I must have smoked more cigarettes today than I had in two months. The Hail Marys have come and gone from my lips, but still my heart feels like a mass of filth and ruin, screaming with the violence of a tempest that picks up more strength as it moves viciously over the dark waves.

It was my birthday yesterday, and already I've hidden in more than one cubicle to cry out the tears stuck in my throat. Every day brings more agony than the last, and the more I kneel in front of the Crucifix, the deeper it cuts. Where is the rest you promised? Where is the joy that makes all of this worth it? Why did you bring me here only to put me through this storm? Why don't you save me? Why don't you save us?

Christ, where are you?

untitled

The idea of death is very appealing to a person who is suffering. Perhaps not actually taking one's life, but playing with that possibility—just to get close enough to death to get a little feel of his dark cloak. It somehow numbs the pain a little, like how sleeping with your windows open when you go to bed helps you sleep, dreaming of meeting the asphalt twenty feet below.

Or when your lungs are already struggling to take in air, and there's the comfort offered by a cigarette. Or just sitting on a chair, one hand caressing rosary beads and the other stroking the barrel of a gun.

Death is so seductive; and suffering so painful, so exhausting, so tiring. How much should a person take before it is acceptable, redeemable, to give up? To say, "That's it. This is as far as I go. I can't go any further. I've had enough."

Eat Your Fill

The world is good and beautiful. Yesterday, the weather was fair. There is a calm, an anticipation, some fear, a lot of prayer. But the world was good when I slept, and when I woke up, the sun was still bright, the cows were still mooing, the dogs still barking—the world is still beautiful.

The people in the world are not always good, and they are not always beautiful. Sometimes their human faces are twisted ugly by lies and corruption and greed. I've always loved Isabel. I loved it when I stayed here growing up, I loved it even more when I left for Cebu. The city can offer me no glamour or "classy" lifestyle, no temptation of the newest luxury restaurant or go-to place, no frequency of trips to Starbucks or Ayala that would make me choose all of the above for the quietness, for the dainty, bucolic solitude, that always welcomes me when I go home. In my heart, I will always choose this humble little town...and its quiet, humble people whom I thought, until now, had simple and childlike hearts.

But now I see them and I feel only disgust. I can't see their faces anymore, just their hands, eagerly and tightly clasping white envelopes with money in exchange for a vote. This has become so entrenched in how politics works in our town that it has wormed its way to become a permanent part of the electoral system—like a loose thread that looks very unsightly but bears the threat of undoing the entire system if pulled out. So it just hangs there, and people have taught themselves not to care.

I just didn't expect, however, the extremes to which greed would push some people. Go find a way to damage this man's campaign, make him disappear long enough for the people to forget his face, forget his name, forget what he's done. Plant a charge against him that will not allow him to post bail, that will make him fear imprisonment, that will paint his name and the rest of his family black. Make him and his family feel obscure, ostracized, ashamed. Find a woman desperate enough to cry wolf even when the wolves are the ones who are soliciting her for her cries. Get her to act against her dignity as a woman to destroy the dignity of a man. Whom she says is a pig, whom she says beat her and forced himself on her.

But you who know him know he can't even get up from sitting so long from a strained back, let alone raise his fist to a woman hard enough to give her bruises. You who know him know he is too gentle and kind and honorable.

But you don't know him. You don't know how he has worked hard, how much he has sacrificed. You don't know the pains he took to give you back, to raise again, what has been taken from you. You don't even know what was taken from you. Because you are ignorant. Because you only judge from what you see, from what you hear from wolves or from other people who are as ignorant as you are. But you have made your decision. You have cooked your meal, so hope you can swallow it without choking. You have made your bed, so hope you can sleep soundly and wake up the next morning.

You want goodness for this town, your family, yourself. Let's hope that's what you'll get.

at the bottom of everything

"Where are we going?" she says to the old man beside her seat.

The airplane shakes violently from one of the failed engines, for which the pilot has apologized three times. The old man turns and looks at her. "We are going to a party."

She smiles.

"It's your birthday party. Happy birthday, darling."

The plane rapidly loses its altitude, and people start putting on their oxygen mask. One mother scolds his son as he refuses to put down his Nintendo. The passengers at the back are passing shots of bloody marys.

She looks out the window and sees the Pacific ocean reaching out its arms to her. She remembers her mother watering orchids, her father painting their walls orange. She thinks of smoking a cigarette, but it will probably get wet.

"I'm happy just because I am really no one."

She closes her eyes, and her skin meets the salt of the sea. Her lips part into a smile. She thinks this is the adventure she has been waiting for.

Stranger

Here it is again, that strange resentment for everything that surfaces every once in a while. Perhaps it's just PMS, but I find everything and everyone hateful.

I haven't been able to read in a while. Not because I don't have the time—people make time for things they really want to do—but because I can't. I'm looking at my books now, and they feel alien to me. I want to throw them one by one across the room, tear their pages, and burn them until they all evaporate into smoke. Why are they here? Why do I feel like they are not mine, that somewhere along the way, they have made me unworthy to peruse their pages?

The truth is, I want to be friends with my books again, to hold them and not feel rejected. But why do I feel this way? I miss reading so, so much...please, Lord, let me read again. Please.

I feel so lonely. Please...