Let us meet…

…in her room- the forsaken, darkest room I have ever been in my whole life.

At the place where our worlds collide, where we could finally understand each other after months of throwing punches. The bruises, bruises and scars I have got from those fights. It was endless and nobody raises the white flag yet until now. You will hear me say that it’s all fine.  This rendevous would be short-lived, I reassured you. Like a lighted match extinguishing itself after seconds of lighting it up.
    Let us meet wearing our work clothes. The dirt from the outside dimension still clings on the corners of our clavicles. Let us meet even if I could still smell myself bearing the rancid scent of antibiotics and isopropyl alcohol. Your breath smelled like blueberry fields from all the artificial smoke you were inhaling. You still smelled the same- you smelled like you. How I wish you were still the same to my eyes because you secretly died and the cemetery is my mind.

  You probably didn’t know I had a new tattoo on my inner arm. You didn’t know I lost tremendous amount of weight. Heck, I didn’t even  know you still wear the shirt I gave you before I left. We are once again strangers sharing the same bed for a short while. 

  I asked myself if I still loved you. In all honesty, all those butterflies died a long time ago. I don’t feel what I felt the first time we shared a room. Love? I don’t want to feel love anymore. I probably don’t deserve it, you are probably not worthy of my time anymore. 

 I don’t even care if you touched other woman. All I need is the temporary adrenaline. When all of this is over, I will go home and will forget I ever knew you again. 

  We’re the only ones who knew we meet. What scandal it would be if anybody knew we are meeting at Sofia’s place. She didn’t even know, nobody knows. Nobody will know.

You’re The Flag of China…

… when I thought you’re just the flag of Japan.

I should’ve noticed all the jeopardy that would come my way; I should have not let you in my life.

All these years, I have helped you. My piffle mind self-incinerated itself because of you but I managed to wake up and survive… barely.

I succumb to episodes and bouts of death, pitying myself and living with sadness every waking day. I couldn’t even lift my feet from my slumber; I often told you I was exhausted, you ignored it. I am deeply sorry if I didn’t make yourself heard or seen because all that was in front of me was darkness, like swimming in a dark, deep abyss of loneliness that all of my energy was focused on me, myself, and I.

I couldn’t blame you, I wouldn’t blame you if you left. But you shouldn’t blame me either if I begged and cried because I was saving what was good that was left. I endured all the harsh words, all the disgusting things you have told me to salvage everything- to save us. During the denouement, it was my last energy. I broke down and wanted to jump from the 3rd floor of the very building I was working because I had no hope, my lifeline left me broken and torn into pieces. My head couldn’t digest the fact that a flawed human could tolerate himself finding another lover in just a day of wanting space. You should have told me you wanted the galaxy instead of space because the gap between us now is astoundingly panoramic, nothing can reach the you to me… not even a space shuttle can do that.

I previously loved every piece of you- your hair, your lips, your voice. I could still remember the pieces of whites you have on your hair, like a firework in a dark, starless night. Your broad back which I loved the most when you hugged me. That hug was all that I needed when I was having a bad day. Now, all that you have left me is the stale bitterness of anger and revenge hanging inside my mouth that I wanted to spit out but I can’t. I wanted to remember all the good days but you made me mad like a rabig dog salivating for revenge.

I told you not to hold grudges against the world, I taught you how to forgive. Meanwhile, you taught me how to hold on to madness to survive.

You made me mad but that’s how love’s supposed to be. Maybe on the other side of the moon, in the alternate universe, there is you and me that works but I hope there’s no other you and me anymore. We are the glitch of the system, the by-product of trauma.

I still cry all the time, each night I go to slumber when I happen to think of you. Last time, it was because of sadness. Now, it’s because of uttermost anger that I couldn’t project.

“Que sera, sera”

Whatever will be, will be.

Evermind

I still write about trivial things, the peculiar ones especially. One thing’s for sure: I don’t write when I feel elated. I must be devastated as hell.

Evermind, evermind- my simbelmyn̈e.

Ever wondered why flowers grow on tombs? Do they grow there because of the abundance of vital things they need? Or do they grow there to feed on the memories of the dead?

Simbelmyn̈e, simbelmyn̈e.

All of the memories you left, I’m still watering them, letting them take over my room.

They crawl- the vines creep against the walls of my very room. Dehydrating and drinking the moisture from the concrete. My sorry self is very much aware that the walls of my room will soon crumble as the twines devour the entirety of the cement palisade but I am too pre- occupied, entertaining your ghost.

The snowy colored blossoms dangling from each vine die each time I try to disregard them but they bloom too fast that if it happens that they will imbibe even just a single tear from the orifice of my tear duct, they will flourish.

Alas! The reason you cannot die lies within me, under my very nose literally.

My heart, my mind is a simbelmyn̈e– feeding upon the dead, the rotten leftovers. Enjoying tombs, the skeletons of the past.

You cannot die, you will never die. As long as somebody preys upon your bequeathal, as long as someone is still tending the memories you have left behind.

Simbelmyn̈e, simbelmyn̈e, evermind.

Eating Ramen with You.

The thing is, I always wanted to eat and thread myself inside the bowl of a magical ramen and wallow with my long term growing sadness that has been outgrowing my intellect since I was 17 years old. I always wanted to eat at a ramen shop on a cold, post drizzle Monday afternoon viewing the people passing by, judging them one by one by their weird outfits. The first time I ate with someone at my favorite ramen shop, I almost fainted because of happiness. Deep inside my cranium, I always imagine eating with someone I found so dearly smiling from ear to ear, talking about nonsense and whatnot. I’d be so glad if I am eating spicy chicken ramen with extra cuts of cabbage on the side if I am seeing the love of my life enjoying my recommended food for him. It could be heaven if he tells me “I love you” in the middle of slurping noddles like an endless cassette tape reel; like an endless thread of yarn he cannot cut using his teeth. It didn’t matter if he accidentally snorts in the middle of doing it. I just wanted a good talk in the middle of eating an extremely good ramen with him.
But the thing is, January 27, 2012 would be the last time I would be eating  in my favorite ramen place with him. I always liked their braised pork, their spicy chicken ramen. But, today is just different. Damn, that was the most awful ramen I ever tasted in my whole 22 years of existence. The taste of spices tingled the back of my throat, spewing nasty tears out of my eyes as I swallowed a huge lump of karaage.
         The thing is, I wanted to cry on my knees when you told me you’re leaving while waiting for your usual order of ramen. You stared down the bowl like you’re daydreaming as you said you don’t love me anymore. I was supposed to be happy because I am with my favorite person, in my favorite place, eating my favorite food. Dear, I wanted to run away from that awful place… wanted to disappear, wanting to die.
Things don’t resonate like before when I passed by that cursed ramen shop. It’s been a year and I haven’t stepped inside of it and I never wanted to again.
Eating ramen with you is something I wanted to do… before you left my fragile heart; before you left me melting like an egg yolk in a bowl of hot soup.

Who would have thought…

… that my ill-fated, forsaken Bonnie self finally found my long time missing Clyde after lurking under my nose for years… and years?
Who would have thought that a simple greeting could change everything that was in between the two old acquaintances? After going home late from the bar, drinking several vodka shots, and kissing each other goodbye, we often ask ourselves where have we been throughout these lonely painstaking years. Honestly and seriously… did fate intentionally played the both of us by traumatizing the fuck out of our emotions and involving us to people who would eventually end up being strangers to us again?
Fate. That’s it. I have no other words for this unexpected union between two lost people. Fate- the foolish unwinding but never breaking red string tangled up and I pray and swear to the vast heavens above me that this would be the last one.  Screw Romeo and Juliet; they got nothing from this peculiar love story.
Baby… I never wrote a happy poetry piece ever in my life but ever since you came, my brain keeps on thinking happy thoughts and keeps on screaming that I needed to write before I go crazy from this overwhelming mix of emotions hiding between the bones of my ribcage. You’re my miracle; an oasis in the middle of a desert. You’re the flower that blooms in my dreams, my dear Smeraldo. I can never imagine my life without spending my late Friday nights without you; never in the deepest parts of my amygdala would have wished that we remained acquaintances after we talked and talked over cheap sticks of cigarette watching the sun goes down at 6pm.
My love, I hope you’re happy as I am right now. Thank you for arriving into my life in such a bizarre time of the year.

 

I should’ve…

… told you that you were a great cook. I should’ve said that I couldn’t live without physically indulging your signature ginataang mais at least once a year. Now, tell me how should I recreate your dish without you teaching me how to do it? I remember trying to scrape off the corn kernels off the cobs and you laughed at me because I suck at doing it.
I should’ve paid attention to you when you were telling me to go out and have some fresh air last week. Basically, you must have not seen me out of my room for weeks and for that, I apologize because I am currently having a mid life crisis but it was surprising to know that you have noticed it.
I should’ve told you that no matter how white your hair is, you’re still beautiful. Can you even recall the time you went to me and asked to color your hair? I will miss caressing your head, feeling each strand of your hair sliding down my fingers.
I miss your obnoxious laugh. I miss how you exaggeratedly laughed at my own lame jokes like I was the one who invented them.
Tell me how can I live walking past your ancestral house without you kissing my cheeks and telling me “Abaw! Ka gwapa sang apo ko!” ? I often wonder why you always say that to my cheap BB cream smothered face and peach colored lips. For me, I looked nothing but an ordinary girl. Too bad I couldn’t appreciate myself like you do.
The night that I was sitting beside your hospital bed, watching your irregular breathing pattern disentigrate as you tried your best to breathe in through the cannula, a lot of wandering thoughts flew into my mind. I couldn’t stand seeing you lying there with pale lips and cold limbs so I purposefully went out of the room.
The last time I saw you respond to me was when I kissed your forehead. You looked up to me with your weakly opening eyelids, my chest felt the pain you were feeling.
My whole being trembled as the doctor told us that your pulse was gradually weakening and they had nothing to do with it anymore but to pump medicines that they thought could improve your fragile heart.
I was eagerly watching your intravenous solution drop, watching you wheeze through your oxygen deprived lungs. You went through hours of pain until you decided to go at exactly 5 am… which was the usual time that I go to sleep everyday.
I should’ve said these things to you. You were always telling me that you will wait until I become a doctor but what happened, my love? I saw you there with your lifeless body; I saw you there peacefully closing your eyes like nothing even happened to you.
I should’ve saved you back there if only I knew.
I should’ve…

-in memory of my late grandmother, Carmelina M. Sinfuego. I love you forever.-

(Seen in the photo from right to left:
My grandmother, Lola Bebet and Tita April, and My mother)

 

When will My Summers End?

January 27, 2018
5:24 am

Approximately twenty four minutes after five in the morning, here I am still awake. I took a night bath, cleaned my room, did my nightly skin routine, and dimmed the lights at eleven in the evening but look who’s wide awake and drowning herself from the darkness? Yes, it’s me. The mighty queen of the insomniacs: Rinzeki. Well, that should be a good epitaph when I die.
Elders always say that if you can’t sleep at night, you might be in love or at least thinking of somebody special to you. In my case, I clearly don’t think about anything else before I sleep but the future. I lie there like an idiot, holding my phone, and reading some unnecessary fanfiction/flashfiction/ drabble for 5 hours but none of them penetrates in my imaginations. I have been a huge procrastinating machine this whole time and no matter how I wanted to do something I usually loved to do (like street photography, writing poetry, roaming around the suburbs) I always say alibis to myself. For example, my laundry has been sitting inside my room for 3 days now. If those were allowed to talk, they’d be complaining to me and would tell me that they wanted to move out and find someone who could actually fold them nicely after drying them up. In addition to that, I am frequently seeing my friends now having their dream jobs while me… I’m just here swooning over seven Korean men and ignoring the two job offerings I had. The jobs were wonderful but of course, the idiot me refused to work in Manila because I don’t want to rent a room and spend another buck for staying there.
Jokes aside, I’m actually loving my current routine everyday: wake up, clean my room, do laundry, eat breakfast, take a bath, read books, try doing poetry which would eventually fail, blame myself for having an IQ of a rat, cry over a Korean man whom will never notice me, do 10 rounds of jogging, repeat. Okay, that was sarcastic but I’m actually getting used to it.
Can I also vent how much I hated seeing couples these days? Not to be that kind of a bitch but please for goodness sake, don’t come near me you dirty people. I suck at love, I would never be good at it and I don’t think that will ever change. Look, I lost three wonderful guys in my life and all of them eventually became Summer Finn. If you don’t know Summer Finn, she’s the girl in the “500 Days of Summer” and ever since I watched that movie, my love life has been shitty. In the story, she just had a short love affair to Tom (who was a big asshole to me, by the way) and left him out of the blue. After that, she became engaged to someone else and never told Tom. Just look it up because I am currently wasting my time explaining a damn movie in my poetry but it actually feels good because I am guessing that this would be the longest poetry piece that I will make.
Anyways, where was I? Oh, goodness! It was the Summer Finn thing! The three boys became Summer Finn and I remained as a foolish Tom Hansen- the alcoholic, depressed, self loathing Tom Hansen. As I am writing this, I am thinking… when will my summers end? When can I actually live my life properly as an adult? Sometimes, I wished I didn’t grow up because being an adult hurts so much. A piece of advice to young teens/college students who are currently reading this, please don’t be excited to graduate and be an adult. You’ll be regretting it later.
Well, too much for a 5 am thought. The sun is currently peeking from my windowsill and that`s the signal that I should get some sleep and think about other things than my future and boys… boys. Ha, boys.
When will my summers end? I wonder…
But what if it will never end and my autumn is apparently just a speck of dust, a fragment of my imaginations? What if my autumn will never come?

Cantor’s Denouement

May the angel find peace
Through the tar colored smoke,
Through the burning charcoal.
May he find peace.

May you find peace
For he is rested
Up above the heavens
Singing his heart out with his benevolence.

-for Jonghyun, lead singer of Shinee
Rest in peace.

At that place…

…in between Morayta and Recto will forever be inscribed in the deepest part of my brain, in the depths of my memory.
I couldn’t wait for the time that my thumbprints on the metal pole of LRT line 1 will disappear like a mere bubble just like you did. I couldn’t wait, I couldn’t wait.
Months and months have passed, all the thoughts of writing about you that has been bottled up inside my chest finally exploded all over the place. In all honesty, I couldn’t even write about you for the following reasons. 1.) Each time I think about you, I felt like I was a foolish person falling from the tallest building I saw while I was walking in Taguig; like those people who read fiction in the noisiest corners of Santa Mesa. Each time I think about you, it seems like all the words that I have been saving up in my vocabulary would always, always fly out of my petty head. For that, I apologize because I knew I promised to write something about you. I just simply couldn’t. 2.) You were the perfect inspiration for people who had a “the one that got away”… literally. For that reason, I didn’t want to believe that you were because I am a person who doesn’t believe in trivial things like that. I honestly do believe that everybody you meet in your life would eventually become  your the-one-that-got-away because that’s what people who are too good to be true are like- they meet you, you meet them; they leave and it’s the end of the story. And; 3.) It’s hard to make a poetry out of a poet like you. Your mere presence always shouts dark poetry and I always write about it but when it comes to you, I am and forever will be dumbfounded.
It has been a long time, my lost light. You didn’t have to come back and tell me that you dreamed about me. It hurts the tendons inside my heart; it hurts the memories that I had from the streets of Sampaloc. Everytime I see the mighty arch of Mendiola, I also see you. The other half of me wishes that Manila can just go burn itself into ashes because Manila reminds me of you.
I am writing this at 3 am in a plain white sheet of bond paper using the pen I bought back in Quiapo, summoning my long time running insomnia. This is the last time that I will ever think about you; treat this as a moving on letter.
So long, Manila boy. We’ll meet each other again soon but I guarantee you that I will not be the same goody-goody girl.

-Rinzeki

Love Yourself

Love Yourself.

Such a cliché phrase but apparently, it made my waking life a lot more better.

For almost 21 years that I existed, I thought that I was really accepting and loving myself; for all of these years I thought that I was really paying attention to every little detail on how to empower myself.  I was really convinced that I was loving myself unconditionally but no; It was just pure selfishness out of desperation.

My absence on social networking sites this past week helped me realize and enlighten myself for all the wrong things that I have been doing all my life. I have been reading and writing a lot and you know what’s funny? I used the pen and paper after a year of using the digital way. I was not okay at first because once I use the pen and paper, I was prone to what they call “writer’s block” but I didn’t have it this time.
In addition to that, I have been addicted to alcohol ever since I turned 19 years old. I was loving the pure euphoria it was causing me but my body had enough of it. After drinking an unknown amount of the evil in a bottle, I just had the worst relapse ever in my life. No, I didn’t hurt myself like I used to; I didn’t even think of it. It was just the feeling of  emptiness from within and being depressed to the point that I forgot I didn’t even take a bath for 3 days already. Contrary to the usual belief, being depressed is not just feeling sad and lonely. Depression is not just tears and suicidal thoughts. The worse thing of having depression is not feeling anything in the middle of the night and being numb from all the things around you. I was sleeping at 5 am for a week straight now and maybe because I was consuming a lot of caffeine lately… or it was just my demons not letting me sleep.
Let’s go back again to the main thought of this essay or whatever you call this creation: Love yourself.
Friends, love yourself so that if other people are rejecting you, you will not be afraid of erasing that person in your life. Don’t be like me; don’t love a person just because you wanted to feel loved. If you feel that a person is no longer loving you back, just follow these steps: 1.) Go to the nearest airplane ticketing office; 2.) Book a flight to Japan or Korea; 3.) Don’t pack your things, just go away from that toxic person.
Love yourself so that you will no longer be able to beg for love. Don’t be like me; don’t be such a desperate bag of petty shit begging for people to love you.
Love yourself so that you will realize how beautiful and how amazing the universe have created you. I was never believing myself; I was always dragging myself and often degrading my physical appearance. Maybe because I was bullied when I was in my elementary years. I was often looking myself in the mirror with disgust on my face; I hated myself to the point that I suffered from anorexia and bulimia when I was in high school. I literally didn’t eat for days just to be “lovely”. Everytime I remember that, I always wanted to punch my face. How stupid was I? Last 3 days, I was having an emotional breakdown at 3am and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know why out of the blue, I listened to BTS’ song called “21^st Century Girls” and started crying like a baby. Don’t put this against me, the song has an uplifting beat but once you look at the translated lyrics of it in Youtube, the song was talking about empowering girls of this generation and to never degrade or insult yourself because you’re beautiful just the way you are. *lowkey promoting BTS*
Lastly, love yourself… love yourself, love yourself. I have no other good reason but the fact that you only have yourself when you’re facing some tough times in your life, please learn to love yourself.

Peace humans. Don’t do drugs.

-Rinzeki