Sober Assessments

You can't beat the bell curve if you don't know where you are in it, so. It's not that we care, or should care, or that any other place is better than the other, but the point is in being somewhere, and then in the future being somewhere else. Progress is creation.

I'm working at a security company (not a securities company) as, essentially, a writer. I am turning thirty this year. I have not had a real dyadic/romantic relationship since birth, and people often wonder why that is so. I wonder, too, but it is what is, and there's no denying it. I am the younger of two, little sister to Bartender Extraordinaire, and we are both smart in different ways which is why B.E. lives for teaching, businesses and projects, and I live the sheltered life of 9-to-6ers.

We share the garage with a dog named Barack, who is one part Spitz, one part Chow-chow. I am tall, slightly overweight by my standards (although several people can still attest to my beguiling slenderness), and I have shoulders suggesting latent masculinity. I had my appendix removed in third year high school, and I am very allergic to dust.

Like you, I have dreams. These dreams don't matter in my sober assessment of myself, because, really, unless they're out there, they're not out there, but this only speaks of my lack of faith in my ability to follow through. In the end this is all that matters, not my skin color or my height, not my friends or my family or the people I work with and see everyday. Faith in the universe, but I am getting ahead of myself: I am a statistic, located in Marikina, breathing the same polluted air.

What makes me different from you is the illusion that I am not you. That I am separate, that we are separate, that we are different inside. I don't know whether it's true or not, I'm just calling it as I see it. I am left-handed, I write like a madman, I sometimes start stories I never end. To date I have published stories somewhere out there, but not in literary journals or in places where it would matter: a poem about my mother, a short story about an awkward proposal.

It's the ones I like that haven't seen the light of day: a story about a secret race of Watchers and a dormitory situated on top of an ancient house of evil, a story about a boy who falls into a river and acquires the power to recognize nodes: decision points in people's lives where new alternative realities are created, a story about a teenage boy in the middle of a lawless desert community who tries to solve the murder of a waitress found skewered in the outskirts of town.

My parents support this. I like unlined notebooks. I started liking metal ballpoint pens. I like bacon and SPAM and raw fish. I like computers and trees and wide open skies. I am you and I am not you. Like you, my ultimate dream is to be loved unconditionally, but like you I could not help myself when I instead look for love in pain, in situations I've called impossible, in needing and wanting and wanting so bad. We are human like that. But we are also wrong.

I do not know why we are wrong, only that we must be wrong because loving wrongly hurts. And we only hurt when we're in a bad place. Why stay in a bad place? We are as capable as the others to not be in a bad place: stories have told us, facts have told us. People overcome the strangest obstacles in the strangest ways.

We are ID numbers, names on lists, a nationality, a citizen, a patient, a customer, a face on a bus. But we are also energy fields, objects of affection, reasons for living, reasons for dying. We are the greatest entities in the known universe. Why must we feel so sad?

Hello, Fellow Prisoners

We are at war with ourselves everyday. We stare at these walls like they will eat us alive, like they are eating us alive, gnawing at our flesh and feasting on our blood. We feel compelled to fight--how else do you get rid of that almost suffocating restlessness? Move, keep moving, keep punching the walls.

Me and some of the guys, we crept near a corner, the one with a tiny hole. We're not sure how we found the place, you never really look back and check why you are where you are unless you have time or you're bleeding or you're lost. Beyond the hole there were moving creatures, creatures made of light, creatures moving so fast so we couldn't keep up with them, creatures making sounds, sprightly, tinkling sounds, like tiny bells. They were saying, or singing, something, but not one of us understood their language.

You grow tired, sometimes, of clawing out. So sometimes you close your eyes and think of nothing. And in those tiny moments, nothing more than milliseconds, really, the walls disappear.

They do. They become like cotton candy, and then cigarette smoke, and then they disappear. Sometimes when I feel they've disappeared I'd jump from where I was standing and make a break for it, but then the wall is still there and it hurts when you've launched yourself bodily into anything.

I have a sneaking suspicion that that's what the creatures have been saying all along. So I listen to them. I become older, and edgier, and my skin is drier than the prison floor.

When you listen real hard you can figure them out. Really simple things that can rock your world. "The universe is at your side," they say. Or, "Love is the point," and such. I say this to my fellow prisoners and they look at me with pity. I began to feel alienated here. Our main business, to escape from these walls, has become a thing that became less convincing the more time I spend noticing other things.

Like the smell of unwashed hair: unbecoming and old, but human. Like tiny tongues of moss colored green and black, ugly, yes, but so bare-facedly biological you just have to have some respect for them--organisms from a million years back, still alive here in our tiny hell holes. Or my fellow prisoners' light banters suggesting hints of a friendship, a kinship, we are here together and we will keep trying to break free.

And every day, since I started noticing things, the walls start to waver. Not for everyone though, which is why I sometimes think I am making this all up. The walls waver and become pliable, a billion little vertical strings you can part somewhere and climb into and out of.

There was one day, in the middle of a specially difficult day, when I actually broke free. It was beautiful.