Cosmological Constant

Her mother used to plan their meals on index cards, pinned on the refrigerator door, charted into boxes constructed from black ink and rulers: Monday breakfast, Monday lunch, Monday dinner; Tuesday breakfast, Tuesday lunch, Tuesday dinner; Wednesday and so on. It made her believe, for a time, that they had access to an endless supply of food and that everything could be planned. Every vegetable, spice, and sauce could be neatly categorized to form a box on a date on a week, for years.

At night, her mother assured her: There is nothing to fear.

Thereafter whenever she was scared she comforted herself with compiling a list of things she wrote down on her notebook:

Sour cream, white cheese, a Dell laptop, a Japanese song, the neighbor’s laundry, magnets, buttons, silverware, baskets, colors, feelings, my life, the world, the Milky Way, endless spiral…

…

One day in school someone asked their Physics professor about space and things they had no real answer for. They passed around an article, exchanged opinions, wondered at the mathematical equations that only made sense with words.

For several nights after, she clutched her thin blanket around herself, thinking to herself:

The universe is expanding, and to herself, she noted:

Wind, songs, typewriters, keys, sounds, doorsteps, blue doors, beige doors, yellow-silled windows, grills, red, rust, metal, alchemy, e-mails, screens, glares, eyes, statistics, corners, midpoints, entries, exits, diffusion, anxiety, context, space, space, space!

…

In the morning, twenty years-old, she began to see her mother no longer planned their meals. What was there, what could be mixed together, thrown together with salt, was served. It was not a lack of love but a failing of the senses, dulled over the years, straining their smiles, convincing their heartstrings that dying and living were but emotions.

She went, she lived, she rejoiced, notebook discarded, perhaps destroyed. One night, in the future, her daughter will ask her if she can have mamon for breakfast tomorrow, and her smile will sag, remembering rulers, black lines, neat little boxes, expansion: the universe.

Life, alive, tags, names, cartoons, rejection, failure, stunted, railway, murder, telephones, vocabulary, boredom, judgment, gossip, commitment, roofs, doors, and walls, walls, walls.

A Rumination on Pinpricks

starts where you would not, usually, and this lets you know that beforehand you had thought nothing much of the compound word. Now that you think about it, was it ever so difficult? To shrink away, shuddering, from the thought of being pricked? But not only that, but to fear something sharp and cold (the terror of which comes really from the fact that it is so small), that is not content to do you harm, but also leaves a mark on you, from the inside out

(Because the truth is that one small dot on the surface means a scarring, deep, into the whole).

My troublesome (and still slightly swollen) right eye. I insist that you insist on being charmed.

‘There are very fine pinpricks in your eyes,’ the doctor tells you, after the thin film of bright yellow light has scanned your eyes and he has folded your eyelids back. ‘There is some swelling,’ he admits and he enumerates the culprits, which, more properly termed, are the details of your lifestyle:

the preservatives in your contact lens solution;
the traces of powder from your face;

and the fact, therefore, that your eyesight has been very bad for quite a long, long time, and that though you are not as blemished (pimply teenager that you were), you need still a touch of concealer and (thank God for the development of your skin into some kind of stability at this time, your early twenties), a light dusting of powder.

The latter you have no problems with, cosmetics are disposable; it is only the contacts solution that would merit real sacrifice, for you cannot wear your slim, compact little eyes, for the next two weeks.

You are told this is natural, as the preservatives are necessary. On the whole, he says, these do not affect your whole body but do your eyes; it is not in the brand but the need behind the preservatives to keep the solution sterile.

That is not what bothers you. After all, you are only morbidly fascinated.

His voice echoes in your mind: There are very fine pinpricks in your eyes There are very fine pinpricks in your eyes There are very fine pinpricks in your eyes.

You imagine now, holes like scars in your cornea every time you lean forward to look at your face in the mirror. You have been wearing contact lenses since you were about twelve or thirteen, and before that you used to play a game when you were much younger, touching the whites of your eyes in your brother’s full-length mirror.

But the thought of pinpricks is new, makes you think what would happen were something to actually prick the human eye, something small, something sharp, something quotidian, and therefore sinister because innocent enough. There are very fine pinpricks in your eyes There are very fine pinpricks in your eyes There are very fine pinpricks in your eyes.

And the only other comfort (aside from the knowledge that now you have Flourometholone to battle it out, one drop each, three times a day, for the next two weeks, leaving a strange taste at the back of your throat—natural, this is all natural) is this – go on, you can read as much as you can, only one other echo does exist in your mind’s eye hears all of this with the anticipation of your new glasses tomorrow.

Imagining life with glasses that are as up-to-date as my contact lenses.

Truth be told, perhaps you were too embarrassed to ask, but your mother who wrote you before you could utter language asked for you, if you could still go on from one word to the other, left to write, up and down.

And to your relief, the doctor replies,

‘There is no limit to the amount of activity of the eye.’

And deeper, more persistent still:

There are very fine pin pricks in your eyes

There are very fine pin pricks in your eyes

But you did not have the courage to ask, if they were as fine and thin and sheer and bright, as the film of light the doctor used to examine your eyes.

—

Pinprick: according to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (copyright 1997), n. 1: a small puncture made by or as if by a pin. 2: a petty  irritation or annoyance.

Otherwise: this Other, as mine, without the wise (copyright 2012), n. 3: another body-betrayal. The truth is he didn’t know the finer details of the diagnosis: the stress of wearing the lenses all day long to work from home, reading at a distance that measures from your corneas to the laptop screen; a peso per word, a puncture per letter, and one more thing to be earned for every space between words on the document you were working on, three weeks before all of this.

The Strange Nuances of Waiting

involve the new senses and how they adapt to cheap thrills necessary for staying still in one place. Here, for example, the cup of warmth just enough of an excuse to stay in the temporary ground. Between the lines, the situation reads, Good thing you brought a book.

You cannot, as of yet, relax; there is no taking in the situation yet because the last time you took in the sights and smells and sounds which felt like silence (so used are you of the notes that they resemble the waterfall, unheard, by Tereza and Tomas), you knew–or made yourself believe you knew what you were doing.

Now, looking back at yourself waiting, and attempting to read in the waiting, who were you back then? Fresh into the new, scared and trying to tell tales about the people around you (but this is now):

The two women trying to study Spanish to your right; the table to your other side which seems an informal introduction of a Korean business man to Filipino food, care of his Filipino companions, the lot of them past middle age; the two men two tables from you there, like you, to simply pass the time with the ability to make small talk sound like shop.

An hour and fifteen minutes before this observation, you felt hollow, as you do now, but you keep telling yourself, Go!, You keep telling yourself: desire.

—

Waiting: according to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (copyright 1997), vb. 1: to remain inactive in readiness of expectation.

Otherwise: this Other, as mine, without the wise (copyright 2012), vb. 2: to insist in anticipation, to let the cracks of realization open up to enlightenment; to be as Janus as possible, and still, to see the bigger picture without becoming dead to the moment.

Project Timeline: Last Half of 4 Parts

I.

Her son will remember her roses; and as he protests poetry is lost on him, he forgets their thorns.

II.

She is only a story now, the old woman who made crema and wrote on them the names of the dead. They were sweetest for the youngest grandchildren who knew nothing of the gentle ruin of egg shells like the streets after being treated by the fingers of an earthquake, cracked to produce the softest of creams.

III.

At first her grandchildren will think her story is short—a precise if unknown beginning, a chaotic middle, a definite end. Later, when they themselves are stretched by time they will know the length of the wrinkle that ran from the skin of her forehead, down her neck, and deeper, right through her heart.

IV.

They will begrudge the growing up she gifted to her son, their father, in all the stretches of the barely there love. In the faded sepia photos they will not care to preserve, she has carefully folded her soul: then, in the 20’s and 30’s when no smiles graced photographs she is stern, and her blood the generations later, will wonder why it is so difficult, even in the Technicolor of mixed media, to smile for the camera.

V.

Now, a garden with no roses (and thereby not a thorn): instead the wild bush of grass or brown mud when the season’s dry. Her daughter-in-law (now simply just a mother) grew orchids that became tiresome, that became imprints on childhood photographs. Never before a garden wishing to be fertile, but all the blossoms in the past, they all smell so fragrant, and so are gone.

_

I.

But it is only one heartbeat, now. There is a singularity in the many words. A person is made up of all of other people’s stories, and then just her own. In the wonder of alone is the power of one. Past fragmentation, to be whole, but not whole without the fragments, there is really only just her.

Project Timeline: 2 of 4 Parts

I.

At seven, this was the exhaustion: her father’s strict face with the fault lines—the illusion that all fathers are such, and her mother, too, by his side in the early years, while the household waited in what her first memories thought was a kind of freedom. Toil and labor were, after all, only just places her parents went off too.

II.

It was also, exhilaration: the breeze around her in a game of tag, breathlessness that was the fruit of limbs and steps on the concrete of the school floor. The sudden thought and later, realization, that the bell that tolls at the end of recess is more difficult to hear and take to heart, when school has finished and all hopscotch and Marco Polo games are done.

III.

The belief that the breath let out after the empty glasses and heavy music has lapsed—the startling discovery that a set of notes can excite fever, excitement: the discovery of thrill, too, ends in her wariness. Of tired bodies, and a mind still so naïve, fed with the belief that nights must be stayed up late for. It is exhaustion the drum beats inspire her to work for.

IV.

Later, just new ways to breathe that leave her tired out: all the words expected to be spoken by the young people who, knowing everything, love themselves broken. Later: just to breathe, and think, and say: I am not tired, I would just like something else.

V.

The exhaustion of explaining yourself. And then later on, of simply not.

—

V.

The handles and cracks on his wife’s kitchenware, the old kettle that hardly whistles as the water boils and the Teflon frying pan that now looks like a soup bowl, are the things he must tinker with. Tools and toys of trade surround him, old mechanic of fatherhood days. To his left the tools for the car, the scattered screws and the memory of grease-stained fingers. To his right the last few things of an eternal house, pots and pans that needs be replaced, fixed over and over beyond repair.

IV.

His son’s life bore the same complexity of the future that would not be dismantled. It is one where he cannot control nor comprehend the mechanics of the Internet, and online choices made over a non-virtual experience lie heavy on his steadily drooping brows. His straight back more a symbol of stubbornness meeting difficulty of his own son, his flesh too and his bones, then of healthy happiness that sustains age, the way roads upon roads of circles choose, are chosen, by his child.

III.

Like the endless strain of togetherness, the santol falls bang-bang-bang! On the rooftop. Tomes of disturbance, eerie remembrances that in pregnant pauses is always the danger of the next few words that will be said: on lazy afternoons, that lull shatters as another fruit comes hurtling down from the tree he and his wife planted so hopefully, without the sun.

The fruits fall and awaken his tired children at night, the uneaten becoming clutter in a backyard so sweet it smells of rot. He picks as many as he can, climbing on the rooftop, hand outstretched to pluck them. By afternoon, he is burned by the sun and the tree looks bare, until he comes down and the next santol falls heavy on the ground.

A torrent of heaviness too ripe to still hold on, so fruitful in fact, there is no such thing as peace at last until the tree is cut down.

II.

The truck is still and calm in the night, while the rice simmers on the side of the street. They are hungry, and the grains will be warm and soft with the cold viand on their fingers. The sacks of uncooked rice await the ride on his shoulders when the sun rises. Then they will learn what downturn luck struck their engine. He will pass by countrysides on his unpredictable Pegasus, the beast-of-unperturbable-sleep-tonight. His companions will talk idly, men whose faces he will never see again, donned later in slacks and a a collared shirt.

Later, the truck will slow down, nuts and bolts under three pairs of hands and years after, he will point out to his daughter stalled trucks and drivers asleep inside, waiting for the night to pass.

I.

But he must run along now, he is late for school. At home, yesterday the Sunday, he and his family feasted on chicken, sucking the last meat and skin from the bones, six children and parents and one pot of soup. Extended with liver, with what vegetables his mother could find, it is the recipes he tells his wife of while eating her meals, of the taste so lost he is still desiring the piquancy of long gone days. Running, he marks the long dusty road lined with mabolo trees, the fruits his snacks to school. The days are hot, and so is the long road, and when he returns home he will fix and make the shoebox, and the pieces of wood, and love his toys, break them, too, but that is forgiven. Tomorrow, he will fix them again.

—

There must be a better way to entitle these fragments. But various reasons for an almost-lull: because I am late in updating (fear, antibiotics–understanding, if only briefly and tangentially, the inability to control body), I’ve posted 2 out of 4 and now thinking if the 4th is worth an extension.