Forever

Recently I bought myself an eternity ring, a ring with round cut diamonds set in prongs all around a white gold band. An eternity ring is supposed to be an anniversary ring, given by a significant other, but I decided to break the rules and purchase one for myself, without having to wait for an anniversary. A girl should be able to buy diamonds any day she wants.

Here it is, my eternity ring, in a photo taken by my friend and officemate Ricky Pineda.


It has a total of about 1.20 carats, spread across twenty plus diamonds, encircling the middle finger of my left hand.

Diamonds, as the De Beers ad has been saying for ages, are forever. They are formed deep beneath the earth's surface, out of pure carbon that has been placed under pressure and intense heat for millions of years, creating gems that can cut just about anything. However, a diamond gains beauty only when it is cut by an expert, so that a round cut diamond's facets will show glimmering hearts in a circle when viewed from underneath, and arrows when viewed from above. It looks fragile, but it isn't. And deep in its depths, one can see one's fate. Hearts and arrows. Cutting and cleaving. Such are the surprising coincidences that mark this chaotic universe.

And such are the symbols that help us cope.

Now here’s my own pledge to myself, as I give myself this ring. I pledge to forever surround myself with beautiful things, and to find beauty in as many things as I can. I pledge to keep myself from hurt, and to not cause hurt in others. I pledge to treat myself well and to always be faithful to the things I hold true. And I promise to keep believing in love, and that it never destroys, only saves, beyond sickness and health, beyond life and death.

Bloom

You have kissed me a thousand times, yet every single kiss attains the potency of myth, even when its meaning should have dissipated into the thousand.

Happy Valentine's Day, my love.

After the insanity comes more

After the insanity of this year's NaNoWriMo, my mind has now quieted a little, and the dust has started to settle, and I can look out of my window to the world outside. Before doing the revisions, I will live a little, go out a little, call friends a little, send letters a little, watch movies a little. But I know that I shall always go back to the word processor, because that is what my heart always tells me to do.

Such is my life as a writer. It is measured not so much in terms of weeks, days, and months as in number of pages written, number of people met, found, and lost, letters mailed, number of movies watched and books read. Some things take center stage in my memory, some get relegated to the dusty cellars of heart and mind, some waver in the distance like a mirage, while some are entirely forgotten for some reason or other. This way, time not so much tick-tocks with such numbing regularity as trickles down and gushes forth in a highly irregular, plodding manner, now fast and now slow, now with such intense force and now with remarkable insipidity, depending upon the richness of the days and the kind of catharsis or neurosis that delving into the deepest darkest depths of humanity brings, as time, inevitably, moves on.


Deeper and deeper shall I go into my writing, finding things good and bad, subtle and blatant, awful and profound. I grow more and more confused, yet more and more enlightened. In my mind, thoughts and ideas and memories fly about like gnats over horse dung, careening towards each other and ricocheting off, canceling each other out and multiplying. I dig my heels in, hold my hands out for a handhold, and find nothing and everything.

November is my new favorite month

Seven hundred and twenty hours. Fifty thousand words. Chaos. Determination. Self-immolation. All for love.

The two October thirteens

Two men born on the same day but years apart. Two men who had both undergone heart bypass surgery by the same doctor. Two men from the same biological source, but had gone different ways. One became a lawyer, one became a farmer. One married late, one married early. One is boisterous and loud, one is silent and keeps to himself. One is dark-skinned, one is fair-skinned. One had a mustache, one had none. One is severely myopic, one is not. One has a full head of hair, one began to grow bald when he approached middle age. One is skinny, one is chubby. One is my own father, my "Da," and one is the symbolic father of our family, Papa Herbie.

One died and is now ashes in an urn, the other has continued living and now has hair that had turned completely white. The tragic news of the death travelled via cellphone and landline from the hospital in Albay to the aunts and the uncles and the cousins. And after the words, "Papa Herbie is gone," none ever followed except the sound of crying from both ends of the line. I myself got the news from my own father via cellphone as I was entering my apartment after having breakfast, and after that statement, we both cried and said nothing else. I held on to the edge of the table by the door and somehow was able to reach the bed, and there I stayed until mid-afternoon. The nine other children of my grandparents called each other not to say any words but just to hear each other cry, and that was how they coped on the first day.

I prepared a eulogy for Papa Herbie during his memorial before his cremation, and in his memory, I post it here.

Four years ago, I almost lost my own father. I was in Dumaguete at that time, and I didn't quite know how to handle it. My father is okay, but now a father figure has died, and although I am four years older, I still don't know how to handle it.

For how do we really move on after a pillar in the family has died? We will never be the same again.

Papa Herbie, to me, and I'm sure to all my 46 cousins, loomed so large in our lives that it is impossible to imagine this family without a Papa Herbie. He was our Santa Claus, our big fat teller of funny stories, the one who had fathered four of my best-loved cousins, the irascible uncle who got drunk one night and drove an owner-type jeep off a pier in Tigaon. The jeep lived a long and useful life after that incident, and fortunately, so had Papa Herbie.

I knew so little about him, just like the little that I know of my own father, these two men who share the same birthday. But I also know so little of Lolo Berting, but he has always lived in the family long after he passed away. It is a credit to our elders how we have all formed the habit of keeping him in our hearts.

My father called me just half an hour ago while I was outside and the choir was singing. He asked me who was singing, I told him it was thechoir. He asked me the name of the choir, I said I didn't know. Normal chitchat for us. He was crying when he called me Friday morning, just after Papa Herbie died, but now, he sounded okay.

We will be okay. How could we not be, after having lived most of our lives basking under Papa Herbie's reliability? And Papa Herbie, like Lolo Berting, will live on in our hearts with the power of legend, with the potency of myth, looming still ever-large in our hearts, just like always, never changing, never gone.

Ever since Papa Herbie died, whenever I or anyone from my family greets Da a Happy Birthday on October 13, there is always a short, very subtle pause afterwards, where we all feel our hearts stopping very briefly, and we all remember where we were and what we were doing when the call came to tell us that Papa Herbie had died. I don't think anyone will ever forget. Now, years after, every October 13, after greeting Da, we whisper another greeting into the air. And in this way, there will always be two October thirteens.

Lost loves

One afternoon, as I was browsing through the digital archives of the Moll family's photographs, spanning the 1920's and onwards, I came upon these two photographs of a pretty young lady. The photos are inscribed at the back. I have a hunch who "Dearest" is, but that will remain a family secret.


I was much moved by my find. I don't know who she is, really. I have never heard anyone talk about her while I was growing up, and I don't know her real name. I saw her in some other photos of groups, at soirees, wearing tea-length party dresses made of taffeta or lace, the women sitting together in a row, their knees and feet close together and poised at a practiced slant, as if choreographed. I never asked anyone who she was the first time I saw the albums as a young child. But as I looked at the photos in 2004, when I had gotten older, instantly, I knew the importance of this woman's presence in the group photographs. Instantly I knew how she felt, writing at the back of these two photos, perhaps kissing the envelopes before sending them off. Instantly, too, I knew how she felt, being away from her Dearest. And instantly, I knew how she felt when she realized that it was over.

I've had my own share of heartbreaks. I began to see images of myself in various ages in the later photos, and I look quite strange to myself. It was as if I was looking at an entirely different person. Even now, when I try to remember myself as I was a few years ago, I feel detached from that person, that woman tying up her waist-length hair into a bun, packing up the laundry to drop off to the laundromat, driving herself to Bicol while listening to the Electric Light Orchestra on her iPod, and suddenly bursting into tears for no reason. It was as if I were someone standing at a corner, watching myself, myself as "that" woman living through her years. That woman could very well have inscribed photographs of herself to her beloved, and then lost him, lost him to time, to distance, to differing interests, to growing older, to destiny.

I scanned all of these family photographs one summer in 2004 after finding out that Bita's albums, the ones that were made with black pages and required photo corners to attach the photos, were falling apart, and the photos themselves have started to fade. A few have been partly eaten up by silverfish. Several had begun to turn silver at the edges, the silver nitrate used for developing photos decades ago rising up to the surface now, as if from death to life.

The actual photographs are now permanently stored in a large box, meticulously arranged with sheets and sheets of acid-free paper, in a sealed wooden box lined with a UV protectant material. In a while, they will go into a fire-proof safe. After almost one hundred years of being looked at, of providing remembrances, of showing now-deceased people as they were when they were happy and alive, of showing now-widowed people as they were when they were still in their beloved's arms, of showing weddings and funerals and christenings and graduations and birthday parties, they have ended up in my hands because I had the time and the yearning to scan them in hi-res on the summer of 2004.

My fingerprints would be the very last imprint these photographs will carry, and these photographs will nevermore see the light of day. Lost loves have been beheld once more, if only in photographs, and shall be lost once more, sealed from the present, but never from our memories. Lost, but not lost -- simply rising to the surface once every hundred years or so, always alive, always aflame in sepia, the color of secrets and regret.

Nonsense!

As I was retrieving some of my old UP files (recorded into cds from 2002 onwards) and copying them back into my larger hard drive, I browsed through the folders and found a poem I wrote for a Poetry Workshop Course I've enrolled in during the second semester of Academic Year 2004, under Professor Paolo Manalo of Jolography fame.

Our assignment was to write a nonsense poem, and I thought of creating one made up entirely of single-syllable words. Here's what I came up with:

THE PIG AND THE LEAF
By Maryanne Moll

In the gut of a pig lived a leaf,
Which,
when it turned eight,
Called its own ear and told it to make lunch.

'Tis this leaf that turned to a pen when it was twelve,
And then to stone.

The pig,
Poor thing,
Kept its own gut right on track by the words of its king.
“All hail the green thing that can turn itself into one thing and then some,
For it knows the life of gnats.”

The sty stank of pears,
And of airs,
And of hay,
And of clay.
The mind of the gut of the pig roiled
In mad ayes
To the words of its king.

And then,
One day,
This pig,
Just like the leaf that lived in its gut,
Turned eight,
With a mind to call its own ear to make lunch.
And then it was twelve,
And then it was a pen.

And then,
It was stone.

As I was reading the poem aloud in class, I noticed that, line by line, the poem began to make some kind of sense to me, and at the very end, it seemed to be telling me something of grave importance. Everyone else in the class felt the same way. I also felt the same way about the poems of my classmates. It was rather surreal, but I suppose you had to be there to understand the feeling. And now I wonder, are we just making our lives too difficult by always trying to make sense? Does every single detail in life always have to work together neatly and precisely, like a clock that never needs winding? Can we, even for just a few days a year, just let go of our standards and our labels and our Derridas and our Althussers and our Nietzches and our Kants and our de Saussures and our Spivaks and our Foucaults? Or are we, being humans and thus cursed, forever doomed to be constantly mired in the search for order?

Sometimes it tires me, I admit, to always have to know why and how things work. These days, I'm just not in that mood. I watch vampire movies and find them funny. I watch ghost movies and find them comforting. I watch documentaries about conspiracy theories and then close my eyes and try to merge them all together inside my mind to create a large, icky mass, somewhat like a hairball, and find relief that I still know what time to get up in the morning. I eat ice cream for breakfast, five peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and finish off an entire 1.5 liter bottle of C2 iced tea after siesta. And then I write new stories. And I notice that my new stories are getting quite better. I don't write like I used to anymore, but now I also have the gumption to own up to the things that I didn't have the gumption to even face before. Chaos is good. Nonsense is good. Zoloft is good.

Year One with Jim, in photos

It all began with a teeny tiny pink 4 gigabyte flash drive with a silver chain that made the flash drive look like a charm, and a cup of hot chocolate at four o'clock in the afternoon. Seven hours later, we were still together and talking, and I could sense that both of us were trying to find a way for the night not to end.

Of course the night had to end and it did end. But what followed is something that went on and on. Here are some photos from what we have been through for the past twelve months, all taken with the iPhone he gave me as a gift.

We did a major redecoration of our apartment, the College of Chaos. From a very cluttered, highly disorganized apartment for one person and thousands of books and files, we turned it into a nice and cozy and orderly living space for two. However, witness the chaos of redecorating the College of Chaos.

From this: The four feet worth of unfiled files, the furniture that have been turned into things for holding books and files, the audio and video cds, the cd archives, the dead files that have to go to storage, the old bookcase I've had since 1998 that was already breaking apart from the weight of all the junk I had it carry over the years, and the basic mass of materials that always seem to gather in a writer's home. And if you're a writer like me, who never throws anything away, then you'll understand how big a logistical problem I've been having for years.

Jim and I went from that chaos to this:










I love this new area rug that's beside our bed. And I simply adore that green lamp that I have been wanting to own since I was a teenager, because the green glass shade and the tall brass stand and pull-down chain switch evokes in me the feeling of being in an old library. As for the bookshelves, I have so many books that I can't arrange them in the shelves any other way. Some books had to be laid on top of the upright books. There are even books behind the ones that are stored upright. And each time I remember how Jim had assembled that computer table in the first photo, I always laugh a little at the memory of the sight of him on the floor, trying to figure out which were the #14 screws, which were the #8 screws, which was platform 3, which nut goes with which screw and onto what hole in which metal post, and on and on. He kept saying, "This is so bad."

And just as we were about to collapse out of sheer exhaustion after turning the College of (Literal) Chaos into the College of Chaos (Theory) -- which I have been studying secretly for over a decade now -- a good friend from PhilMUG turned up with two tickets to the March 15 Harry Connick, Jr. Big Band Concert, and he gave us these premier tickets for free. Imagine that!

I found the concert wonderful. I love big bands, and for a bit of time, a few years ago, Glen Miller was set up to play continuously for days on my iTunes while I was working on a particularly annoying small project. Jim himself isn't really a big fan of big bands and the blues, but about fifteen minutes into the show, I could see he was starting to get mesmerized. It was a fun night of music, good-natured and self-deprecating humor from the star of the show, talk about halo-halo, and balut-throwing exercises by some of the band members.


And then there were the travels to several different provinces. A sunset flight:


A hotel room:


Another hotel room:


Yet another hotel room:


And yet another hotel room:


Me in a mirror inside yet another hotel room, whiling away my time while Jim was doing his fieldwork:


Puerto Princesa:


Somewhere in Clark:


Palm Beach Resort, Laguna:


Eagle Point Resort, Laguna:


Rockpoint Hot Springs Resort, Laguna


Saud Beach Resort, Pagudpud:


This was the bus we rode to Saud, which I thought wasn't running and was due for the junkyard:


This was the "bus terminal:"


Of course neither of us dared to sit on this chair:


We always travel with these two bags, my small brown trolley and Jim's blue overnight carry-all. The black one is Jim's laptop bag. I almost never bring my MacBook Pro during our trips because I take advantage of the trip to catch up on my reading and journaling and the writing of first drafts of stories by hand on pads of legal paper.




I carry the larger luggage because I'm the one who's always tasked to carry the flat iron and the toiletries, and of course my usual stash of Moleskines and books and legal pads and fountain pen ink.


And then there were the lunches, the dates, the movie-watching in cinemas and at home, the window-shopping for the things we like, the drives we took just for the heck of it, the walks in malls and the attending of launches related to the Macintosh, the online chats, the email exchanges, the surfing through YouTube for old music videos of the Electric Light Orchestra, the tequila nights, the vodka nights, the champagne nights. It was a wonderful Year One. We've been through so much, and the first year seemed like ten years and it felt as if we have been to the moon and back, and from the beginning of time and back. We have been through the Crusades, we have witnessed the Spanish Inquisition, live through the Great Depression, and survived the bubonic plague and most everything in between. But through all these, we are still together, and we have found the best place to be. Home. The College of Chaos.

From Pasay with love

I woke up late in the morning of my birthday and saw a huge box waiting for me on top of the dining room table in my mother's house in Naga. When I opened it, voila!


Nothing like two dozen bright red American roses and a wonderful card from the man in my life to add to my birthday cheer. He wasn't there that day, though, but he came over for a visit the very next week and met my family.

I admit I am horribly late in updating this blog, but my hands have been full with changes and people and ideas and words, and my plate has never been even part empty. But I am coping. I am writing stories again, and I have filled in my blog with one post for every missing month, and have found a way to shorten the sidebar, which many people have already complained about before. See? I'm dealing with things now, little by little, one day at a time, and I'm grateful for every chance that I get to write and finish a piece.

Rest assured that I'm okay, and that with the love I'm receiving from all of you, from Pasay to Makati to Camp Crame to Quezon City to Naga to California to Canada to New York to London, through all the channels open to us, I'll be back again with happy updates. Please feel free to visit my archives, reminisce with some of the posts, and remember who I was then. Because somehow, at some point in time, that person has become no longer. Here I am. This is me now.

Light

Midnight beckons with perfect complacency, knowing it is hours away from daylight. Together we heed the call with mist in our breath, and as you engulf me in such silvery darkness that borders on illegitimate light, I clench my teeth lest my soul fly away.

[Image Credit]