A bathroom scene. At this moment, he wished the tiles were tatami. There was no record of the past in this white tiny room, he thinks. As if it has taken the guise of a lonely planet floating in space spun out of orbit, without origin or history, with no known destination or trajectory. Just the push and pull of magnetic fields of two heavenly bodies and the suspension of disbelief. Today, there is no difference between seclusion and solitude. The four walls create a space pod for a single astronaut floating aimlessly in space. He lights up a cigarette. The smoke lingers below the fluorescent light hanging like Polaris. He spits on the drainage.
A pool of saliva, an alien material from his body, and a vessel of trust and bitter memories.
This is a breathing exercise. He inhales, his lungs soften for a bit, trying to hold a whirlpool inside him. His mouth cools. He is a water bearer after all. He exhales and the world began to seem as distant as a light-year. The smoke, unnamed nebulae under the lightbulb.
“I swore to the heavens / I swore to the sea / I swore that I'd make you / Stay with me”
A universe aborted. Ourselves the Elves plays from the speaker above the old washing machine. A memory plays in his head, a familiar tone of voice he cannot seem to remember at a place he would never forget—inside a bus three hours from home, the warmth of her hand, the scent of home emanating from her body now becoming a taste of abandonment and the words of a false prophet... The vagueness is a comfort from the pain. The unnameability of things and the residual pleasure of unknowingness. There are no tears this time but pure emotion. Somewhere, she is kissing another man. There is warmth on the cigarette smoke that slowly envelops him, like a womb—and suddenly, he feels like a baby once again. Stillborn. He will still be dead once he gets out of this.
The womb, a tomb.
This is a meditation on commitment. He inhales once again, watching the embers flare up from the end of the cigarette. That slow, ephemeral glow of faith in feeling and watching your own breathing. He exhales, and what comes out is trust and an unsuccessful leap of faith. The smoke summons a familiar view but his sight is getting worse. From the farther end of the bathroom, a meter away, is the horizon. She was that horizon, on her bed with another man. The inch-long mold of ashes that resemble a light-year distance is still attached to the stick. He does not want to break the mold so he let it stay, latch. Upon making that decision, it started to break. Love was never about emotions but belief. Days gone spent alone and he remembers her talking about connections. What he did know is that she meant distance and cover-ups.
“Lost and filled with regret / I'll find you / Aided by a memory map”
The song shifted and the bathroom became a temple for a goddess who will never return. He lights another stick that serves as an incense. Buddhism after all is a religion of detachment. But he is a heretic and his name is anathema. He believes in piety through the practice of sacrilege. He inhales, a prayer for himself, from a poem by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta: Let a cigarette/ Right an average/ Sadness. And/ For every hundred// Poems the poet/ writes, there/ Is a lady/ Who never arrives. Then, he exhales a different poem, of the same poet:
“I want things hard. I want things true./ How can I go on loving you knowing/ now as I do// There are other ways of leaving./ Knowing edges by hand, hardness, the/ world. The end of loving you// Was the beginning of the world.”
He is fond of addicted to the sacred and profane. He believes in the profanity of gods and goddesses. The myth-making of ourselves and the paradox of their inaccessibility. Their absence is what constitutes their presence, that lie, that pretense, that illusion, thus belief, thus disillusionment, thus faith, thus love. That, is his practice for his own religion, in that order. As of now, he knows because he can smell her impending destruction as he has always done before but she hates it. As if a ruin bids welcome to the birth of another ruin, he says, Welcome home. It is not he who has gone. What remains, remains. It is just a matter of time.
Like the smell of the cigarette smoke in his dominant hand that stays after washing with soap. Like the smell of fish that lingers in his dominant hand after washing with soap.
After realizing he’s had enough, he placed his last cigarette butt along with the other two. The day has already passed before noon. But he is not moving. The world moves for him, he thinks. He works his way to ride different tides, at different places, in different time zones, alone in his head. For the coming years, still, he would not know the concept of family for he will always be sporadic as a sunset. What he requires is a companion that resembles the touch of afternoon sunlight kiss on his skin. He sits on a line that separates sidewalks from her dormitory. It was a line that always points towards her, such as in a compass, the True North. He trusts the world and the Earth’s magnetic field but he blames falling in love with gravity. What gravity is but the warping of space and time but what warps space and time in his own dimension is her laughter and tenderness from her index finger when she traced the veins on his right arm and said that she would love to pierce an IV into his skin. With a heavy heart, he stood from the toilet—a temporary throne for all the mess he has made and become. It was, after all, isolation that rescues him from all this wreckage like a jammed eject button from a crashing jet. He has said his prayers. The smoke still lingers inside the bathroom, like a foam supporting his suppressed weight as he is trying to hold it all in, its madness and crushing pressure on his chest, cushioning his being from the raging storm made of sunshine outside. His longing is translated into the deepest melancholy, sung by Humpback Whales. It is October and the tiled floor feels like tundra. What warmth is, is now foreign to him. The smoke fulfills his solitude. He wonders how Pessoa feels when he’s left alone. Every room is a planet, he thinks. Just like the title of the last film he watched with a former lover two years ago. What lies outside the door is a vacuum. Entrapment has become his second skin like a man with leprosy. Hardening. Providing comfort in the guise of someone else’s embrace. Rectifying, somehow. He took his clothes off. Demarcation, he said to himself. Since no one is there to listen. He found out that company, for most people, is for lonely people. What he needs is a love that burns. For a while, it did. For him, it still does, but fainter than the light from a cigarette that fights in its own will to live for its own sake.
There is no more steam rising from his hands, perhaps there still is but it comes out as the fog of ice. A condensed, thick layer of air. A cold embrace from himself.