the break

that will not come because it is longed for and dreaded at the same time.

there. i think i have finally named it. the simplest version of which is: rushing home after class, for some alone time, because you do not want to get too sick of this place you work in, of these people you do love being with, only to realize that you cannot stand being alone with your thoughts either. you end up remembering too many things, things you should have done, used to want to do, had resolved to try to do. and right after that, what follows is a veritable guilt trip: what do all those things matter when, what's at the very base, at the very core has been unhinged? for good. your friend calls this place of absence the soul. you sometimes find yourself agreeing that it is, indeed. but then, oh, what petty, burgis concepts these are, you think. but you swallow, you choke on the truth at night, knowing that tomorrow is going to be no different from the day that just passed. that this "free time" is actually the most debilitating of forces. free, really, is just false. doesn't exist.

***

been thinking about what L said last night, about having lost the language for that which you want to write about. i think i know what he means. i told him this afternoon that it must be why i have been wanting to run away from what i think, and what i inevitably have to say. i want to listen. i want to watch. i want to read.

***

some five years ago i found myself working on what, in hindsight, i now realize to be a futile, even complicit task that involved farmers who were once agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) but who had since lost those benefits through -- what i understand now to be -- technical manipulations of the very system that was supposed to have protected them. i got paid a really good sum for it.

three years before that, i did a series of stories on the women of quezon who had lost their farmer sons, brothers, husbands and fathers to intense militarization/terrorism in their area. i did not get paid a single cent for that series of stories, but, to this day, i find myself going back to that experience of the truest, purest pleasure, when i saw those stories in print. and without my name on them.

***

or, it can actually be made so much simpler: there are too many smiling faces in december, and it's freaking you out. a student in your freshman lit class died and you want to weep for his mother who had this loneliness about her that radiated, it was beautiful, and sick at the same time. you could see the cracks, and you could see how the cracks held her together. and how brokenness made sense in other people.

or simpler still: you miss your mother and, having to wake up, every single day, to her absence is terrifying it snuffs the air, the voice, all motions and emotions, out of you. there.

lacan would be proud.