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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

I live under a sky without stars.

The night feels unhinged, dislocated. The air is too warm for comfort. Mosquitoes abound, but I’m not afraid of being bitten or getting sick because they would sooner die from my caffeinated blood and nicotine lungs.

I try to make sense of the past few days, not realizing that it is already Thursday. I’ve been living inside a story for almost two weeks, hibernating again within the cave of my own imaginings. A good friend asks me where I’ve been, why she hasn’t heard from me. I could only offer the flimsiest of excuses knowing that the truth would make no sense.

G fishes me out from time to time, but he is more courageous than he knows: he sits with me inside the cave, and tries to grasp the illusion that has consumed the hours. He sends me recordings for inspiration, for good luck. He sends them to remind me that I’m not alone in my madness. 

The story is coming along but I’ve hit a snag, and it is absolutely frustrating. Perhaps I’m merely delaying the inevitable. Still though, I can’t wait to wake up when it’s done. 

writing personal journal prose theorchestraofmadness
I know you’re never going to believe any of this.
I’ve known you long enough to be certain that somehow, as you are reading this, a part of you could not help but laugh, not out of malice, but because that’s simply how things are between us: The...

I know you’re never going to believe any of this.

I’ve known you long enough to be certain that somehow, as you are reading this, a part of you could not help but laugh, not out of malice, but because that’s simply how things are between us: The years have been filled with laughter, sugar-high drinks, and words.

So on the day you stopped laughing for a while, I wondered where you had gone. Who took the laughter away from the only person whose rainbows and unicorns I had allowed to enter the great and dark fortress of my heart. For a moment, I vowed to cripple that person who had taken the laughter from your eyes and replaced it with something sad, something alien and strange and totally unlike the woman I have come to know. I had thought about hurting this person until he begged for the end to come, for the apocalypse to dawn on his very soul, and I would be there, watching and laughing as the torment continued, for he took something so precious to me that not even his screams of agony could pay for that which he stole.

And then you started to talk, under the mellow lights of a quiet coffee shop, in a city you have never been in but braved anyway, about how you believed he was still a kind person, not a bad person at all. Just someone lost, full of himself, someone young and unsure and insecure, and he wasn’t that terrible at all. At that moment, as you talked about the story of your broken heart, I must have imagined you glowing, for in my eyes you seemed to be more colourful than all the other planets scattered in the universe. Brighter than all the stars and the shades that emerge from a fractured prism. I could not explain how someone who has had their heart broken could look at life still with so much hope and understanding. How someone who had been abandoned without any proper explanation could still find it in herself to look at this deserter with such unending compassion. And I knew then, as I watched the night fall, that perhaps destiny led us to meet because someone had to let me see beyond the darkness of my own soul.

I don’t know if you will believe me when I say that you are more beautiful than you would ever think. That your heart is bigger than the galaxies I’ve dreamed of in my insufferable solitude. I don’t know if you’d believe me when I say you deserve to be loved by someone who is just as colourful, as grandiose in spirit, and that you’d find him in this life one way or another.

But I do.

theorchestraofmadness letters to a friend journal prose writing

Sundays

are sacred, surprising, and sometimes sad.

The thought of Monday lingers, and if I were to be completely honest with myself, it comes with dread, lethargy, fear and excitement–all in equal measure.

But I am, as always, getting ahead of myself.

I try to remember that it is Sunday, that it is sacred, that I am free to be selfish for at least one day of the week. That I can think about something else other than work, the pitfalls of being an adult, the frustrations of one who continues to desperately chase after dreams. That without the sublime Sunday air, the rest of the week will never be the same–everything disengaged, dislocated…

Doomed.

So even if Sundays don’t always go my way, I’m still glad that it happens, that I have always been given the choice to make it happen despite all the other things that could easily derail this slow-cruising train.

Today, there are oven-fresh cupcakes, brewed coffee, the laughter of family, the soothing voice of a beloved.

theorchestraofmadness prose writing sundays journal
My heart is a rusty little thing.
I am even more plugged in these days, wired to my seat, hands bolted on the mouse and the keys. Eight hours, twelve hours, sixteen hours… I log in like clockwork despite the lack of sleep, lack of peace, the haunting...

My heart is a rusty little thing. 

I am even more plugged in these days, wired to my seat, hands bolted on the mouse and the keys. Eight hours, twelve hours, sixteen hours… I log in like clockwork despite the lack of sleep, lack of peace, the haunting tick-tock of the clock that shrieks deadlines, deadlines, DEAD-LINES. Even in conversations, I answer in auto-reply, in practiced spiels. 

They have turned me into a machine.

My mind gets exhausted. My bones creak. My fingers cramp. My eyes burn and bleed. But they still think I am a machine.

Well now, darling dictator, I’m slowly running out of energy. I am doing this out of need, out of love. Love powers my engine, but even cars run out of gas. What do you think I am?

Oh right–you think I am a machine.

One day, I will rise above you, into the stars that look upon me not as a machine but as a human being. I will rise above you and your stupid, tiny world that panders to your every whim. One day, I’ll sail into space, into the vast dreamscape that your closed little soul will never dare explore. By then I would not need to smile at you with my mercurial teeth, my steel grin. I will have no need for you and I can forget about you, fully, finally.

Darling dictator of doom, when that time comes, I will no longer be your machine, your little puppet whose strings you could pull at your beck and call. I promise you this.

I am not a machine.

theorchestraofmadness journal personal prose i am not a machine writing

(Part 1, Part 2)

Jackie called.

She did not sound like a girl.

I normally would not have answered the call, but I recognized Jackie’s number and thought maybe she ought to know. She was wasting her time, and I needed to clear my inbox and call log soon. 

“Hello?” I do my best Helena Bonham-Carter imitation because there was no one else I’d rather pretend to be at that moment.

“Mark?” she said in a timid voice.

“Who?”

Jackie lowers her voice even more and the only word I could pick up was “Mark.”

“There’s no Mark here, love. I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

I drop the call and go back to watching Sengoku Basara Season 2 because it was a Sunday and I deserved to lie in bed and let my mind wander off to ancient Japan on steroids.

A small part of me wonders whether Jackie will try other numbers, hoping that one of them would finally lead her to Mark. We step out of each other’s lives just like that, and I expect never to hear from her again.

I pause the video and head outside for a cigarette break. My shoulders were aching. All afternoon until way into the evening, I had been lying on my side, watching, gushing, squeeing, holding my breath. Apparently, while I was indulging on Japanese history, the rest of the nation was watching a debate between presidential candidates on national television. For a moment, it sparked my interest, but I wasn’t going to aggravate myself over lies and lies and lies.

That night, before sleeping, I went to the kitchen to grab myself a glass of water–to ward off the nightmares. I found my brother staring at a watermelon.

“What are we gonna do with this watermelon?” he asks.

“I dunno,” I shrug.

“If we leave it there too long, it might turn into a coconut.”

theorchestraofmadness prose writing journal musings the saga of jackie and mark
After a long time of not seeing each other, an old friend gives me this poster. It is perhaps the closest I could get to one of my favourite Japanese bands, which I had been following since high school. I tape the poster to my bedroom wall, a little...

After a long time of not seeing each other, an old friend gives me this poster. It is perhaps the closest I could get to one of my favourite Japanese bands, which I had been following since high school. I tape the poster to my bedroom wall, a little heartbroken that I might never see them live.

I was unable to watch the cinema screening either, for back then I had no job, no money, and the only currency I had was my pride. I have a treasure trove of it, but it doesn’t pay for anything.

On the night I received this poster, my friends and I went to two nearby bars in a city we’d always call home no matter where we were, drank like we just came from the desert and smoked like factories from the Industrial Revolution. In the morning, I had one of the worst hangovers of my life.

There’s always a small hint of rainbows in this black-and-white world. I call it forever and goodbye.

theorchestraofmadness prose writing journal musings memories l'arc~en~ciel friends leaving

(Part 1)

Jackie’s back. She asks me how I am and if I remember. She starts her sentence with two periods, followed by two smileys, and a lowercase letter. I look at the word remember again, surprised that she spelled it right and ended it with the correct punctuation.

She gives me two calls. Except I left my phone inside my room, and a part of me wonders if she will call again, and how I would break it to her that I am not Mark and I remember nothing about meeting her, or selling her “scarp.”

I begin to wonder about them both, Jackie and Mark–two characters who accidentally made a tiny appearance in my everyday life. Two strangers who I will never know, and have no interest to, save perhaps for the fact that I continue to become fascinated with this little saga of short, mistaken messages, if it will all end up as a trilogy.

I toss my phone back on the bed and shuffle to the kitchen to make coffee.

(Part 3)

theorchestraofmadness the saga of jackie and mark prose writing musings journal
Five years ago, this was home.
Yesterday, I came back, feeling exactly the same way I did the first time I set foot here: I am transported not just to another place, but to another time. I am away from the rest of the world, and it is strange, scary...

Five years ago, this was home.

Yesterday, I came back, feeling exactly the same way I did the first time I set foot here: I am transported not just to another place, but to another time. I am away from the rest of the world, and it is strange, scary and delightful. 

It is exactly where I should be.

So many things have changed from the way I remembered it–new buildings, spots that have been completely renovated, restaurants that weren’t there when I was around, places that have been walled up as if they never even existed. But even then, my heart is filled with those lost things and lost places, for I have loved each one with equal measure; even though they will now exist only in my imagination and in the memories of those with whom I have shared them.

Conversations, laughter, the perpetual stream of footsteps, hot afternoons, cold nights, a mild quake, Christmas fireworks, the splashing of fountain water, whispers, the shuffling of notebooks and photocopied papers, words spoken and better left unsaid, silence–I know all the corners in which each one was made, and they remain like small dots in the puzzle-map of my soul. Send me to one of those spots and I will tell you what happened there, who adopted a cat, which path we took when it rained as if the sky had no mercy, what we were having for lunch, how much loose change I had in my pocket, who we were watching from afar, where we sat down for a while when we were drunk, sad, joyful or alone. I’ll tell you where we waited for miracles to happen, where we fought, where we hid from anyone who would figure out we were cutting class, where we told each other secrets. 

A different time. Different people. Same sky.

Thinking about all these things, I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen the sky outside of my village for ten months. And I haven’t seen the Manila sky in five years. 

theorchestraofmadness prose writing memories musings UST university of santo tomas journal

Early morning. Uncaffeinated.

I am texted by an unknown number. Apparently my name is now Mark, I bought “scarp” from Jackie, and I am cute. She informs me that all her numbers are available. She asks me where I work. She spells a kiss with double Js. The message, short as it is, registers in my brain like a puzzle that the keypad spewed out after a night of binge drinking. I wonder if the sender used her forehead to type instead of her fingers. 

I run to the kitchen, relieved to find that coffee is already brewing. Perhaps the caffeine would help me cope with these little intrusions from the outside world. I take the first sip, feeling a bit closer to finally becoming human for a time. But someone sends me a chat message with another stupid question, and I wonder which vortex this person’s common sense has been irredeemably sucked into.

I wander off into the veranda, which is perhaps the farthest I could get away from my tiny space, my office, my room. In the distance, I could hear old songs drifting from a radio. A thin sheet of white noise and bad signal breathes over the wind. Other sounds make it into my bubble of existence: Cars, motorcycles, people walking their dogs, dogs walking their humans, humans talking in a volume best suited for conversation across mountains. There is so much turbulent wakefulness around me that I feel as though the weekday has never left. 

I envy our cats lazing about in the garage. Nothing excites them at the moment. They sprawl themselves over the ground with nary a care for the world. Later on, when my grandmother comes home from the grocery, I discover the scene of a recent murder: A small rat lies dead near our gate. 

The world goes on without stopping. 

(Part 2)

theorchestraofmadness prose writing journal musings

The wind blows coolly from where I sit, as if winter is just about to begin in this strange part of the world that knows nothing about the snow. The closest we could get to experiencing snow is perhaps when we gaze at the clouds and feel their white, infinite softness fall ever so slowly… but not quite. Or maybe the ashes from a cigarette would suffice, their tiny crumbling forms–fire-stained murky snow–ferried gently away by the wind.

The world around me stirs with agonizing slowness. It is almost night. I can feel darkness beginning. The lights dim slowly. A part of me longs for summers lost, when we could walk home from school and feel the fingers of sunset touch the world and those beyond it. Now, I hardly go out. I am constantly plugged in a dream of monochrome. My body remains in place yet my mind wanders off into the landscapes of memory.

And I do not know if that is the best place to get lost in, especially when it’s this cold.

theorchestraofmadness prose memory musings writing journal thoughts