Love affair with love letters.

Ottawa, April 6, 1955

My dear,
aaaTime is short. Dr. Shortcliffe says it will be a matter of days, doesn't he? This is not, of course, what he tells me, but what I overheard him saying to you last night, whispering in the corridor, after I was moved to the General. My hearing has remained oddly acute.
aaaMy mind, while less acute, is at ease about financial resources for you and for the children. The house, of course, is secured--for I feel sure you would be reluctant to leave familiar surroundings, particularly your garden--and there are sufficient funds as you know for the children's education.
aaaBut you will want money for travel--why is it we have not traveled, you and I?--and for small luxuries, and it has occurred to me that you might wish to offer for sale my lady's-slipper collection. I am certain it will bring a good price... I expect you will sigh as you read this suggestion, since I know well that Cypripedium is not a genus you admire, particularly the species reginae and acaule. You will remember how we quarreled--our only quarrel as far as I can recall--over the repugnance you felt for the lady's-slipper morphology, its long, gloomy (as you claimed) stem and pouch-shaped lip which you declared to be grotesque. I pointed out, not that I needed to, the lip's functional cunning, that an insect might enter therein easily but escape only with difficulty. Well, so our discussions have run over these many years, my pedagogical voice pressing heavily on all that was light and fanciful. I sigh, myself, setting these words down, mourning the waste of words that passed between us, and the thought of what we might have addressed had we been more forthright--did you ever feel this, my love, my marginal discourse and what it must have displaced?
aaaThe memory of our "lady's-slippers" discussions has, of course, led me into wondering whether you perhaps viewed our marriage in a similar way, as a trap from which there was no easy exit. Between us we have almost never mentioned the word love. I have sometimes wondered whether it was the disparity of our ages that made the word seem foolish, or else something stiff and shy in our natures that forbade its utterance. This I regret. I would like to think that our children will use the word extravagantly, and moreover that they will be open to its forces.
aaaDo you remember the day last October when I experienced my first terrible headache? I found you in the kitchen wearing one of those new and dreadful plastic aprons. You put your arms around me at once and reached up to smooth my temples. I loved you terribly at that moment. The crackling of your apron against my body seemed like an operatic response to the longings which even then I felt. It was like something whispering at us to hurry, to stop wasting time, and I would like to have danced with you through the back door, out into the garden, down the street, over the line of the horizon. Oh, my dear. I thought we would have more time.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaYour loving
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaBarker

From Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries.

Yes, waiting sucks.

First.
Yes, yes, I have come to the conclusion that I haven't completely gone off my rocker when I decided to ask, "Why wait?" Waiting sucks. And yes, I didn't go about the waiting, nor the ending of the waiting in the best possible way, but that's really all I can find myself to be sorry for. Because now, I hope I'm on my way to where I really want to be, instead of waiting (there's that word again) around for some good samaritan to give me a free ride. Here's to being a student again. Go me!

Second.
One of the things that drove me crazy while I was in Manila, was that my sister had had all my books shipped back to Iloilo. And so after a few weeks of re-reading the few books I brought back from Japan (which I've read a million times over there), I was beginning to go crazy. (I had read High Fidelity from middle to end, start to middle, and then start to end before I conceded that I needed help.) My sister was no help. She considers her Chemistry texts good reading, and doesn't mind rerererererererererereading Harry Potter 5 & 6 or Clavin and Hobbes. Good thing I have friends who still appreciate good fiction.

But now that I'm back in Iloilo (Yes, I went home, what's it to you?), I immediately looked through my books (Immediately after two days in front of the TV, that is.) and decided to create another Reading List. Here they are:

1. The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
2. The Longings of Women, Marge Piercy
3. Lord Jim, Conrad
4. Kinkakuji, Mishima
5. Our Father, Bernice Rubins
6. The Shipping News, Proulx
7. Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party, Greene
8. Pere Goriot, Balzac
9. The Art of the Novel, Kundera
10. Love in the Time of Cholera, Garcia Marquez
11. In the Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco
12. In Cold Blood, Capote
13. The Silmarillion, Tolkien
14. The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
15. The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
16. King Lear, Shakespeare
17. In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
18. Accordion Crimes, Proulx
19. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers
20. Leaves of Grass, Whitman

Ambitious, aren't I? Twenty books in two months? This is impossible of course. I can't even do it even if it were twenty romance novels (Hmmm... Maybe I can). Not to mention that I am still in the middle of a book that I've been reading for almost a week now (21. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields).

Most of the books I've had forever. (The reason I have bought so many books without having read them all, aside from the excellent prices at Booksale, is that I have this fantasy of being 35 and retired(see, how lazy I am?), on a lounger on a beach somewhere with all my unread books stacked on one side and that's what I do all day--read and read and read (sunbathing and sipping mai tais) until I've read them all, then I can die in peace. Weird, huh?)

Anyway, most of them I've had since before: Some are a re-read, others recommendations, plus a smattering of the pretentious (Umberto Eco? Hello!). But the point is, I have a project for the next few weeks, and it feels good.

(Aside.
Incidentally, this going-through-my-old-books stuff has made me remember all the other books that I used to own but now I can't find--if you have borrowed a book from me and still haven't returned it (and have not given it to some girl you were hoping to impress, hahaha!), I really would like to see that book again... please. Even just to touch it and smell it again. Really. All my Kundera--from The Joke to Identity and everything in between, my Shirley Jackson short stories, even my romance novels, and all the others that I've forgotten!!! Ohmygod. I really miss those books.
So, please.)

Anyway. Third.
I tried to submit to the Ateneo Workshop, but I didn't make the deadline. (Fuck, fuck, fuck!) I had completely forgotten about it (too much waiting can actually do this to you). Anyway, being the eternal, irritating optimist, I'm now taking this failure as a sign that my newer stuff aren't that great. Haha. But I did submit some re-written, re-worked poems for publication and I hope, I hope those do better, because I sweated my ass off to rewrite them, and I do think they're good (ehem.) and, it was on time at least. (Please, please, please.)

Fourth.
This is what happens when I have been silent--on paper, on the net, vocally, even-- for so long. I reach a threshold and then I just bubble over. Drey, stop. (I have just replied to the backlog in my email. Ten or so emails in two hours, one in Japanese! Grrr.) Seriously. Stop.

Last. Promise.
One of the five that didn't make it. A re-write of an early morning writing exercise.


Patterns repeat

Like when a girl sneaks
a boy into her room after dark—
her mother had forbidden it

like the mention of the bastard
who broke away at the words
forever, chain, us versus others;

like vines having no where to go
but up walls. Circumvention
creating paths, patterns

that shouldn’t surprise any more.
The light come the morning finds—
an empty bedroom, breakfast for two—

nothing but outlines and shadows,
hints of the unspoken, the silence
of the nights to come.

Why wait?

For the almost month-and-a-half that I haven't been writing here, I have been busy and bored in turns--too busy to write, and too bored with my life to write about it. Either way, it had the same results. Whatever I have churned out lately has been fit for nothing but practicing three-point shots into my waste basket. Not all of them went in, either.

Just what have I been doing? I have been waiting and waiting and waiting. I even know what I've been waiting for:

1. I have been waiting for the poems inside my head to figure themselves out and present themselves in their most perfect versions--ready for publishing--without any involvement from me;
2. I've been waiting for a call from someone who'll say he misses me, when I should be the one to do it, because, technically, it's my turn and it's me that's yearning, and this is the reason I don't do it;
3. I've been waiting for this year to end, so I can quit my job and finally take my master's degree in literature;
   
4. I have been waiting for my life to figure itself out while I wait in the wings for my cue to enter the stage.

Crazy thing is, right in front of me, in letter-stickers on my laptop, is a motto-of-sorts I've assigned to myself years ago--Why wait?

Indeed. It's a paraphrase of my take on regret--another promise I made to myself years ago--to only regret those things I chose not to do. Yet here I am in the sidelines. Again.

And as if my life has decided to go on without waiting for me, it just zooms by with various images I can use to write those poems--a student playing the piano on his desk top while waiting for an exam to finish, his face tilted up, features crumpled in concentration as his fingers pounded on keys not-there and I could swear I heard the music spiralling from that desk to fill the whole room--and as if telling me, "There. There. And there. If you still can't write that, then I'm washing my hands of you." (Read: Maybe poetry isn't for you.)

It zooms by until one day I look up from my lecture and I realize I've fallen in love with my students. Those little brats I've been cursing for their obtuseness, for their youthful arrogance, for the fact that at that age they know as I know it is the world that waits for them. But I look at them, I see them--the stubbornness, the assuredness, that real, real confidence that everything can and will wait--and I find myself smiling even if I insist on bitterness.

And suddenly, I'm entertaining thoughts of staying for more than a year, of maybe finding myself content in this job. And it scares the shit out of me. What do I know about being content and staying there? I've left that place years and years ago and since then I've been more familiar with the constant bitterness that comes from the inseparable combination of romanticism and cynicism. I've known happy and I've known unsatisfied, but what do I know about being in between?

I don't know. Somehow, no matter how much I hate to admit it, there might not be anything for me to do but wait. Ride it out, and wait and see.

Putang ina, alas kwatro na naman.

Or, Why It's Better to Stay Locked Up in Your Room All Day, Watching CSI. But.

First things first.

To a Daughter Leaving Home
Linda Pastan

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? This was written in 1988, and I wish I'm as ignorant now as I was then. Hell, I was probably more original, too.

*****

Second.

I don't remember when, where or who exactly, but somebody once said that I wrote poetry that was a paean to relationships, or something to that effect. I had to look up the word paean: a song of praise. And here I thought I was being cynical and unromantic. And now, another one. I don't think I like it, or that it's any good. But a paean? You decide.

Because in the Movies

They always end up together.
Or if they don’t, always
it’s with good reason.

So she left and with good reason,
she thought. She took other lovers
and tried not to

compare. If it was difficult at first,
now there was ocean and time
zones between them,

and both are never still. So what,
if she fantasized about him
showing up at her doorstep?

In her dreams, she’s opened that door
many times over, her face changing
from quizzical—she never expected it,

of course!—on to elation, her eyes
widening by degrees, like her arms.
And the embrace that followed

has been patterned and replaced
by the best reunion scenes
Hollywood has thought up.

And perhaps this practice hurried her
to that future date. Now, she stands still
at the beach instead, wondering

if the waters didn’t flow and fall
over the edge. Of the world,
was it really round?

I swear, when it was still in my head and not yet on paper, it sounded way, way better.

*****

I've had this conversation quite a few times recently, maybe even with you:

You: You always write about relationships, don't you?
Me: Yeah. I get that a lot. Some people have asked, too, "Where's your social commentary?"
You: And you say...
Me: I've tried that before, y'know, writing about what I don't know? It never worked. So I'm sticking to what I know now. Maybe when I have six screaming kids and a budget that just about balances, and I finally know that a can of formula is expensive, and just how expensive it is, then I'll write my social commentary.

But I tell you, it has gotten me thinking. Is this all I know?

Fuck fuck fuck.

Let me be your heroin/e

Perhaps it was lack of sleep, or my frustrations with where-I'm-not, or maybe it's just your garden variety PMS (You notice how these three letters explain away most of our weirdest moments? "See, hon? It's all chemical."), but I was feeling woozy and lost empty inside without the usual spinning-room complement of my vertigo attacks.

So I tried to look for an explanation, but it wouldn't come. Tried working backwards, too: experimented with different explanations hoping it would lead me to identify whatever lack it is I feel but can't locate. It didn't work either.

So I gave up, and tried to forget about it: replied to the backlog in my Inbox, slept for four hours, called my best friend. But in the background, that nagging was still there--like that pain below your shoulder blade during days you know you've smoked too much. So I looked for a word to describe how I felt, and ended up with a whole excerpt:

(Tangina, ang haba ng introduction, ano?)

*****

Heroin/e
by Cheryl Strayed

Three years after my mother died I fell in love with a man who had electric blue hair. I’d gone to Portland, Oregon, to visit a friend, seeking respite from the shambles my life had become. I had thought that by then I’d have recovered from the loss of my mother and also that the single act of her death would constitute the only loss. It is perhaps the greatest misperception of the death of a loved one: that it will end there, that death itself will be the largest blow. No one told me that in the wake of that grief other grief’s would ensue. I had recently separated from the husband I loved. My stepfather was no longer a father to me. I was alone in the world and acutely aware of that. I went to Portland for a break.

I'll call the man with electric blue hair Joe. I met him on his twenty-fourth birthday and drank sangria with him. In the morning he wanted to know if I’d like some heroin. He lived on a street called Mississippi, in North Portland. There was a whole gathering of people who’d rigged up apartments above what had been a thriving Rexall drugstore. Within days I lived there with him. In the beginning, for about a week, we smoked it. We made smooth pipes out of aluminum foil and sucked the smoke of burning black tar heroin up into them. "This is called chasing the dragon!" Joe said, and clapped his hands. The first time I smoked heroin it was a hot sunny day in July. I got down on my knees in front of Joe, where he sat on the couch. "More," I said, and laughed like a child. "More, more, more," I chanted. I had never cared much for drugs. I’d experimented with each kind once or twice, and drank alcohol with moderation and reserve. Heroin was different. I loved it. It was the first thing that worked. It took away every scrap of hurt that I had inside of me. When I think of heroin now, it is like remembering a person I met and loved intensely. A person I know I must live without.

The first time they offered my mother morphine, she said no. "Morphine is what they give to dying people," she said. "Morphine means there's no hope."

We were in the hospital in Duluth. We could not get the pillows right. My mother cried in pain and frustration when the nurses came into the room. The doctor told her that she shouldn’t hold out any longer, that he had to give her morphine. He told her that she was actively dying. He was young, perhaps thirty. He stood next to my mother, a gentle hairy hand slung into his pocket, looking down at her in the bed.

The nurses came one by one and gave her the morphine with a needle. Within a couple of weeks my mother was dead. In those weeks she couldn’t get enough of the drug. She wanted more morphine, more often. The nurses liked to give her as little as they could. One of the nurses was a man, and I could see his penis through his tight white nurse’s trousers. I wanted desperately to pull him into the small bathroom beyond the foot of my mother’s bed and offer myself up to him, to do anything at all if he would help us. And also I wanted to take pleasure from him, to feel the weight of his body against me, to feel his mouth in my hair and hear him say my name to me over and over again, to force him to acknowledge me, to make this matter to him, to crush his heart with mercy for us. I held my closed book in my hand and watched him walk softly into the room in his padded white shoes. My mother asked him for more morphine. She asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything. A mad dog. He did not look at her when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word, and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his shoes and his penis in his pants. My mother begged and whimpered then. She cried and her tears fell in the wrong direction, not down over the lush light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair on the bed.

I wanted it and I got it, and the more heroin we got, the stingier we became with it. Perhaps if we snorted it, we thought, we’d get higher on less. And then, of course, the needle. The hypodermic needle, I’d read, was the barrier that kept the masses from heroin. The opposite was true with me. I loved the clean smell of it, the tight clench around my arm, the stab of hurt, the dull badge of ache. It made me think of my mother. It made me think of her, and then that thought would go away into the loveliest bliss. A bliss I had not imagined.

There was a man named Santos whom we called when we wanted heroin. He would make us wait by the telephone for hours, and then he’d call and instruct us to meet him in the parking lot of a Safeway. I sat in the car while Joe took a short drive with Santos in his yellow pinto, and then Joe would calmly get back into the car with me and we’d go home. On some occasions we went to Santos' house. Once he sat in his front window with a shotgun across his lap. Once he clutched my thigh when Joe left the room and told me that if I came to see him alone he’d give me heroin free. Another time he held his baby daughter, just a month old. I looked at her and smiled and told Santos how beautiful she was, and inside of me I felt the presence of my real life. The woman who I actually was. The kind of woman who knows the beauty of a baby, who will have a baby, who once was a baby.

This is an excerpt. The entire essay can be found in The Best American Essays 2000, edited by Alan Lightman and Robert Atwan.

(Cut-and-pasted from http://www.cherylstrayed.com. See her other work, The Love of My Life, from The Best American Essays 2003, too.)

Turnabout is fair play

Turnabout
aaaaTo a Dad Leaving Home

I have left you many times.
The first, perhaps,
was when I began to root
for a different basketball team,
or argued that Dominique Wilkins
was better at the dunk
than Michael Jordan.
Or was it when I listened
to damned noisy music
and started to slam doors,
muttering that Vedder
didn’t scream as much as Callas.
The next was on my birthday,
when I insisted
on a mean mountain bike
and lessons without training wheels.

But it was in college
that distance became real.
I didn’t have to be back
at my apartment by midnight,
or two at the latest.
I learned that cigarettes are good
with beer. I fell in love—
it wasn’t with you anymore.

You, on the other hand,
have always been home. Waiting—
first, for my dreams to come true,
and then yours. Now

I want to cling and cling—
bow to His Airness, dish the dirt on Grunge,
lock every door against your own quest—
but I remember you said
that to learn to ride a bicycle
takes two people:
One to pedal like crazy
and the other, to let go.

*****

Something I wrote recently, in an attempt to sound more generous than I actually am.

When in doubt, quote other people.

Because love is often not love, and freedom not freedom, and all these words should come with government-issue quotation marks, but then you ask yourself, "Really, what's the point?" And maybe I'm just angry because we look up to Fox Mulder because he's cute, period, and sad that his truth out-there, has become elsewhere--a too-small star we don't even bother to search for during those quiet, lonely nights when we can't sleep.

And because we look for different things in our heroes...

Here are two poems:

Leaving the Motel
W. D. Snodgrass

Outside, the last kids holler
Near the pool: they'll stay the night.
Pick up the towels; fold your collar
Out of sight.

Check: is the second bed
Unrumpled, as agreed?
Landlords have to think ahead
In case of need,

Too. Keep things straight: don't take
The matches, the wrong keyrings--
We've nowhere we could keep a keepsake--
Ashtrays, combs, things

That sooner or later others
Would accidentally find.
Check: take nothing of one another's
And leave behind

Your license number only,
Which they won't care to trace;
We've paid. Still, should such things get lonely,
Leave in their vase

An aspirin to preserve
Our lilacs, the wayside flowers
We've gathered and must leave to serve
A few more hours;

That's all. We can't tell when
We'll come back, can't press claims,
We would no doubt have other rooms then,
Or other names.


Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the
Hospital for the Criminal Insane
Etheridge Knight

Hard Rock was "known not to take no shit
From nobody," and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumped ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.

The WORD was that Hard Rock wasn't a mean nigger
Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head,
Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity
Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back,
Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose,
Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status.
And we all waited and watched, like indians at a corral,
To see if the WORD was true.

As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak
Of his exploits: "Man, the last time, it took eight
Screws to put him in the Hole." "Yeah, remember when he
Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?" "He set
The record for time in the Hole--67 straight days!"
"Ol Hard Rock! man, that's one crazy nigger."
And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit
A screw in the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit.

The testing came, to see if Hard Rock was really tame.
A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch
And didn't lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock
From before shook him down and barked in his face.
And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly,
His eyes empty like knot holes in a fence.

And even after we discovered it took Hard Rock
Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name,
We told ourselves that he had just wised up,
Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long,
And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed.
He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things
We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do,
The fear of years, like a biting whip,
Had cut grooves too deeply across our backs.