eye, lid.

We each have a dark thing that only comes to us in times of great depression, and mine came some Novembers ago. In the time of the year when the weather could not decide between being a punishingly hot rainy season or an annoyingly wet summer, it came to me in the form of a man, claiming to be my true father.

“Son. Son, son, son,” there was considerable tremor in its voice as it told me this, its dirt-rimmed fingers digging hard into my shoulders. In a voice bordering on screaming as if he was hard of hearing or wearing headphones, he said, “I... see you.”

Breath that held Death and Decay captive for centuries hurled storms onto my face. Panic was salvation, Panic kept me awake.
The noontime crowd flowed around us as water would navigate around a stick stabbed in the middle of a stream, heedless to my nightmare.

It was wrapped equally in rags and its own hair, and all the dirt both parts have amassed over a long time.

Its eyes, though. Specifically, the wounds in place of them, a pair of gaping doors to the same abyss housed in a body mistaken as human. Empty pools rimmed with torn skin, long-dried blood blackened by time, infection with all that pus. All the grimy hair could not curtain, or refused to.

“Take those off. We’re not them. You're not them. See me, too, son, see me, too. See the universe,” it told me in haymakers of breaths, right as Fear shoved Confusion aside, thundering in like a god to lend me a moment’s strength to fly. I pushed myself out of the thing’s grip. I picked myself off the initial stumble. I ran a long time until the last gasp of breath abandoned me. No, I did not dare look back at it, but I knew. I could not unsee it. A permanent streak of spilled ink, blackest ink, running across my memories.

But the truth was I have not seen it. I have not experienced it. Not then.

.:.

Depression peaked when I lost her, but it had been growing over the past years. I could have let it take over every cell that was I, I could have had my true self take his leave, have Depression put on the entire body and run the Life. It may have been easy to let it find an exit out of all this.

But no. I did not want that.

I picked one of the thinner spoons out of her silverware collection. It seemed like the one we used to taste soup as it cooked, never one of those that made it to the dining table.

Could you have imagined such a mundane eating utensil to have such an extremely good command of pain when applied onto the human eye?

The first bloody globe finally rid itself of the last stubborn nerve and dribbled around the sink. I thought of a fish plucked off the water, the nature of draining energy from the living body to synch like dance and song heading towards the end of their mutual existence. I wondered if this was a dream. If it was, I remained asleep.

I started on the other.

.:.

Darkness, then Light.

It began with Vision.

How do you describe color to someone who had never perceived it? I could start with pointing at a small portion in the sky, telling you it was “less azure” than the portion on its immediate left. But each centimeter of expansion would demand a new measure of comparison, and I would have to name each new color for you, and after a couple of million I would have given up. It would be comparable to building a network of religions, and I do not have the motivation to instill Faith, the one ingredient required for anyone who's not of my kind to believe in the Truth.

The world itself was a welcome party to my birth, the sights a glorious parade not unlike a mesh of a thousand years of Sinulog.

Sound followed: the horrified voices coming out of the shells of what I used to call fellow men. But even then, all their emotions dispersed across waves of music vibrating from everything, even from every wisp of air hanging, hovering, floating around.

Scent and touch came next, the elusive couple harder to define, and you know how it is. Man learned to record sight and sound but never scent nor touch. I began with feeding a lingering human hunger to try, to let you know, but Pity came to me in a wind pattern of three thousand, nine hundred, and eleven different colors, twice the number of different tunes, and in as many scents and textures. I knew then that all I could give you was a sad look barely masked with a slight smile.

.:.

It came at the summit of my birth's celebration , shearing through the shells of who, or what, I called fellow men: you. Unfortunate creations with only darkness beneath your spherical blindfolds.

It was pulsating with a billion sights, patterns, melodies, and everything you thralls never could. Amplifying all those and surrounding elements as it got closer.

I called out to it. My voice, my words, were alien, but familiar, and deliciously richer.

“Father. Father, father, father.”



2018.feb.08

‘cause you wrote a confession on her palm when she wanted your name; better yet you should have written the plan instead

i. alternate ending

Twilight, spiked with sake for the gods, did not have the magic to have her take his memories.

The price that took form of losing each other’s name, at what purchase was it attached to, then? Certainly not the blueprints of his terrorism. Or the fate that befell a city bicycle that took her halfway to here, while having to suffer a trail beaten down for mountain bikes and people on foot.

She was confused. How could one hang on to sanity when your last memory before this dream-like dusk was of the festival of falling comet shards over windswept grass fields? True, their minds had taken turns at driving each other’s bodies, but as dancers do - weaving across the floor, deftly flowing out of each other’s way, guiding the other, but always with a chasm separating them, never together on the same precipice.

So she stood there at the lip of the crater, behind her the lonely green paradise it encircled, the rock shelter of gods. Before her, the breathtaking lake whose beauty she had grown to take for granted. The town she always wanted to toss over her slender shoulders, all of the first some-teen years of her life she could not wait to leave behind.

Death. Death was falling upon her world, her mind nagged at her. But her now-questionable memories confined her where she stood, the uncertainty stemmed from him living as her on that day she had already lived. It threatened to overlap and mock whatever is left of her reality. For instance, the question of how her hair got cut short that day: was her memory false now, had he overwritten this day but left it clinging to her like a phantom only she could see? Or, was it even the same festival day, was it even the same comet?

And it must have took him forever to get her up here. The exhaustion it taxed on her body kept her rooted where she stood and demanded she gave in, and it was just too easy to fall to her knees, and wait for the end of the world.


ii. alternate epilogue

She was not where the rocks from heaven landed.

But the lot death had taken from her, abetted by her psyche’s state of already skating over the slippery ice of this mind-switching mistaken for romance, had broken her. They found her sporting an empty gaze, wandering around the edge of the water where her town used to be.

No, she did not return to his city. They found her a comfortable bed where they cared for her and others like her, until weeks later when no one was looking, she went into the younger of two lakes and walked to the bottom to sleep and rest, knowing in three years he would come and restart the torment.


2017.feb.01

This was from last year, when I was still bothered by the plot hole in the ending of Shinkai Makoto's anime your name.