.”

“What did she do, Mommy?”

“See, they sat beside each other in class, her and Warren. Teacher’s seating arrangements, because otherwise, I would have sat beside him. And then, during a boring lecture, I turned in my seat to see if Warren was looking at me, watching me. And there they were. There they were.”

“Were they, um, kissing?”

Beth laughed. The sound was gritty to Michelle’s ears.

“God, no. Of course not. Warren had his hand up her sleeve. For a long time, just holding her shoulder.” Beth snorted. “Oh, heartbreak at fifteen, right in the middle of a Biology lecture. The worst kind of heartbreak there is.”

Michelle nodded, although her mother was no longer looking at her. Her eyes were fixed on the curtains, and she was smiling a smile—that smile—that Michelle realized she didn’t like too much.

“I asked him later on,” Beth continued. “I asked him what he’d been doing to that Kate girl. We were waiting for the school bus to pick us up, and there were just so many people around us, it was all I could do to stop myself from screaming at everyone to shut their mouths, because something really important in my life was about to happen.” Her mother looked at Michelle. “You ever get that, honey?”

Michelle didn’t know. She just shrugged.

“Anyway. He said Kate had asked him to fix her bra strap. Fix her bra strap. Can you imagine the audacity of that girl?”

In her mind, Michelle repeated the word: audacity. She wasn’t sure what it meant exactly, but she was sure that it wasn’t anything nice.

“There are more of them,” he mother went on. “Maybe when you’re older, I can tell you what they did, those Catherines.”

Beth sighed. “Your sister. I can’t tell her this now, the girl’s only five. But when she’s older, tell her this, okay, honey? Tell your sister about the Catherines of the world. No daughter of mine shall go uninformed.” And Beth laughed, and Michelle tried at first to laugh with her, but then she was ten, she had resolved to be ten, and so she just smiled politely.

A few weeks later, her father moved out of the house. He promised to call her, and Alice, whenever he could. He did call, frequently in fact, and sometimes, tiring of hearing her father’s voice, she would pass the phone to Alice, who’d always ask, “Where are you? Why aren’t you here? When are you coming back? Where are you?”

There were afternoons when, coming home from school, Michelle would see Beth playing with Alice, crooning to her in a voice that made the fine hairs on her arms stand. Alice would have lipstick all over her, rouge garish on her young, plump cheeks.

And sometimes, Michelle would find Alice alone in the kitchen, while her mother’s voice wafted out of one of the rooms in the now-big house. Michelle would always take Alice by the hand, and lead her to their bedroom.

II.

Her father had left a college teaching position to go to Antipolo, where he farmed, until now. He always seemed happier, if not content, whenever he came down to have lunch with his daughters. “Are you taking care of yourself?” he would always ask them, Michelle first, and then Alice. Michelle would notice the sunburned skin of her father’s nose, the scruffy beard. And Michelle would say, “Yes, Daddy.”

The name of his new “wife” was Nora (that’s how he introduced her to the girls: “This is my new wife, girls: Nora.”). Apparently, Kathy the Department Secretary was nothing more than a fortunate mistake. Beth always shook her head when Nora’s name was mentioned, as if it was deeper betrayal that her former husband didn’t take up with the woman who’d originally wrecked their marriage.

“But they’re not really married, you know,” Beth would tell Michelle. “There they are with their vegetables, living in sin.” And Beth laughed, the way someone would laugh when they heard a cruel joke.

Michelle had told her once, “It’s because Nora’s not a Catherine, is it?” And Beth had screamed at her so suddenly, that for a couple of seconds, Michelle just sat still, staring at her own mother as she raged. She’d been thirteen when this happened.

The girls had met Nora a couple of times during the early months of their father’s retreat into Antipolo, and then, later on, some summers were even spent in their modest house fronting a field of corn. She was a petite woman, her skin brown, her face lined with years of easy smiles and laughter. She had hugged Alice first, she was seven then, and when Alice had giggled, Nora had opened her arms to Michelle. Michelle tensed for a few moments, thinking about her mother back home, who was probably bent over her pedicure at that moment. Michelle allowed herself be hugged, to smile. Nora smelled like mangoes, picked at just the right time.

“Oh,” Nora said to her husband, “she has your eyes!”

Michelle liked her enough, what was not to like? Alice claimed she loved her. “I want to stay with them forever, and farm,” she would always say, after the visits.

“You wouldn’t like it,” Michelle would always tell her, eyeing Alice’s pale skin, which easily turned red during summers, no matter how much sun block Michelle put on her. “Too much sun.”

*

When Alice was thirteen, she had come running into the bedroom, where Michelle was reading a book. Alice was crying, her cheeks mottled pink, the skin around her eyes swollen and red.

“Do you know what he did to me?” Alice wailed.

Michelle assumed she was talking about Derek. Derek. She thought it a pretentious name for a thirteen-year-old boy. Since school started, her younger sister had gone on and on about how Derek, school heartthrob, had befriended her, leaving notes inside her books, walking her from school. Alice announced she was in love. She usually announced this during dinners, where Beth would smile widely, and give her a kiss on the cheek. And Michelle would look up from the book she was not allowed to read on the dinner table and make a face at her younger sister.

“Do you know what he did to me?” Alice kept wailing, and wailing.

It seemed Michelle was obliged to inquire. “What, Alice? What did he do to you?”

Her sister stood in the center of the bedroom. “He asked if he could walk me home. He said he had something really important to tell me. I was so –” and she broke off to hiccup. “I was so excited. I thought he was going to ask me if he could be my boyfriend, and I was so excited, I couldn’t stop smiling at him. I’m such an idiot!”

“You’re not an idiot.”

Alice went on. “You know what he did? You know what it was that he was going to ask me? He asked if I could help him with my lab partner. My lab partner.” Alice’s voice was high-pitched as she mimicked, “‘I’ve had the biggest crush on her. Could you tell her that?’” And Alice crumpled to the floor, not crying anymore, though her face was twisted as she stared at her sister. Her voice, when she spoke, resumed its normal pitch, but the sound was rounder, more hollow. “My lab partner,” Alice said.

“What’s her name?”

“Does it matter?”

“I guess not.”

Michelle thought it was probably a ploy. She was eighteen now, and a lot of boys found her pretty, so she’d gone through a lot of ploys already. Some boys had done this very thing to her, pretend to have an interest in someone else, when it was really her they wanted to get close to. Sometimes she helped them out, and sometimes, her matchmaking skills outweighed any original intention those boys might have had.

But she didn’t tell her sister all this. She probably wasn’t right. And she never liked Derek anyway, those few moments she’d met the boy. And so she told Alice, “So it’s what he didn’t do to you.”

Alice glared at her. “You’re not helping!”

Michelle shook her head. “No, I’m probably not.”

*

There was a story Michelle kept repeating, even when not prodded, about her first disastrous love affair. An anecdote, something to amuse, entertain, though it started out as a signal for a need of sympathy. Or something like that.

The story goes: she’d been a year out of college, working as a library assistant, in the university where her father used to work. She’d been dating the head librarian, Peter, for about six months, when she decided, one particularly slow day, to go to him in his office. On her way there, she thought of how surprised he’d be, how surprised and pleased—and yes, aroused—once she started taking her blouse off, letting him know that she had to have him, had to have him now, and yes, the door was already locked.

The door to his office was open, and she peeked in, to make sure he was alone. She remembered how she’d taken care not to nudge the door, as it creaked. She remembered how her throat had constricted when she saw Peter with a girl, a girl. She remembered how suddenly cold the hallway was, and she’d wrapped her arms around herself, still watching Peter and this student, who couldn’t be less than two years younger than she was.

Peter was leaning against his desk. In front of him was that girl. She was wearing a blue miniskirt, and she was inching the hem slowly up her thighs. Michelle could see the shadows at the backs of this girls’ knees, the taut muscles of her calves.

And Michelle always ended this story by saying she tiptoed out of that hallway, did her work like an automaton. That she went back to his office at the end of the day, and told him she didn’t want to see him anymore, and that she hoped he enjoyed the rest of his life, particularly his job in the college library. And her last words to him were, “Bye now.”

During Alice’s bridal shower, she’d told this story again, to a group of Alice’s friends, who’d all giggled at the beginning of her tales (office romance!), who eventually gnashed their teeth, and shook their fists at her unfortunate ex-boyfriend, and the anonymous college schoolgirl. After the well-wishing had abated (“Oh, you poor thing, he’ll have it coming to him”), and she could feel all the women in the room were thinking about old loves that didn’t work out (they always get that look in their faces, that they were daydreaming, but their eyebrows had come together, confused, unbelieving), Michelle excused herself and went to the kitchen, where she poured herself another glass of wine.

She thought about that story then, and the more she thought about it—the door, the hallway, Peter against his desk, the blue miniskirt—she realized she no longer knew if the story was true. She’d told this story many times, originally to her friends from college, who all demanded why she and Peter hadn’t worked out, when Peter was “such a nice guy.” Perhaps she’d wanted to justify herself? Or disprove that Peter wasn’t the nice guy he seemed to be (and actually was)? Did she actually see this? Did it even actually happen?

Michelle couldn’t remember.

What if, somehow, word got around—to Peter, to that college girl? Peter, a gentleman, would keep silent. He hadn’t even said a word when she broke up with him, not even a calm Michelle. And that college girl, would she say, “I never did that!” and deny everything, thinking she was the victim of deliberate slander?  I never did that, she would probably say, and Michelle would think (only to herself, of course), “No, maybe you didn’t.”

Michelle knew she had gone to his office. Knew that Peter was there, that the girl was there. She was sure about the miniskirt, more sure that it was blue. But the hem slowly, playfully, inching up? Was she sure about that?

No, she wasn’t. She’d maintained a fiction for so long, she had forgotten what was real.

Michelle went back to the party, where everyone had raised their glasses, wishing Alice, for the nth time that night, a happy marriage. Michelle raised her own glass, near empty now, and her lips moved, shaping over the other women’s words.

She looked at Alice, who had a red lace thong pinned to her hair, like a tiara. Her little sister, pink with wine and party make-up, grinning at everyone in her room. So young, so in love.

Michelle smiled, and when she spoke, the whole room listened to her, the girl of the broken heart, the one who’d walked into an office wanting to have sex, instead presented with a reason to end the relationship, blue miniskirts and all.

Michelle said, “Alice. Have I told you I’m happy for you? That I’m glad you’re getting married to a… to a decent enough guy? Because I am, you know. Happy for you.”

“‘A decent enough guy.’” Alice shook her head, smiled a little. And then one of the women laughed—her laugh was a spurt of unintended glee shooting across the room—and everyone else, then Alice, then, finally, Michelle, joined in.

III.

Michelle met Jim a couple of months ago, in a bookstore. (“Of all places,” her mother would say, if she knew about them. “Typical,” Alice would mutter.) She had noticed him as she came in: he was in the Classics section, squatting on the floor, browsing a low shelf. What she could see of him—neatly trimmed dark hair, dusted with gray, a checked polo shirt, the veins lightly threading his forearms, his wide palms—she liked, appreciated. She moved around the store for a couple of minutes, picking up books, pretending to read their blurbs, then setting them back down again. In the end, she made her way to the Classics section, where, sure enough, she found the man, still squatting on the floor, still browsing that low shelf.

“Can I help you?” she asked, before she could stop herself.

He looked up at her, but not before he ran his eyes up her legs, bared by a frilly skirt. “You’re not one of the clerks, are you?” He smiled, there was a lone dimple on his left cheek.

“No. But I’m a librarian.”

“A librarian.” And he raised both his eyebrows. Michelle decided she liked his eyes: they were warm, a dark brown, fringed with lashes not too thick as to make him look pretty.

“Yes, a librarian,” she repeated. And then she smiled, realizing it was her first, for him.

They had gone for coffee after that, to a café a couple of stores down the street. He talked about his having a girlfriend, and his voice was steady, matter-of fact. She caught him, though, darting glances at her when he thought she was studying her coffee mug.

She talked about her being a librarian. She had helped him choose a Tolstoy back in the store.

They met up a few more times during that month, bought more books that Michelle was sure he wouldn’t read. One Friday afternoon, a few days before her thirty-fifth birthday, and after two cups of coffee and a slice of cheesecake, Jim said, “Would you like to come to my apartment with me?”

And Michelle said, “That would be nice.”

*

Michelle stepped out of the taxi. She secured the strap of her bag over her shoulder, and went to the gate, let herself in. Before, she would have spent a couple of minutes just staring at the house, at what landscaping there was squeezed between the wall and the curb. But not tonight. Tonight, she was tired. Tonight, before coming here, Beth had called her, complaining about how her daughters never called anymore, and soon, the conversation veered towards her ex-husband, “that father of yours,” Beth asking her, “Does he still call you, Michelle? Is he so preoccupied with his corn that he can’t even check up on his daughters?” And Michelle could imagine her mother at the other end of the line, lounging on a sofa, a muted television in front of her.

“Daddy called me last Wednesday.” And he had, to say that he was “inexplicably worried” about her, and that the children—his children with Nora—were looking for her and Alice. Michelle had told him everything was okay, Alice was as happy as ever, and how were the children, had they applied to any colleges?

And then after Michelle had soothed her mother, Alice called, and Alice had called to tell Michelle that she was pregnant. “Well, I’m not really sure, you know. I mean, I missed my period, but you know I’ve always been as regular as the damned calendar. I haven’t told him. Oh, Shell, I might be a mom! You might be an aunt!” And Alice had giggled, and Michelle shook her head, wished her might-be congratulations, and felt the beginnings of a headache.

The headache was gone, thankfully, by the time she got to Jim’s house. She felt she would be making a mistake if she’d go to him less than healthy. Once, she had a fever, and she had called Jim to cancel plans. A less-than-peak performance didn’t seem welcome.

Besides, Michelle never thought to share anything, not even a headache.

At the front door, she knocked. Jim hadn’t given her any key to his house, and it seemed, would never plan to. Which was well and good, Michelle supposed. God knew what she would (and could) do to his key.

Besides, it wouldn’t be good if Jim’s girlfriend would decide to pay him a visit, unannounced, discovering there was a key waiting for her to use, under the welcome mat, or inside a potted plant. You never knew. Most betrayals were discovered by chance—few hunted for it deliberately—and if not by chance, then by, perhaps, a subconscious provocation: a sudden desire to look at a boy to see if he was staring at you, dinner made on a whim, walking home from school, a quickie in an office. It wouldn’t be good for any of them if Jim’s girlfriend would walk through the door, as Jim was making love to Michelle, on the bed they must have been making love in long before Michelle saw her boyfriend in a bookstore.

The door opened, and Jim was there. He was wearing a plain white shirt, old jeans, and house slippers. She looked up at him, and at the same time, they said, “Hi.” He stepped closer, took her bag, and slung it over his shoulder. He said, “You okay, Shell?”

Watching him, Michelle thought about the last conversation she had with Alice, the one about her might-be pregnancy. And Michelle remembered that, as she rubbed at the bridge of her nose to ward off a headache, Alice, miles away, had asked her, “Is everything okay?”

Michelle thought then: Everybody should stop asking everyone else if everything was okay. And then she felt bad, she felt like one of those bitter, shriveled stepsisters in fairytales, and she gripped the phone tighter, and she said, “Alice? Alice. I’m happy for you. I’m really happy for you, you know that?”

And now, Jim’s voice, seemingly from far away, asking her, “Hey, what’s wrong?” And then, Jim’s hand rubbing her nape, Jim’s other hand curling around her waist. There, in his doorway, he kissed Michelle, first on her forehead, and then on one cheek, and then finally, on her lips. Just a small kiss, a soft kiss, a fleeting one.

When he drew his head back, she smiled at him, assuring him nothing was wrong.

“My baby sister’s pregnant,” shared Michelle. “Isn’t that great?” □

* * *

This Fleet of Shadows

It is quiet again. Ever since you realized what exactly silence was, you know that is what weights the house in the hours before noon. The arms of clocks move slowly, dust courses through the air without displacing anything. Always that silence, as the day grows from the gauzy rays of dawn to the stark heat of midday.

Your mom is somewhere within the house, straightening pillows and blankets, watering plants, steadying vases; she is most probably humming a song you will never recognize. Your father is at work. Down the road, the old people with their rolled tobacco and nganga are talking about the snow that fell on the town of Rosario for exactly seven and a half minutes, some eleven years ago, the day you were born. Outside, the sun is relentless. Today is the hottest day of May.

In this house, you are as unmoving as everything you can reach. The rare breeze slips through the drawn lace curtains, and sends loose strands of your hair to tiptoe along your cheeks. You lift your hand, and brush the strands away before reaching for a pen on the table beside you. You try to still the fluttering of a pad of paper with the tip of the pen. It leaves a precise, sudden dot on the white page. Slowly, with a care that bordered on dread, you angle the pen downwards to catch the outline of the shadow your arm leaves on the page. Beside that, you write virtuoso, scimitar, geisha, and connoisseur, words you got wrong on this week’s spelling test.

In the stillness of this house, as you look at the patterns your words and lines have made on the page, you think of the man – plumber? electrician? mailman? – you watched on television with your mom. The man who was sitting in the toilet one day when a knock on the door made him, well, hurry things up a little, with such force that nerves popped in his brain. (“That actually happens?” you asked your mom then, wide-eyed with glee and wonder.) When he awakened after a stint and a coma in a hospital bed, he found himself to be a voracious poet, writing verse upon verse on notebooks that ran out in days’ time. And then, after that, he took up a brush, and found he couldn’t stop painting as well. His canvasses were created from this fixed, fevered state, all from a hastened sit on his toilet, and an unexpected visitor.

You used to be like him once. (Not the part about the toilet, though.) Every object that left a mark, every surface that could be marked, you used, most at the flurry of the moment. Passing by your murky reflection on a dusty pane of glass, you used your finger to draw immobile butterflies waiting for flowers in flight. You used your mom’s eyeliner once, to write down a word you’d stumbled upon in one of the magazines lying around the house: palimpsest. Your father shouted at you, a rare occurrence, for using his shoe polish to draw an intricate pattern of swirls and arrows on the bathroom floor – your mom looked at you then with something too much like sadness in her gaze, before she told your father to leave the child alone, Ted.

As a child, younger than you are now, you drew fables on the walls of your parents’ bedroom; imaginary farms and gardens and forests of familiar animals taken from the dreams that made you huddle deeper into the blankets at night; petting zoos of made-up creatures from relatives who sneered at you from way up, their faces too far away to know that your answering scowls weren’t supposed to be endearing. They are still there now, those drawings.

There, almost kissing the tile floor is a mango tree lying sideways on the ground, its branches heavy and swaying with large round fruit. Inching its way atop the horizontal trunk, like a trapeze artist you saw in a picture book once, is a caterpillar with an elephant’s wrinkly knees. Blue swirls for the sky, red dots for the candy the neighbor’s kid stole from you, yellow slashes for the monstrous canary you shriek at on television, orange waves for the trees because the neighbor’s dog ate the green crayon the day before. And then a penguin here, its small yellow beak curved in the smallest of smiles, soaring, filled in with purple.

You drew, you drew. Until your mom, smelling of detergent, gently took the crayon you had been using, and told you to stand still, that she can slash a rough line above your head. She placed her hand on your shoulder to press you against the wall, just to make sure. She smiled to tell you that you have done nothing wrong. She looked really pretty then, with her hair longer.

“You’re growing,” she informed you, as she tucked the crayon in the pocket of her slacks. “Do you want to take a nap?”

“I don’t want to sleep,” you said, and you jutted your lower lip because you had learned more people do your bidding this way. “I do not want to sleep.” You drew your brows together – the way you had seen your mother do when she talked to your father whenever he came home smelling sweet and a little strange. “No,” you said, “No.”

“Okay, okay,” said your mom. She sighed, her hair falling softly over her shoulders. (You remember then that the night before, she had let you brush her hair with the gold-trimmed hairbrush grandmother gave her on her wedding day.) She gave you back your crayon. “Go, uh, trace your shadows then, sweetie,” she told you as she started to walk away.

“What for? How? I have to stay still, and I can’t.”

“Find a way,” your mom told you over her shoulder.

You looked at the flying purple penguin you had just drawn. It was too far from the ground, so whatever shadows it might leave will be on clouds. And so you drew a cloud (too bad the crayon you picked was pink instead of blue) beneath the penguin, close to its belly that it looked like it bounced off a pillow in a moment of pure joy, and you squiggled rough lines of purple on its surface. That, that was the penguin’s shadow.

On the wall, shielding the outstretched wings of your impossible penguin, your head had left its shape. You started with your neck, because one line, and the another, are always the easiest to start with. You then traced the outline with a crayon (purple to match the penguin), making loops on the wallpaper to mimic the curls on your head. When you leaned in to trace the finer hairs, the shadow moved, growing out of the faint purple lines and shapes.

The next day, you stared at the penguin and its companion cloud, and realized that when you had drawn the outline of your head, you had caged the soaring bird into a head-and-neck-jar, almost like the firefly you trapped one afternoon, and left on your bedside table to stare at. You remembered that when you had woken up the next day, the bug had lain on the glass floor of its makeshift prison, as serene as all things that used to glow were.

The next week, you asked your mother to give a name to what you do to the walls, and she called it a mural. Mural. Painters do a lot of it, she said. So, then, when you drew on walls, people might call you a genius. Armed with this knowledge, you rushed outside and joined friends, even the bully who had decided to make peace even for a couple of days, the new word floating from your mouth once, then twice, and then another time, until someone told you to shut up, and the word was immediately set aside for a game of tag.

The next months, right before going to bed, your mother told you to stand by the wall with your shoulders thrown back. She placed a heavy book on your head, steadied it. Then she told you not to move, and then she told you it was okay to move. You stood beside her as she drew a line right beneath the hard spine of the book. You had grown taller, yet again. The penguin you had locked up lagged an inch below this new line. When you looked at your mother, you saw that she looked shorter now, but not less pretty.

You, well, grow up, your petting zoos forgotten and abandoned. You learned a new word for this, menagerie, and you said it to yourself over and over as you went to a school where everyone knew your name, and the history of your entire family, up to when the teachers from the first shipment of teachers landed on national soil. Now, when you walk by the walls of your parents’ bedroom, you are inches above the abrupt dashes your mother left that afternoon. Before you know it, you will have completely abandoned capturing your shadows, leaving them untraced, frozen as they are one minute on the road in front of your house, then moving faster and faster out of your reach, until it runs in circles around you.

Wendy Darling had sewn Peter Pan’s shadow to the soles of his pointy green shoes, so he could fly. But then, they had to chase his nimble shadow around the room first, creating such a big mess that Nana the dog could hear the noise from the doghouse to which she had been chained. You don’t want to chase your shadows, though. You know it likes to move, at times, disappear.

The pen you are holding moves almost of its own accord, trying to record the hazy memory of Peter’s shoes. You draw little veins on the surface, and a stem at the heel. Peter Pan wouldn’t use leather, although the Lost Boys liked to wear dead animals on their heads. You wonder, yet again, why there are no women in Neverland, no other girl aside from Wendy but a spoiled Indian princess, no mothers.

Your own mom comes in the room now, smelling of mornings. She smiles at you. “Hey kid, is everything okay?”

“Yes, mom.” You doodle on the pad of paper, roughly drawing a chicken wing and a melting ice cube.

“Oh, fried chicken. You’re drawing again.” You look up at her, and you see your mom has bitten her lower lip. You smile at her to say that it’s okay.

“It’s so hot,” she says, and you nod. She sighs and runs one hand through the hair that curls around her face with the heat of the day. She cut it into a bob a couple of years ago, saying then that it would be easier that way. You no longer help her brush her hair with the gold-trimmed hairbrush at nights. Your mom bends a little to give your forehead a brush with her fingertips. “After lunch, how about we go to the grocery store and get some ice cream?”

You smile at her. “Cool,” you say. And both of you giggle, although neither of you know why.

You drew arrows with shoe polish and wrote the newest strange words with your mother’s makeup. Wendy Darling had sewn Peter Pan’s shadow to the soles of his pointy green shoes, so he could fly. Today is the hottest day of May. □

*

Eros

She was a child. And so, perhaps, this made it permissible for her to come home to an apartment that was currently empty, with the imprint of another person’s lips on hers. As little as a couple of months ago, she would have fretted at the possibility of lingering strange scents, of the welcome unfamiliarity of new and longed-for tastes. She would have spent as long as she could under the shower, until the shrill beeping of the shower’s heating system drove her away—and even then she’d bow her head to turn the secreted shadows of her nape against the scalding water. And then. And then, with her body mottled pink, she’d brush her teeth in front of the dresser mirror, her pruned fingertips peeking with every up-down-up-down motion of the toothbrush. She would only stop when the foam turned pink, when her gums felt sore when she’d touch the tip of her tongue to them. And then she would wait. Sometimes, she’d read a book as she did so, but mostly she would just sit cross-legged across the bed, leaning against the headboard and simply wait.

But she was a child, she’d been thought of as one, and called a child too many times—and this is what children do, regardless that another man had kissed her and whispered her name in a tone that too many people have been carrying around blithely. This is what children do: she took her jeans off and left them in a heap on the floor. She climbed into bed in the blouse she’d been wearing all day, and her underwear. She slept.

Later—she did not know when exactly, only that the room was still illumined only by the fluorescents—she woke up. Woke up for just a few moments, the world blurred at the edges, more memory than actual experience. She saw Tom walking into the room, and she saw him in one of his gray shirts, and she saw him look at her form on the rumpled bed. And she didn’t understand that look, couldn’t. She slept.

She woke up during the night a few more times, with the same listlessness as she had before, the momentary snatches of how the world—how Tom—moved on as she lay sleeping. Saw Tom in front of the desktop. Saw Tom climbing into bed. Saw Tom’s back turned away from her. And when she reached over to pull him back that his heat may press against hers, she felt him resist. She drew her hand back, let it fall to the bedspread. She was curled up behind him, not touching him. Her last thought before she finally succumbed to a deep sleep was that if anyone leaned over them, some divinity, some brownnoser from above, they would look to be in pursuit: him steadfastly distancing himself, her in flight. It was her last whimsy of the day.

*

Give me something to write about.

I usually burn through a notebook in two months, but this time, I was writing in two simultaneously, and a couple of days ago, the pages of the last one just ran out. Poof. The last two notebooks are square-ruled Moleskines — yes, they look like Math notebooks, get over it. Anyhoo, I started writing on one about mid-February, stopped a while to go to the other, returned to the first on the last days of March, stopped, didn’t return to it for a really long time, went back May-June-ish, hopped and skipped and juggled.

The notebooks have, I guess, a record number of false starts for stories, and some daydreams/fantasies because I’m O.C.-creepy that way. Here are a couple of G-rated excerpts from the two notebooks, and I’ve kept the mushy stuff to a minimum. Maybe. I dunno.

So. Indulge me.

*

FEBRUARY

* Descartes: the evil genius. Malevolent deity. He’s like Christian God, but completely evil, yo. Could the evil genius fool one into doubting his own existence? Wasak. But, but, but: manifesting this doubt—just having it, actually proves you’re a thinking and questioning being, a being. You’re real, man. YOU’RE REAL. (I want to go home.)

* Thesis defense over. Knees shaking. I think I came off as a cold bitch. Damn it.

* J. W. von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther: “Oh, what a creature is Man, that he may bewail himself.”

* Writer’s Festival:

- Fiction marginalized? Mas gusto ba ng tao ang mga tula kasi mas maikli? LABO MO, BOSS. And and and, if the Greats don’t recognize you, you’re not a writer? Cynic. And why isn’t there a forum on Filipino romance novels? To use a grade school syana term: snobbish, haha. In denial ba ang mga tao?

- How is this international? Why are there so few people—w ala bang nagbabasa? Why isn’t there an antho of the 40 under 40 people? Why am I wearing these shoes, my feet hurt, god there’s nothing to eat (that I can afford).

- Mogwai, Cubao Ex. Sasha Martinez is back in high school, One Tree Hill style. Think about writing a treatise: Crash Course on Polite Conversations, from an episode of OTH (from a line in a song?) I am such a girl.

* Larry: “A battle between ‘I want to write a story’ and ‘But this is a poetry class.’

* Reading The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard. Sometimes, she talks out of her ass. Sometimes she makes sense. But even when she makes sense, she sounds like she’s talking out of her ass.

*

MARCH

* … pretended to be absorbed in a book (one out of three I brought along with me — I prepare for props for convincing sought-for solitude.) …We try so hard to pretend that we welcome this solitude; we arm ourselves with objects to keep us company. What use Kafka, Camus? You need a storybook date.

* Too many people tell us how to love. And the fictionist can’t get a word in.

* Banish words like “juxtaposition” and “entropy” from conversations.

* From Camus: “Why do I need to write or create, to love or suffer?”

- “To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.”

* KILL THE DOMESTIC. SICK AND TIRED OF LISTLESS WOMEN AND THEIR VOLATILE LIVES. TIME TO GET OUT OF THE ROOM, BITCHES.

* Requiring a state of inebriation to be able to humor the possibility of loving him. Shouldn’t that tell you something?

* Revolutionary Road: “People don’t forget about the truth — people just learn to lie better.” Shit.

* “…speech is not a secure possession.” – Heidegger.

*

APRIL

* “The status is quo.”

* When did I start believing that a pen falling to the ground would mean its ink would cease to flow smooth? When I began noticing that whenever a pen fell to the ground (always by accident, of course) the print looks like this.

- Curious: the grim finality of the pen’s clatter. Clack! — Oh no, oh shit. And the foreboding that kicks in when I bend to retrieve it. No matter how grim (perhaps grimness intensified), why couldn’t life be as predictable, with its concrete omens?

* I wanna make out.

* YOU WANT ME TO WRITE A SUMMARY?

* The Plinkies should have a Short Story Collection category. But does this mean you’ll have to do a book report on your own collection? Guh.

* He (Caucasian) is wearing slippers with shorts. She (Filipino) cannot help but notice how pale his feet are, how pink his ankles, how fine the hair spattered on his legs.

* Soft-boiled eggs give me the heebie-jeebies. Anything that falls short of its intended design, and settles for placid gelatinousness deserves to be slid glooped down the drain.

* When people under 30 (and God forbid, under 20) assert what they think, what they want to do, what they plan on doing, they’re projecting. When people over 30 do it, they’re speaking with the wisdom of their age. Fuck it.

*

MAY

* Who I wanted to marry when I was in grade school: Michael Bolton, Shawn Michaels, and Robert Downey Jr. A taste of things to come, yes?

* Woman daydreams about seeing husband with another woman. Giddy at such morbidity. Displacement. Much easier to handle a scene instead of the slow erosion of loving. Things are always far easier with scapegoats.

* Sneaking up on a story to write it.

* Couple beside me. Woman asks, “If you were given a free ticket to anywhere in Asia, where would you choose to go?” Man says, “Mainland China.” And she utters a disappointed “Oh.” They leave soon after.

* What the fuck does “carnal whistling” mean?

* I am not a writer who consoles. Dear Reader: the world’s full of shit, deal with it.

JUNE

* Shortening Happy Mondays to HaMon is funny.

* Maybe I’m just predisposed to boredom, moreso with the desperation of the lengths I go to that I can rid of it. When I didn’t know any better – when I knew less – I chose to call it ennui, because it sounds nicer (thank you, Dorian Gray). But you and I know that just because it sounds nice, it doesn’t mean it’ll feel nicer.

* He tells me I’m praning. What he really wants to say, “Relax, bitch.”

* I am so glad a majority of my friends don’t squirm when I hug them.

* “You outgrew it.” He was talking about love, but I guess it applies to many things. Like pants.

* The scientific name of the Telmatobius Frog means aquatic scrotum.

* I have not written in so long, I feel like my blood has thinned. Jaysus.

* Dear universe, thou art a heartless bitch.

* * *

I suppose I should put something here about the sentiments and reason behind keeping a notebook, and why I’ve kept a notebook for a long-ass time now. But that’s not how I roll.

Oh. And many thanks to K. for sponsoring the newest Moley I defile with my inanities. :) Nadaan sa pa-cute, buwahaha.

1 – Are novels in the Philippines — those written in English, in particular — allowed to be insular? More inward? Although I’m not saying that I’ve noticed that everything has to be social realist in bent, I am saying that there’s just the pervading feel that, well, if you’re going realist, and you’re writing in a language that could reach beyond the shores (not to mention beyond the circle of friends who happen to be mandatory readers of whatever one publishes), you have to make it count. And to make it count, one must at least have the smallest commentary on the current Philippine (economic, social, cultural) condition. Parang may false (?) sense of responsibility that, well, since you’re writing anyway, gawin mo nang makabuluhan. Makabuluhan, Jaysus. Talk about OFWs, talk about orchards and talking Taglish in cafes, talk about C5 and Hayden Kho. Again, I know you’re not required to go all propaganda on their asses, but, well, how many novels have hazarded to talk about a family, and just a family, never leaving the walls of their home? Or maybe a venture here and there to the small town surrounding it, but never never giving more than a passing glance to the (campaign) billboards dotting the roads, the grimy children asking for coins, the, I dunno, dynamics of sustaining peace and amicability in a, uh, interracial household. Pretty closed-in on itself naman, you may think — but people out there can make it work. Is this too lazy for the Filipino novelist?

Also, there’s the matter of our history. Damn but we’re overflowing with the potential for grand epics, not to mention period pieces and historical fiction. You want blondes clogs in your novel? Go back Pre-Spanish era, when we made besos with the Dutch during trade. Want another hack at Noli and El Fili? By all means, go ahead. Go Yank, as well — have a GI fall madly in love with your usual camisa-clad labandera. And then there’s the Japanese Occupation, which I’m partial to. Or put them all together and have your own saga.

Is it because we have too much compelling material around us na at the height of self-absorption if we lock ourselves in a house for the entire duration of the novel?

And even though I believe that whatever commentary you have, it’ll inevitably seep out from scenes and characters — say, a thirty-something plain-looking woman in a government-issue clerk uniform, coming home from work, removing her patent leather stilettos as she goes; say, a happy little boy waiting in front of his house for his dad, watching the grunts and roars of tricycles passing by — there’s no need for force, dude. Madadaan naman sa usapan. Natural na mangyayari yun — if it has to do with your character, then it’s going to be skimmed upon, however teasingly.

2 – Why do Happily Ever Afters have such a bad rep? Is it, “If you’re going realist, make it hurt.” Hay. At the risk of sounding emo (and therefore confirming all the suspicions), I’ve been making everything hurt for too long, and (oh god, yuck) getting hurt in the process. Dude, it’s draining to write about the fucking human condition — mostly why I hate writing in the First Person POV in my fiction, since, man, I can get pretty schizophrenic and start mirroring the moods of betrayed wives and grieving adolescents. Hell.

Nothing beats the feeling when you sit back from the laptop/PC/notebook and you know you’ve done something so good, so hurting, it terrifies you. But then again, I’d also like the feeling of weaving a tale of boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl have raunchy Happy Times, boy and girl have Big Misunderstanding, boy and girl inevitably and irrevocably get back together after pages of grovelling. I don’t think it’s making readers feel good, as much as it’s making me feel good. Yes, writing is self-serving that way. But, you know.

3 – The death of such small things. The dynamics of grief, and grief by association, and being needed, and stepping back because so few people want to admit that they need someone, and being pissed as hell because you can’t grieve properly, you’re not allowed to be needed.

That’s it for now. Brainfart.

Oh hai internetz. Some of you kind people may have noticed that, for the past couple of days, I haven’t been posting as rabidly as I used to. Well, it’s primarily because I have rediscovered life now. Screw that chick (methinks it was Annie Dillard, but Google-fu is wonky right now though) who said, “The writer does not need to concern himself with the world.” Because, dude, screw that. The only reason anyone ever writes is because of the world – either it fucked him up good, or it just fucked him hella good (to continue on the same crass vein; apologies to relatives who may be reading this).

I have discovered that in my newly rediscovered life – a resurrection really; long periods of existential dread have a deplorable, albeit predictable, habit of sucking the life out of you – there’s not much internet access to go around. Yeah, I’m stuck in a cave for the better part of the day, but it’s with a person I haven’t seen in a long time and miss so terribly that everything’s got this new feel to it (kind of like how one’s ass feels against upholstery that’s still static-y from the plastic wrapping).

Also, I’m actually going out. And not just to take a walk in our dismal neighborhood park with the children. I am going out and talking to people that aren’t half my size, people who won’t back down from an argument because you offer them candy. But well, never mind that my FB Scrabble rating has gone down because people have gone on a Force Forfeiting Rampage in my absence, never mind that my Plurk karma’s down – hell, never mind that my SSM pledge has been experiencing a setback in schedule. I’m actually trying to act like a normal person. And any semblance of normalcy is something I’ve been oh-so-desperately yearning for.

But enough melodrama. So. What have I been up to? Before anything else, notice the absence of the SSM logo in this post – this is more of a Sasha Update than anything else, really. But this doesn’t mean I won’t be tossing in thoughts on a short story, or on writing for that matter. Because I dovetail that way. I’m still reading, yes, yes, I am. I’m also still trying to write, which is a real sissy way of saying that I’m not doing writing at all, just thinking about writing, and we all know that doesn’t count, not really. What else, what else?

At times like this, the OC in me hankers for a list, and I’m not one to deprive the OC in me.

1 – Monday afternoon I went back to Katipunan after a very, very, very long time. Yes, three weeks is a long time. You, Constant Reader, should know that a lot can happen in three weeks. (I apologize for the obvious Stephen King phrase there – I’ve reread his “memoir of the craft,” On Writing, and the “Constant Readers” just jump all over the place.) So. I went back to Katipunan, because you know, like a One Tree Hill Season 1 episode title says: Sometimes you gotta go there to come back. And I went there. And I’m here. And I’ve come back. And I reiterate that static-y ass metaphor I used earlier.

2 – Tuesday night, after hours of procrastinating and some fascinating mindnomnom about bees, and polar bears, P. and I went to Gateway to get some Trekker action. Man. Don’t get me started on Spock. Okay, too late. Brace yourself. Or skip this item, because I’ve already blabbed about it in Facebook and Plurk. So. Spock. Spock Spock Spock Spock. Oh honey. As I’ve said in many a public platform, Spock (as played by Zachary Quinto – this is important, man), honey, you can do that finger-to-face thing to me any freaking time you want to, bebehh. As I ranted to an FB contact, “It’s all there. The bao haircut. The uniform. The ears. That bulbous nose. Winona Ryder as MILF. The goddamn angst of being a un-belonging half-breed. His insistence on logic and stoicism when we all know there *so* was tongue in that kiss. He’s the bruised little boy in the playground we all wanna hug, more so because he refuses to cry — he‘‘s the man in uniform with a deplorable but it-grows-on-you haircut that we wanna get seriously FREAKY with.” And yeah. Long live and prosper. To which Wappy and I say, “Popcorn, dude, popcorn.”

3 – Also, Tuesday night was spent with friends. Dearly missed friends. Yes, I am aware that the phrasing in that last sentence made them seem dead, but, yeah, guh. We talked, mehn, we talked. And there was a creaking in my brain that I first mistook as the beginnings of a migraine – but it was really just the sound of a creaky organ waking up again after weeks of gleeful hibernation. Oh, and there are no words for how much I missed them people. And I won’t attempt, because they’re all real men where they come from, and they squirm like the good little boys they are when I try to tell them how much I luuuurve them.

4 – In relation to Tuesday night / wee hours of Wednesday morning: the books I borrowed from Kael. Nothing makes me giddier than raiding your room and going straight to your bookshelf. Or in this case, huge striped sando bags of books. I unearthed about seven, seven very pretty books, and I’m currently planting the seeds of a BFF-ness with said owner of books so when I say Pretty please, he’ll give them to me. Hi, Kael. It’s me, Sasha, your soon-to-be BFF. You know, like, yeah, well, with the imbecilic taxation of books some nincompoop at Customs/DOF invented (I will start on this at a later time, when I’m not so happy because fuck it, this is a backwards-ass country we live in), it’s nice to get new books. Ah, new books.

I’ll try not to bore you any more than I already have by bringing out the kilometric list of add-ons to my TBR Mountain Range. But I must say something about this whole rereading business I’ve been on lately. When I left United, I brought with me Tracy Thompson’s The Beast: A Journey Through Depression – since it helped me enough at seventeen, and there’s no harm in rereading it with a wiser (naks) and hopefully less-impressionable mind – am also putting my pen to it, scribbling on the margins, because dude, nothing is sacred anymore. I’m rereading Thompson, because I need to. It’s one of the best memoirs on the illness I’ve ever read – much, much better than Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation – funny how all the critics raved about it, which makes me suspect that none of them have actually been depressed. Anyway, I might have to talk about depression-memoirs later on. I’ve got a slew of them on my third shelf, right beside the Phil. Lit. and the Canon. (If you wonder, The Beast was wedged between Von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Charlson Ong’s Conversion and Other Fictions.)

I’ve reread King, because it’s nice to go back to the things you missed because the security guard was roaming the hall, and you’ve been on that seat with that same un-bought book for about five hours. Anyway, with King, I’ve found that I disagree with more things this time around than when I first read the book on the sly over at NBS about four years ago. And I’ve also become a more vehement champion-er of some of the things he says. I won’t bore you with those things either, because I have a feeling you’ll hear enough of them in the upcoming blog entries.

That said, abangan ang susunod na kabanata.

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