Figures of Speech

Over the weekend, I am told I will have time. To declutter my existence. To align the bottles on my dresser; to separate photographs from notebooks; to fold clothes and put them into piles; to align my shoes and keep them in boxes; to fill the yawning cavities in my bookshelves. To eliminate the waste of too productive a life. I apologize. I cannot concur. Time only exists in the spaces between action. If I have time, there is no action; if there is a mess, I am certain of compensation. My important documents are in a folder. My folders have no sense of Time. They are kairos, not chronos. I know when waste is excessive, and when it is time to give up. Mea culpa, mess is excess in itself. I have tried order. Things disappear over time: receipts, drafts, bookmarks, earrings, nostalgia. There is satisfaction, but there is also mediocrity. The trick is in finding the line that separates the two and casting yourself far away into a clean horizon or a dusty corner. Let production trap you there, before you counter it. Little by little, see that clutter too, is ordered. There lies your metaphor.

2011 photograph, Philline Donggay. The semblance of deviating from routine.

Deus ex Machina

It’s just a trip to the grocery, I tell myself. The apartment is dim and small and not at all what I imagined, and yet, the little poem I have written in my head remains:

Little room, where light is space / Come inside my mind and know how to tear / This loneliness, this place of self…

(I insist that these non-rhymes are my instances of genius, so that I can feel good during my day job)

So this is what it feels, I fool myself. Independence has taken the form of shelves, perfectly aligned, with everything you could want in a consumerist symmetry, bedazzled and baffling, cans stacked, liquids bottled, animal parts frozen (oh, those red-painted salted eggs, they’re here, too; don’t let the concept of posh groceries fool you; it’s a marriage between wet market and class, come don’t say you didn’t think it)!

And because I felt so grown-up, I didn’t take a list with me, I reasoned, what for, when it’s all in my head!

At Cashier 25 he glared at me, because I rammed my cart into his heels, and rightly so, I apologize, turning my cart around and away from his cotton white shirt, that sculpted face with an ironic frown that well, I kind of loved from a three-office-cubicle-sized distance.

I always did forget the milk; and he was gone by the time I got back in line.

Oh well, I tell myself.

Really, I thought, putting away the plastic bags in my car, it’s all some kind of justice, some kind of fate, and really, it’s all a matter of well-placed coincidence.

–

part of a series, still, here and here: Learning to Unravel or, On Literary Devices.

Denouement

Oh, I thought, as I realized you were waving at the person behind me.

–

second of a series; an attempt; Learning to Unravel or, On Literary Devices

Suspension of Disbelief

There are no explanations but that it ends, here.

Before the narration begins, you must believe it yourself, else people will doubt you the moment you open your mouth. Have you ever seen a picture painted in watercolor and realized how faint the rendering, how fragile the lines? That too, is your story: close enough to be recognized, but still a couple of paces removed from the truth, so you baffle both philosophers (and still we insist that it is not impossible for both of them to have watched the plays anyway, just as we consider the possibility that Homer may never have existed).

The last few pages, written with fervor (because you made yourself believe you are free of distractions), are what you think can be genuine proof that sometimes the boundary is lifted; you may even like the chaos that is of your own making: grammatical necklaces, tense impressions, punctuation marks in place. A movement from A to B until you descend into an assumed finish must be prepared for, or otherwise be explained by some implied natural logic.

Well here it is, you have conquered the page. Now all you need to do is convince others as you have convinced yourself, but just as you spit them out, the words die in your mouth. Don’t lie to yourself; you’re a little satisfied.

–

an attempt; Learning to Unravel or, On Literary Devices.