Twilight: A Review

(A post rather, rather tardy.)

Poster
His pale, lives-in-a-basement skin. His sinister leer, topped with sanguine lips. Her frightened, deer-in-headlights eyes. their unnatural postures.
Your first impression upon seeing the giant billboard is that it is a PSA on child predators. It does not bode well for giggling prepubescents the world over.

Baseball
So far, your quiet quips and your friend’s heckling has gone unnoticed in the hushed, reverent crowd. The giggling of the schoolboys beside you makes your skin crawl, but you refrain from reaching over and socking them with your soda can. You keep mostly to yourself.
Then they bring out the baseballs, and a familiar song oozes out of the movie speakers.
Your scream of indignation echoes in the moviehouse.

Alphabet
The two protagonists—appropriately cardboard and/or smarmy beyond belief—attempt to talk, or what passes for it. You watch in puzzlement as their conversation, composed of hackneyed phrases and hard-sell flirtations, go from Point A to point W and back again to Point J.
“I’m dangerous.”
Seriously. Who talks like that?

Blood
Enter the lamb, see the pussycat.
That first meeting, as the supposed hero (or rather, two-century-something who routinely stalks delicious-smelling girls in their bedrooms) flairs his nostrils and tries his hardest not to prevent an orgasm in the classroom (you call ‘em as you see ‘em), you have a stray thought about menstruation.
Suddenly the direction of your mind takes a turn for the gutter.

Credits
It is the best part of the movie.
The cinematography is wholly different, and the music coolly seductive. No acting is required, therefore the actors posing like 50’s Hollywood stars actually look the part.
It is the best part, however, because it is over.

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.