While I was cleaning files in my old computer, I found this. It was supposed to be a multiply journal entry but I figured it could pass for creative pretentiousness. So I tweaked it a bit. Fixed some metaphors. And then FORGET how the metaphors work. Hahaha! I hope I could remember it again though. Anyhow, here it is, grammar not yet edited (will make a statement about my being anti-grammar-yet-I-want-my-friends-to-edit-mine in my multiply, I think I did already, but it’s probably better to just update the statement than do a possible futile search).
——————————
I didn’t want to bring a camera. I wanted to see if I could capture life when it all fades into memory. And as my fingers try to find the right keyboard keys, I fear I am too incapable of painting a picture, or those moments were simply too light to catch and press down with the supposed right keys.
I digress, of course, for I don’t know where to start.
Do I start with this place, or that? Do I describe the smell of cold air doused with books, or that drop of sweat trickling behind his ear before we stepped on the bus? We joined the line at the bus stop. We just needed to get out of the city, we decided. The line snaked around the posts, walls, and corners drivers pee on. We joined the line that heard the startled scream of the woman. We joined the line that gawked at the woman on the opposite side of the road. We watched from the line as a small crowd of bulky men approached her. She was complaining, we knew. She was robbed, we knew. The bulky men wouldn’t do anything, we knew. We joined the line that talked about the woman complaining, robbed, and nobody could do anything about it. The bus came. The line hurried. He held me again. He wrapped his hand around my wrist. Protecting my shiny watch, he told me. We were almost pushed into the bus. He let go of my wrist. The cold air doused our shiny faces.
Do I start with the way we didn’t hold each other’s hands?—that electrifying space between us in that walk into suspended time, those tiny hair on my right arm, prickling, calling out for his? My watch read twenty past ten. I shoved my hands in my pockets. I was supposed to meet him twenty minutes earlier.
Twenty minutes earlier, I counted every step I took going down the creaky escalator—the one we had always joked were operated by moaning slave elves. I overtook the perfume-showered man, who tried to overtake me back at the train’s sliding doors. I passed by the coffee shop screaming out its help for its coffee bean farmers—every cup you buy, you save a life. I passed by the floral dresses of anorexic mannequins. I passed by the ma’am-sir calls of women and men, powered up in their business suits, holding out flyers of the yet built high-rise condo. I passed by the androgynous guard powered up by a sound-emitting stick—tooooot.
I kept my eyes firmly on the ground. I rode another escalator ran by elves, wondered about overrated germs on its railings. The lights flicker bright in the bookstore, continuously flowing through door to door, even reaching the asphalt pavements outside the doors. I passed by one bookshelf over another. It still seems like it’s Christmas, I thought. The lights danced over the pen and pencils, the greeting cards and file cases. I wondered if it would dance and bounce over my hair. It’ll be like a freaking commercial, I thought. And there he would be, standing as always, on the same floor, reading beside the same bookshelf. And I would smile, and he would smile, hold my hand and say, where do you want to go?
But not that day, of course. Not on the day that I finally could answer him with the truth—anywhere, I would have said. Anywhere, if he would have asked.
Do I start with myself? Do I start by being not there? After the long day, the long anticipation, the long line, the long bus ride, the long hours I was aware I was not holding his hand, the long weeks, stretched into months, stretched into the ignorance of time, I would go home and take a cold shower. I scrubbed and I scrubbed and I scrubbed. But dear god, nothing. These thoughts would buzz and play, swimming around in my head—before I let cold water wake me up in the shower. My thoughts would freeze, curl themselves into fetal positions, until they spiral into themselves, until gone.
And I would think, finally. Finally, simple as that. Simple only if I’m still in the shower. Simple only if my thoughts would not flash back like a flickering cursor on the screen, determined to buzz, play and swim in my head. Determined to evade the right keyboard keys, determined not to be put down, determined to come back just when I thought life had faded.
I digress, of course, for I deny the moments were too light.
