Because Jam is Racing Against Sunbeams

French-kiss the morning
It is your favorite time of the day.
In those few minutes between slumber and the shower, you feel a faint embrace of the warm dawn air. It lingers as you try to hold on to remnants of your dream, and suddenly bursts as the phone utters a shrill reminder.
As the hours plod forward, your dream wisps into the haziness of your recollection, and you are left with a warm, brilliant smile and eyes aching to protect.

Pray to the god of sex and drums and rock n’ roll
The heavy bass line thrums through your system, undulates and uncoils like a sweet summer wind. It takes a moment for the beat to pick up, and soon you see yourself in a roomful of people, slick sweat and lust redolent in the air. It is not merely a dance; it is the clash and the kismet of a hundred souls, gyrating for lost wishes and unfulfilled dreams and aching, bursting rebirth.
With upraised arms and a shuttered gaze, you join in the fervent ritual.
As the last guitar solo twangs into a yearning silence, you open your eyes and see your bedroom once more.
Few think you’d be the type to bump and grind.

Make the rocking world go round
You thought you could make a difference.
You still might. You’re young, after all. So what if you’re not slaying metaphorical, political dragons, saving damsels and the demographics from the tyranny of antediluvian laws and practices? Heck, some people made their mark past death!
Even as you rationalize, however, the years of youth—and that of hope, and change, and wrinkle-free skin—are slowly slipping away, and you squander them all in mediocrity.

Find a stairway to heaven
You’ve spoken about it a lot. Cried buckets to your unobservant best friend, mentioned Frost and snowy evenings in passing, routinely discussed the best methods.
Still, they think you won’t do it. A cry for attention, some think; spoiled little brat. Others say that your Catholic upbringing has permanently imprinted hellfire and damnation on your skull should you attempt to try. The few who knew you at the edge of seventeen know you won’t do it, if only for the memory of a bright-eyed sylph who faded far too soon.
You just want to be happy.

Fly to the moon and back
You just want to be happy.
Stocking up on impossible hopes and dreams, however, seems to preclude reality, and lead weights of guilt and reason drag you down back into the stratosphere.
Crash-landing seems inevitable.

21 sentences for a 21-year-old dreamer

(Clearly, in desperate need for an intervention)

1. Yell
On the nights when her mother shrieks and wails and she can’t do anything to help, she quietly cries in her room.
2. Roulette
It seems so easy, she thinks, to let it all slip away, and her mind allows the possibilities were she to play that game with her life; lately, she’s been gambling more and more.
3. Klaxon
In the weeks immediately following the day she nearly killed a man, and the odd day after, she wakes in terror at the sound of a horn.
4. Mirror
In her mind, inner has always trumped outer, and she searches her reflection in vain for some semblance of beauty within.
5. Vomit
As she spews the remains of the day and her stomach pulses and heaves, disjointed statistics on poverty and anecdotes on poor little girls (because needy and poor aren’t one and the same) collapse and congeal in her head.
6. Communication
She was once told she was a hard person to love by one of the people she loved most in the world, and for this reason, and many others, silence lays thick between them; the irony is made complete when she enters her course.
7. Pedal
Someday, when a souped-up motorcycle lies between salvation and a thirty-ton tyrannosaurs rex, she will end up regretting she never learned how to bike.
8. Hand
She hates incompetence, she hates stupidity, she hates the slack-jawed expression on her classmates’ faces, but most of all she hates that crestfallen look on her professor’s face; and so she raises her hand, hating they’ll now brand her a arrogant snotty know-it-all.
9. Fatalism
She believes that whatever Power-that-Is likes to toy with her for Its own sick amusement, and addresses Murphy as if he were an old friend.
10. Ate (Greek)
If she were born in another time and place, she would have made a fine Amazon, right breast notwithstanding.
11. Ate (Filipino)
Many have remarked on their similar mannerisms, some had raised eyebrows on their sibling spats, yet few know that she would murder—eviscerate, disembowel, and make a party hat out of innards—anyone who dared touch a hair on her sisters’ heads.
12. Romantic
She knows waiting for the right one would be utterly idiotic, but she can’t bring herself to pretend about the boys around her even just a little.
13. Nun
When she’s not the smartest or the most artistic or musically talented or prettiest or even the most capable, she wonders if being the most socially aware counts for something in her odd little family.
14. Picture
She doesn’t want to admit to missing them, because dammit they were the ones who hurt her, and shouldn’t they be crawling on their hands and knees after all she’s done for them, yet she still can’t delete the image of two smiling girls.
15. Funeral
In her personal life soundtrack, she had just recently crossed off “Another One Bites the Dust” from her dirge list.
16. Superhero
She prepares elaborate scenarios and backup plans for if and when her cover identity is blown, and most of them aren’t serious.
17. Maiden
A secret suspicion is that she’ll end up being the crabby old virgin with twenty cats; this pisses her off, but mostly because she’d prefer dogs.
18. Roulette (II)
In an entrance exam to another college long ago, she threw her life to the wind and devoted her essay to detailing extraterrestrial life forms in tertiary education; it utterly nonplussed her when said school recommended her for advanced placement.
19. Zephyr
She wants to run and never look back, and drink in the beauty of the world in her wake.
20. Security blanket
Sometimes, change terrifies her, so she keeps her mouth closed and her burdens heavy.
21. Change
But life still goes one, and eventually she shuts out all the clamoring inner voices and goes.

There’s a reason I’ve never had a love life (and his name is Murphy)

(no judgment. Please.)

Artiste

You met him in class. You—young, fresh-faced, naïve (dense). He—effeminate, poetic, apparently interested in the same gender. Coming from a nearly convent-like existence, and with a nearly bone-deep wariness of testosterone, you deemed him safe.

Little did you know that your cousin and several other acquaintances fell for the same trick.

It did not go down well when you saw the pictures on his website.

Jock

Your fellow virgins (never-been-touched, never-been-kissed, never0been-out-on-a-date) have certain “types.” One, a friend with Amazon-like proportions, always falls for beautiful boys shorter than her (and the average man). Another likes a touch of “ruggedness”—for her, a leather jacket will suffice. One sister want manly footballers, another erudite pretty men with snobbish, Mr. Darcy airs.

You never thought you’d fall for an athlete. But the very first thing you noticed, about the very first boy you nearly gave your heart to, was not his wit or his poems to another girl (that came later).

His arms were iron.


Gravelly

When you first heard his deep voice in a school meeting, you thought, “Hurrah. Handsome. Intelligent, because he’s in this university. Straight, despite being in this college. Dear girl, there may be hope for you yet.”

Alas, when you shyly confessed your infatuation to your persistent friend, as the object of your affections strides past…

“___? He’s GAY!”

Your track record remains unchanged.


Boss man

In an online conversation, you and your fellow flighty friend (though she doesn’t quite look it) giggle over a man—more out of something to do, though, than any real attraction. You dissect his habits, speculate about his love-life, and cringe (or laugh heartlessly, depending on the girl) about recent events. In one sheer stroke of stupidity, you post it on your online journal.

And forget that he’s as tech-savvy as the two of you.


Asthma

It is the best and worst moment, sexually speaking, of your young life.

In moments like these, and the ones that follow, you wonder if the fates purposely mess with you for their sick amusement.

The bare expanse of flesh. The mutual friend (and his subsequent message). What the mutual friend saw the summer ago.

When you retell the story, a year after, to someone who turns out to be his second cousin, you conclude.

Murphy is a bloody rat bastard.

A Trip to Tagaytay

(All pictures are my sister's. Because.)

Rooster

There was a chicken crossing the road.

It doesn’t exactly belong to anyone. Your sister, on an earlier visit, chased it around and took pictures of its brood of chicks strutting on pavement.

While your friends made the same jokes, you thought back on the story you once wrote, and snicker a little.

Birds and revolution don’t exactly mesh, do they?

Fog

It is two hours past midnight when you point it out to your best friend, and both of you stand up and look outside.

There’s no one around, not for miles, and the sole streetlamp paints the one neighboring, empty house in a yellow haze.

The smoke makes you both stare for a few seconds. And then your best friend turns away, and leaves you contemplating the chiaroscuro.

In your fertile, overactive imagination, you imagine a stranger emerging from the gloom.


Makahiya

Whenever you see these plants—so named for their shyness—you are compelled to crush them. To see them slowly close up beneath your rubber shoes.

This may or may not be indicative of your inherent violent tendencies.


Ants

Because of the chilled bottles of vodka and mudshake, half-finished packs of chips and biscuits, the uninvited guests come crawling to the living room. Groggily, you pick up the bits and dispose of the visible crumbs, and waddle—inebriated, half-full of alcohol and junk—to your place in the sofa.

You and your friends then proceed to yodel on the microphone.

Ants, you think, are lucky that they can’t hear you.


Flowers

Your mom’s a frustrated interior designer, you tell your friends as you enter the house. They take in the immaculate walls, the artfully placed furniture, wooden curlicues and curios, and agree.

Then they see the photos, and ooh and aah over snaps of vibrant flora.

Oh, we took that, you tell them. Me and my film sister.

You’re quick to add they’re mostly from your film sister. Because honestly, you suck as a photographer.

Identity Crisis

I do not know who I am.

Jump!

I want to fall in love.

Clichés

I skulk in coffeeshops in vain.

Long walks on the beach

It’s ironic, that despite living in a tropical country, you can’t stand the turf n’ surf.

You look awful in a bathing suit. You always get sunburns on your skin. Sand—and crabs, and bits of broken glass, and polluted flotsam from the sea—stick to your toes. The sandcastles you build always get washed away, in an apt parallelism to dreams and wishes and plans you’ve made.

But when it’s quiet, and the moon sits atop the velvet black like a queen, as you watch the dark waves roll softly…

…Alone, you are content.

Crying in the rain

It’s kind of unfair that when fictional heroines do it, they do it prettily—eyes glimmering with leashed fire, clothing pressed damply to ample curves, skin lustrous because of a strategically placed streetlamp.

You blotch. The moment tears come, a sniffle is sure to follow, and before you know it, you have a full-fledged cold, and maybe, just maybe, an asthma attack.

(Breathe.)

And come to think of it, the rain is probably polluted as well.

Well, damn.

Wedding bells

At this age, Mother says, in another culture, you would have been married already!

You have a moment to think, “Holy cow, we’re allowed to date?” while your sister mouths to you, “Mrs. Bennet?”

So as your mother continues on her diatribe on suitors, the lack thereof, and her three older children’s apparent ineptitude with the other sex—

(She still doesn’t know about the stalkers you’ve had, not in detail, at least)

—you spend the rest of dinner daydreaming about wedding bells, and a possible Darcy.

Guys next door

You hate your village.

When you had to do a survey last year, it took two days (and it rained the entire first morning) before you could finally get enough answers. The only silver lining in that expedition was the two cute men living two blocks away from you.

Alas, it is not that kind of community where bake sales and basketball games let boys meet girls…or maybe it is. You, after all, are the hermit.

But who can blame you? Next-doors were your cousins, and a colonel who spent midnights cursing loudly into the phone.

Not a good combination.

Star-crossed lovers

Romeo and Juliet were idiots. It squicks you to realize Juliet was 13 (Dear God, eight years older, and STILL alone), and Romeo was a filthy little boy (glove upon your hand, indeed).

Tristan and Isolde are forever ruined because of James Franco, and while you adore Hades and Persephone—the Goth shtick works, to a certain degree—you have to wonder about her mother’s hold on her. Unnatural.

Cupid and Psyche. Too classic. Beren and Lúthien. Too eternal. Buffy and Angel. Too dead.

By the time you’ve ran out of pairs to emulate, you hope you’ve met you other, unrequited half soon.

A Trip to the Ayala Museum with Mimi

All photos taken from Ayala Museum's Website. Because I am Lazy.

Gold

Sometimes, people look in askance. Despite your mother’s business, you hardly wear jewelry—and if you do, they’re nearly always plastic.

You do appreciate gems, of course, just not in the way most people expect. As you stare at the glass cases, with sheer sheets of metal woven into intricate braids, you can almost see your ancestors’ lives imprinted in the yellow gleam. They’re in the richness of the royal regalia, the little circles and hoops of the elaborate earrings, the delicacy of paper-thin diadems…

Then you see the golden chastity guards, and your thoughts come to a screeching halt.

Diorama

All the world’s a stage, and all the men in it merely players.

You agree with Shakespeare, and thus, as you stare at the models depicting key moments in your country’s history, you think of the lives before you. The unsung heroes of unfinished revolutions. The statesmen, poets and statesmen-poets forever etched in the annals of elementary textbooks as black or white.

A brief glance at the full-scale heights of founding fathers makes you smirk.

Hey! You were taller than them! Haha!

Painting

Nothing transfixes you like a painting.

Even if your mother and those two art galleries say you’re talented, you know you haven’t got the skill or the time to produce a real face (or even a decent cartoon), so you stare at oils of pastures and beautiful women with a burning longing.

You imagine, in another place, another time, maybe you’d have packed your bags to dwell on the C’ote de Azur, or perhaps Paris, and live the life you’ve secretly always wanted, perfecting your art at the risk of all.

But then, you’d never survive as a starving artist, so when you come home you merely stare at your abstracts, and resolutely pick up the pencil.

Fossilize

Listening to “The Last Man” while thinking about 3-million-year-old three stumps is not a good combination.

It makes you think about life, and time, and how insignificant you are, in the scheme of things. It makes you dream about reincarnation, and Troo Luv, despite your Catholic upbringing.

And a line from a Rupert Brooke poem makes the romantic in you squeal:

“One mote of all the dust that’s I shall meet one atom that was you.”

Pottery

There are a lot of ceramics in glass cases.

It kind of makes you want to be a bull.

You chuckle out loud.

Band Candy

Muse

Your time is running out.

It’s so strange that the closer you get to your (deadliest) deadline, the more inspired you get…for other writings. As you pound out statistics and factoids from the keyboard, your mind is filled with imaginary maps and scripts for future comics.

You conclude your muse is essentially a schizophrenic witch.

Queen

Once, you wore a tiara to school.

Never mind your university has running priests and Zorros and annual naked men loitering around campus, and never mind your college is the most flamboyant of them all.

You wore a tiara. To class.

It was partly because of a dare, but you know better than that. You have a tendency to do these kinds of things, after all. Maybe it’s because you’re (not-so-secretly) guano crazy. Maybe it’s because you’re bored. Maybe it’s because, despite your pro-democracy and slightly-to-the-left leanings, you’re still the great pretender.

On your notebook: “I AM a pretty princess.”

The prosecution rests.

Rivermaya

Your mother grew up in a tiny, countryside town—your aunt told her Australian daughter it was “a ghetto”—and your dad was the type who would walk a mile from school just to use the toilet at home during breaks.

You, on the other hand, grew up a city girl, admittedly clueless in many, many things. But unlike so many others, you take the time to smell the metaphorical roses, and occasionally watch birds floating in stagnant water.

Because you know, in the blink of an eye, everything might change.

Brownman Revival

You exhibit certain aspects of your personality with different sets of acquaintances. The geeky side of you, the dork side reserved for lightsabers and fanciful ninja-pirate-princes, is known to a select few. You natter on about boys to girlfriends and gays, and babble about…well, everything to your sister.

It’s only when you reached college that you remembered the news and patriotism and issues, and the revival of your ideals was such you forgot not everyone cared for such conversation.

It cost you some friendships along the way.

But be cool. Be steady.

Maybe you were better off without them anyway.

The Smashing Pumpkins

It’s nearing Halloween again.

You used to love the holiday. As a little chubby thing, you would totter around the village, eagerly snatching up sweets, watch us the community suddenly turned into a host of witches, and goblins, and white sheets with holes cut out for eyes.

There was an annual contest for the residents’ children, with a prize going out for the best costume. In a photo, you look absolutely adorable as a bright orange pumpkin.

But your sister won the contest two years in a row, standing in the same garish purple fairy dress, basking in their love.

Life can be unfair.

Because I Enjoy Being It

(a girl, that is)

Dress

You wanted to be a fashion designer when you grew up.

Earlier, you wanted to be a model.

There are pictures of you, a chubby—but fierce—girl, hip thrust out in an indefinable angle, dainty (pudgy) hands dramatically splayed, in ruffles or polka dots or hideous organza.

Those days are gone. You now have a standard uniform (jeans and t-shirt), which is a far cry from the-middle-school-tomboy-years, but just as changed from your frilly, fabulous prepubescence.

(But secretly, you’re still the girl who loves to wear dresses.)

Lipstick

You’ve made a whore out of Snow White.

You think that as you stare at the prints, photos, apparently, designed to show your creativity. (Or lack thereof).

As you look at your picture, wincing upon imagining your mother’s reaction, you decide it’s probably that particular shade of crimson.

You knew the makeup artist had an in for you.


Flirting

Don’t think no one has noticed. (Or do. It makes for great romantic comedy, if celluloid would translate into real life).

Tucking your hair behind your hear, you gaze coquettishly at the object(s) of your affection. The glance lingers slowly, slowly down. Making sure you are the only person in that stall, you approach. Slowly. Sway your hips.

Once in front, a hand rises to lingeringly touch. The caress is almost obscene, but once again, you think no one’s watching, and so you make your move. Leaning forward, chest exposed, you pick up…

…the book, and gleefully skim through it.

You are an absurd little creature when it comes to bookstores.


Blushing

It’s the envy of many, especially in this white-obsessed, foreign-beauty-loving country of yours.
Clear, pale skin isn’t all that great, though, particularly if it reddens easily and you (used to) train often.

The men think you’re flushed because of them, which makes you want to stab them through the heart with the phallic symbols they’re so fond of, or shriek and pretend to be lesbian just to get them off the notion you may have a teeny (eensy) crush on them

Never mind that it’s actually true.


Period

It’s burning white vision bursting at the tops of your eyes. It’s nausea, shivering and plunging at ten thousand feet. Pulsing, pounding pressure, starting from the low centre of your body and radiating downwards until you can’t move, can’t do anything but lie limply on the bed. Every step taken is an epic battle in itself. Cold sweat becomes rivulets pouring down your spine.

Considering this happens once a month, it’s shocking how you’re considered “the weaker sex.”

Gun

In retrospect, you shouldn't have pointed it at your head.

(At least, not in front of your parents. Nevertheless, bravo for not telling them if you had to pick a way, it would be something invariably less messy.)

Now you're never going to learn how to shoot, stupid.

Que Horror.

(It being near Halloween, and all that)

Vampires

When you were younger, you had a fascination with vampires. You researched Vlad Tseppes and Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Carrying delusions brought about by too much Buffy, you took up (and quit) various martial arts in preparation for Slayerhood. You’ve made jokes about local fanged undead—the better halves, as they were—and devoured awful literature (read: mawkish supernatural romances) about the creatures of the night.
Then again, they are the stuff of make-believe, and you much prefer fictional bloodsuckers to the metaphorical ones in your life

Demons

Inner demons.
You’ve heard the phrase. It’s for the baggage (you try) to hide from the rest of the world, wrestling with them night and day for some semblance of peace.
You wonder, what happens if the demons win?
You’re afraid you’ll find out soon.

Witches

Things happen, and of course, though they’re out of your control, the blame is squarely placed on you.
So this is how it feels to be burned at stake.

Sanguine

How ironic there’s a word that refers to “cheery” and “bloody” at the same time.
Or, if you turn the glass half-full, how fitting.

Blade

God you want to gut the little weasel.

The First Cut is the Deepest

Syllable

“I learned the truth at seventeen,” the song warbles, soft, lamenting, as you stare at the ceiling of your room, spread-eagled on my bed. It seems to fit—in the seventeen and four years and counting, you’ve never been a beauty queen, never felt the eyes of a lover linger on your lips.
And so you stare at the ceiling and dream, dream of boys with dreamer’s gazes and poet’s smiles and artist’s hands with a really nice set of pecs, as they bend down to lie down in your bed and whisper the three syllables you so badly want to hear.

Vaccine

From when you were very young, they’ve given you shots for chicken pox. Small pox. Protection against bacteria that would have slain you centuries, or maybe even four decades ago. Later, there were the shots for tuberculosis, for the prevention of breast cancer.
You don’t remember the infant shots, but a phantom twinge echoes in your shoulder in remembrance of the last. You avoid looking at the needle, but from your sister’s whimper it must be at least two inches—maybe more. From that one glance, it seems awfully thick.
A brave little girl, merely three times seven, you scarcely feel anything beyond that first prick, and the immunization is over in a moment.
Fleetingly, you wonder if there’s a vaccine for loneliness.


Aide

It’s when you’re helping your friend bolster the flagging organization, as a somewhat useless aide-de-camp, that you’re hit with the realization.
This isn’t your story. Your role in the universe will always be relegated to The Best Friend, the Joan-Cusack-type Older Sister, the Angsty Misunderstood Daughter, and happy endings, like it or not, will always have to be lived vicariously.
Because you are sidekick, and it’s the heroine, in the end, who gets the boy.


Alarmist

Sometimes, it perplexes you when people say you’re a leader.
You have a tendency to panic, to react immediately, arms flailing about. You get frustrated at incompetence—especially your own--, and during crunch time, your statements have an alarmist tinge.
Deep down, you know you’re more suited as a foot soldier.


Cub
Just before you go to sleep, and moments in between waking and facing the new day, you imagine having a family of your own.
The face, the hair, the build of your husband-to-be varies; his gaze, ardent, is the only thing unchanged.
An infant wrapped in swaddling clothes lies between you. Or is it two, three? It does not matter. You feel a surge of love to this as-of-yet-unborn children whatever the shape of their eyes or the color of their hair or the shade of their skin, and in your mind’s eye the babies are perfect, and more importantly, yours.
And come heaven or hell, mama bear will protect her cubs.