When in despair, she does either of two things;tell the truth about it, or lie spectacularly. In her blog, an entry made the day after her daughter left for the holidays, she was composed, calm. Am I lying, she wondered? Yet it felt real like the pimple just below her right lower lip, a small, pink protrusion that seemed harmless enough, unobtrusive. But the course it would take was something she was all too familiar with and maybe if she tried, because she felt like she still had the energy, an intervention could be done. So on the last day of formal classes, on a morning that felt like rain, in front of her bathroom mirror, at 10 past 9 AM, she takes a hairpin and pricks the pimple open.
It bleeds profusely, dramatically. The intervention is way too early. Pressing an antiseptic soaked cottonball against it to stop the bleeding, she considers her options and reduces them to coffee, cigarettes, so so lunch and more cigarettes. Would she see Sasha? Mike? Was Darren going to attend the org meeting at the department? They were near; just within her circle of reality and that was what she needed, something to hold her down before she floated away. The rest had to be pushed away- they were phantoms to her; omnipresent, awfully important, yet distant. What could they do, but throw more phantom stuff at her- who needed reassurances, jokes, detailed accounts of episodes with people she didn’t even know? All these passed through her as if she was porous, like a sieve that caught everything unimportant, but not the important ones.
She misses her daughter. Putting on her jeans, she surveys their bedroom, spies her daughter’s still unwashed clothes and gathers them into her arms, pushing them into her face. She is offended by the smells; three-days of cooped up sweat, spilled food, and school-yard scuffles. But it’s an offense she willingly takes because it is the only punishment she could understand and accept. In the mirror above her drawers, she sees that the pimple has bloomed like a flower, angry, red and flaming.
Good, she thinks. At least something here has some sort of feeling. And the feeling grows, as all infections do in that way that is invisible to you but not to others.Sasha, toting papers and coffee spies it first and in her dim, shallow way asks, oh gosh, you’ve been in a fight?
He slapped me last night, she replies spectacularly, flawlessly, a lock of her fine, pale brown hair falling over her eye as she bends to cup her mouth with a hand, as if to shield her lip from another blow. But all she does is light a cigarette and she sucks at it gingerly, as if smoking exacerbated the pain, the memory of a fight that in her mind was growing real every minute.
Oh my God!!!..I am so sorry, that stupid, ugly brute…oh God… Sasha shrieks, actually sounding as if she is about to cry.
Yeah, is all she can say and feels sheltered in this story, this fantasy that weaves a comfortable bubble around her all day. She, the victim, of an imaginary fit of violence, by a man who would have given her true service had he been actually inclined to lift a finger, a hand, a lamp for christ’s sakes, anything, just anything to rattle days of absolute discomfort, brewing over arguments that never come up to the surface.
It was pure indigestion, a sickness to the stomach that she tried to relieve with an endless flurry of course work, org meetings, harmless, time controlled bar hopping, imported beer, cheap carinderia food, cigarettes, cigarettes and more cigarettes.
When she got home, it felt as if she had scraped her insides raw, leaving her like a hallowed out shell. Her daughter was always a comfort, but she didn’t want to encourage this dependence. She wanted more damn it.
Enough is enough, Mike intones and for a moment, his seriousness makes him more solid, substantial. Tall and gangly, his grave indignation renders him the authority of someone older, someone she knows way back; someone she had thought she could rely on to protect her. But even stones, she knew, stood on shaky ground, and most of the time, she thought that it was probably her fault; a girl who grew up in the shadow of a volcano which as long as she can remember, was always threatening to do something.
What did this breed in her? A reactionary, cautionary stance? A devil-may-care attitude? It was actually a progression of these until she finally said, okay, I give up. I simply give up. Salvation was her child; it was easier to get through when she was doing it as a mother. As herself, it was like swimming through a small lagoon at the foot of the volcano, murky with sulfur and hardy weeds. She was always the one who was trying to catch up, awkward, a bit panicky. Ahead of her, her siblings were like silvery fish, agile and pale, a flash of leg, thigh, a signal to her to catch up.
She is tired of that, of catching up, to things which end up either nowehere or worse, to a face in her mirror she absolutely couldn’t recognize.
Hey, it’s okay, calm down, she tugs at Mike’s shirt and he relents, smiles sheepishly. I hit him back, so it wasn’t one-sided, she lies and suddenly, sadly, she feels that the story had to end.
See? See how easy it is to assure the young, the naive? Their idea of time is warped, always on fast-forward mode. And now, she is the protector. She smiles, everything is okay. The inflammation has subsided, and things were going back to normal, back to the frenetic forgetfulness of the young and the naive. This is life, Mike says, as if in closing, you get hurt, you hurt back, you learn. She agrees, nodding reassuringly although in her heart, she wants to laugh, be sarcastic and say, that is so fuckingly over-rated, but she holds her tongue. In the ladies room, she applies concealer and the pimple is at last hidden, as if this is also her way of closing.
Darren doesn’t attend the meeting and she decides to just go home, thinking of dinner. She receives an SMS and it is her best friend R____ asking where she was, if she had gone home to the province. She is about to reply but then it starts to rain, heavily that she runs desparately for cover towards the waiting jeep bound for Katipunan.
end/01/07/06
