If I am being honest, it has been a pretty rough year in our home. There have been more downs than ups and my wife and I have failed to see eye-to-eye on many occasions. It seemed when something would happen, rather than talk we yelled. We would forget the love we promised one another and seek to destroy one another with barb after barb of scything insults and profanity-laden missiles aimed at the other’s heart.

I, too, came to this website because I’ve been asked to perform an archaic notion of femininity for a friend’s wedding. Isn’t it funny, how we’re doing this for love? Isn’t it funny how we squish ourselves into an untenable form—cheap fabric and all—so that other people don’t get bent out of shape? 

In the PI, we played basketball. Filipinos love basketball. I towered over cousins. I outweighed them by thirty to fifty pounds. I was Shaq on the clay court. We made “family” bets for two-liter bottles of sodas. We made “secret side bets” for 1000 pesos, ten dollars. Opposing teams shouted, malakas siya, talking about my strength in the paint, then they shouted, mataba siya, calling me fat as I used my body to push them out of my way.

Oh how I yearn to breakthrough the stillness of your ashes to give you this poem and to tell you how sorry I am that my love was too fragile to carry the weight of your tears

I am not overcome to give love, which sometimes feels a roomful doing / no one any good. Only randomly leaking out. A double tip for a harried waitress, / an overly-long thank you, that embarrasses my wife…

I pictured it, my heart:  an ornate Victorian cage hanging from arched roof ribs, swaying gently. I knew that the gasping bird inside wasn’t the problem; she was the sentinel canary. But no one else seemed to understand this. How could I gently release the rope suspending the steel bank safe of stress without crushing myself underneath?

Pain, and in particular female pain, is often not taken seriously. My hysterics, pre-diagnosis, were often written off as typical adolescent craziness. As I got older, it became apparent that I had a problem. More specifically, I was the problem.

Maybe these are just expiration myths that help / us close up shop, help us turn the sign from / open to closed, a way to keep on living even / as we’re confused about what shop we’re in. 

we can bind together these sheafs of existence / into a library of shared living / and together into the forward hurtle / and bumpy turbulence of days and weeks and years / just...be.

Three. Two. One. Let it go. Feel the air rush as you fall down for what seems like eons. Free fall forever. Then once you land, breathe for the one second you get before you rush down, just to jump off another cliff, the cliff of adulthood.

In mid-September, my body itself became a breakthrough. My vaccinated body, despite all odds, was hosting the virus it so forcefully fought against. My body, healed and biking again, was ready to dance again. But for 10 days of quarantine, all dancing was confined to the small space in my room between my bed and my desk. The only option was to dance like nobody was watching because nobody could. 

we refuse / to consider death while we live, citing how / we are consumed with life and won’t seek / the living among the dead;

Now that our mother has forgotten your name, / I see you everywhere.

This is where my sister moved, married, resides, and I’m terrified that orthodoxy demands I do the same, that I suffocate in the colorlessness. If it does, I will. I’ll live there and stay there and die, sewing skirts and cheering on classical conversations and buying pasta and milk in bulk until I clock out in the home I rarely ventured beyond.

I had spent my life disconnected from my body. Hating my body, I tortured it—starving, purging, over-exercising, looking at food as a necessary and unsatisfying evil. I hated my body so much that I felt like someone was granting me a favor if they wanted to touch it. Something I should accept because, if they could see past this body I hated, it meant they really cared about me.

Ruminations on / moments in time, a million what-ifs written / in shaking print or strung up in ones and zeros / across a backlit computer screen.

I’m sorry we didn’t have more time. / maybe your heart would’ve softened / or maybe I would’ve stopped trying to fix / something that was too far /broken.