No Salvation

...and sometimes I drown in words, my eyes blank with acceptance as I sink into their depths. They fill my nose and my mouth and my mind until I cannot breathe and I cannot think. But I do not struggle as I slowly submerge. For this is my fate, and there is no salvation...

February

Early morning. I am getting some work done at the computer. Eli is behind me, gliding on his scooter. Woog is at the toaster, performing his morning chore of crisping the breakfast bread. Suddenly, just when I am attempting to extricate myself from an awkward turn of phrase, Eli screams loud, long, and piercingly. I turn around, ready to tell him off for crying at the drop of a hat again, but I see something that makes my blood run cold.

Woog, for some reason only known to him, has placed the butter knife inside the oven toaster and touches its red hot tip to his brother's arm. Eli's face is purple, and he is losing his breath with his screams. The rage that comes over me is inexplicable. I grab hold of the butter knife and whap Woog on the bicep, broadside. That the knife is still hot escapes my notice as I glare at him from a red film of fury. It is only when he squeals and claps a hand to his arm do I realize what I have done.

I grab my crying boys and lead them to the nearest faucet, spraying water every which way. Atch comes downstairs, demanding the cause of the racket. When he sees the raised blistering skin of his wailing sons, none of my words can pierce through his anger. He looms over me, a stranger with hard fists.

He takes hold of his first-born's arm with tears of wrath in his eyes, “this,” he accuses me “is how he will remember you by - the monster who burned him.”

I am a mother. I am a monster. The four of us stare at each other, crying. Above us, the clock ticks ever onward to my doom.

February

The days are slow in passing, and so is the depression. The word “monster” has burned its way into my mind, like a hot brand of accusation. Already, it has made its rounds within the family, and although no one speaks it out loud

“monster...”

I see the word in their eyes

“monster...”

shining like beacons to mock my dark.

“monster...”

Only my hurt sons continue to cling to me, allowing me to smooth my apologies into their burnt skin like I do their ointment.

“monster!”

February

I am a devourer of books. I stow away in frigates and sail to far-off places in my bid to escape the world I am in. I flee my unpardonable sins. I take flight from the disillusionment in my husband's eyes. I turn tail from the unbearable people I work with each day. I am constantly on the lam from this encompassing depression. But more importantly, it is because I seek desperately to evade the glistening pink and white scar that gazes piteously up at me from Woog's arm.

William Goldman, Gail Carson Levine, Audrey Niffeneger, Annette Curtis Klause. I jump into bed with them, one after the other. Diana Gabaldon, Neil Gaiman, Cornelia Funke, Christopher Paolini, Stephenie Meyer. If they offer trilogies or novels in a series, I pursue them ever more relentlessly. In the space of two months, I have buried myself alive in 15 books.

I look up and blink around me in surprise. I find that I am in need of new glasses.

Valentine's Day

I open my eyes. Atch bends over me with a kiss and a card in his hand. The card thanks me for seven fruitful years together. Happy Valentine's Day, Aifee.

Over lunch, I hie over to his office with a gift of my own. “Here you go, fruitful,” I tell him, setting a colorful fruit compote down on his desk, “Happy Valentine's Day.”

I am constantly stuffing his lunch bag with fruits and vegetables, and with good reason. He has finally quit smoking in December, and I am insanely proud of him. Food has become a compensation for the loss of his poison sticks, and he gorges himself at every opportunity. Between the both of us, after the holidays, we have gained a good three hundred tons.

Happy Valentine's Day. He sends me off with an ardent one-sided embrace. It is the only way we can hug these days. Our bulging bellies are in the way.

February

M/V Doulos sails into our part of the backwater. A real ship. Filled with books and books and more books. The last time she was here, Eli was a toothless infant with no neck. I tell the boys about her wondrous innards, and pretty soon they are badgering their Tatay to bring them on board.

“I want to go to Doulos,” Woog nags.

“Chip, ride chip!” Eli chortles.

Resigned, Atch takes his family to the port where we feast our eyes on this seafaring missionary vessel just two years Titanic's junior.

On board, the whole city it seems, is neck and elbow amongst shelves upon shelves of books. We sweat freely while the boys dump their choice of reading material into my arms.

I am surreptitiously returning a Spanish-version Scooby-Doo board book back on a shelf when Atch hands me five cd's, his idea of digestible literature. “We're going to get ice cream, Aif,” he says before taking his sweaty self and both his sweaty sons out to the commissary, leaving me to pay for our purchases.

On the way home, it dawns on me that all I have gotten for myself is a mid-sized thesaurus and a book of household cleaning tips. No matter. I have given my boys the gift of words, and it will see them through for years to come.

Speed

Faster and faster, my fingers pound on the keys. It is as if I never left. The old sensations cascade over me and I am kayaking through the rapids, riding roughshod over words, getting drenched with words, inadvertently swallowing words. Will this thrill of a ride never end?

January

All little boys explore the various orifices of their body at one time or another. Eli is no exception. He has a particular liking for his nose, and he roots around in it regularly, to our great dismay. Occasionally, he unearths a motherlode, which he then pops into his mouth, smacking his lips delicately.

We are horrified to the depths of our germophobe beings. We discourage him, scold him, screech at him, even slap his busy little hands away. We ply him with other more palatable alternatives, but he merely gifts us with his triangular smile and continues with his mining expeditions. Perhaps we should be grateful he cannot as yet reach his ass.

January

We rush my Tatay to the hospital. It is my mother-in-law's 71^st birthday, and he falls into a blank stupor at the party. Inday takes his blood pressure, and it falls at 60/40. His pulse disappears into the unknown. He blanks out twice, and each time he comes to, he assures us that he is only tired, that it is only the wind that has whacked its cold hand upon his back, that we only need to take him home so he can rest.

In the emergency room, he keeps up the protest, this man who has been smoking for the last 50 years. Deedee, Dada & I bustle about him, and the children who are away call us frantically on our cellphones: Nonoy the doctor, Dudu the medical student – they all get a chance to speak with their father. Who is still protesting.

I stand in a corner and my mind is a-whirl with the memorial plan I have set aside, just in case. And where on earth to find the money to buy a small plot of land in the cemetery. Tearless, I am steeling myself, mentally preparing for the inevitable. I am first-born, after all.

A week later, showing no visible sign of duress, my father sails with us across the strait to his hometown of Dumangas. We light candles at his parents' graves, we stuff ourselves with prawn, oysters and mud crab, we drink with him and two of his brothers. He laughs and he laughs and he laughs. It dawns on me then that I have never seen him so happy.

January

It is the year of the Ox. My birth year. I look at myself in the mirror and wonder if the way I'm constructed violates all the sacred tenets of Feng Shui. Feng Shuit, more like. I feel the dark digits of despair and depression clawing hungrily at me, as they so often did when I was young, so long ago. I snap at the husband. I growl at the boys. I go through all the self-defeating motions, sabotaging any chances of well-being.

January

One evening, we bring the boys and their Uncle Eisen to Chopsticks Alley to watch the fireworks and hear the bands play. It is a hawk and a spit away from home, and the boys are in their 'jamies. We walk the street that's been converted into a showcase of Snake, and Rabbit, and Dragon, and Rat...and all the other life-size Chinese lunar animals, lit from within.

While Atch and Manong Eisen buy beer, I take the boys to their respective animals and explain that they represent the year they were born. Horse for Woog, Dog for Eli.

I glance behind me at their Uncle Eisen and see that he is even worse of than I am, this man born in the year of the Tiger. Hasn't been home to his wife in over than a decade, and recently laid off from work. He is quiet, guzzling his beer.

The boys are thrilled with the fireworks that light up the night sky. When we get home, it starts to rain, and the downpour washes the dust from my eyes.

January

Siesta time. Woog is on one side of me, sleepy, grumbling. Eli is on the other, wide awake. My younger son is yakking his head off about nothing in particular. He is one of those children who doesn't have to raise his voice for it to resonate across great distances. Woog is growling, I am growling, Eli still refuses slumber. Apparently, only his father can make him sleep on command. I have seen it happen, time and time again, and it irks me no end.

Woog puts a pillow over his head, and I try to ignore Eli's grasping fingers, which squeeze at my arms like masticating machines, while he murmurs into my face. Outside, it starts to rain. I am about descend into nothingness, when Eli's voice takes on a different cadence.

I force my protesting lids up a gradient or two, and I hear my son singing his first full-length song:

Yeyn, yeyn, go 'way

Comma-gen, yanada dey

Yittew Eyi wansa pyey

Yeyn, yeyn, go 'way

I must get the tape recorder, I say to myself. But Eli's toneless, tuneless chanting lulls me like the sound of the breeze on the sea. I fall asleep, and this great moment is lost forever.

Like Riding A Bike

Writing is like riding a bicycle. When you don't write for a time, the calluses at the tips of your fingers where the constant banging away on the keys have flattened them, start to soften, and they round out again, just as fingers should.

And when you start to write once more, you wobble quite a bit, just as you would on a bike. Striving for balance and control, like Woog when he was learning to ride.

Sometimes there are ruts on the road, and you ride over them, forgetting to swerve. You don't actually fall, but you do get a good jostling. Up and down, bump and bump. And you put a protective hand on your figurative crotch, hoping you haven't damaged any of your soft tissues beyond repair...

January

Changes come fast, blowing all over me like inclement weather. Unexpected expenditures eat up at the wide margin of my budget surplus. I am broke all over again. Still hung-over from the holidays, I cannot seem to stop eating, and I take to wearing my old maternity dresses as no pants will close over my girth.

At work, the old frustrations bury me in so much mud and silt, and I defiantly send in my resume somewhere else. After two phone interviews, I am told, very gently, very tactfully, in a very round-about way, that I have been relegated to the reject pile. It seems spending 10 years in one company, working with the same people, has eroded my market value. I am ready for the scrap heap. Or a change. Whichever comes first.

January

We have new neighbors. They are dark-skinned Indians of the five-six variety, and they settle next door where Inday and family used to live. The adults keep to themselves, just as they keep their car covered in its canvas jacket. They prefer to ride their three motorcycles, even to bring their daughter to school.

They have two kids. Samantha is nine and a first grader. She enjoys singing at the top of her voice, especially during siesta time, and has a habit of entering the apartment without knocking. She immediately starts mothering Woog and Eli, as well as the little boy who lives in Door 1. Very Wendy Darling.

Harkirat is three and cries at the drop of a hat. He and Eli eye each other warily. Soon, Eli is crying at the drop of a hat, too. My son, the mimic.

Not in any way racist or disparaging, Atch takes to calling them “the Boomies”, short for Bombay. We don't realize how much Eli is picking up on adult conversation until one morning he points at the father and yells: “Tatay Boomie!” It is a good thing we are in the car and the windows are rolled up. Atch drops the moniker pretty quickly.

January

It is raining outside again, and the cold is seeping into our bones. My head is buried in work that I barely glance up at my whining younger son. He is clinging to the doorknob, all set to cry at the drop of a hat again.

Belatedly, I realize that he is whining the longest sentence I have ever heard out of him, “I waaaaaant to go ouuuuuuuuut!”

Bemused, I unlatch the door and send him out into the rain.

January

We meet our new landlord and landlady. They are in their mid-twenties, very up-and-coming. They hail from the capital and do not speak the local dialect, but they are keen on keeping things the way they are. Very wise. I am hoping it includes the rent.

He is soft spoken in an upper class college-boy sort of way, with long fingers and a penchant for designer labels. She is short and feisty, with a voice that would rival a fish seller's at the market. They are pregnant with their honeymoon baby. Sweet.

Procrastination

It has been quite a while, hasn't it? You poor motley collection of words, you. I am languishing under the cool and sleepy palms of Procrastination, while the busy water throws itself at me on the sand, reminding me there is work to be done. It wants to pull me over to where it roils, dark and deep and vaguely threatening, urging me to stroke and stroke and stroke until I reach the other side.

And so… “I must go down to the sea again…for the call of the running tide, is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied…”

I lower my head and taste the sea. Time, it seems, has not banished the salty sensation of words on my tongue. Those same words flow down to my fingertips as I graze them over the flow of nouns and adjectives and punctuations I remember swimming in so long ago. And so I submerge myself once more into the wet warmth of words to take up where I left off before the lethargy of Procrastination took hold.....

December

We are sad. My sister-in-law Inday and her husband Sam, finish building their dream house. They are moving away from the apartment next door, bringing Tatay, Nanay, Ia, Elen, and the dogs.

With them, they take away a lot of laughter, the extra watchful eyes we count on when we are away, their cable TV subscription we illegally connect to, and the eggs/sugar/coffee/bell pepper that we borrow from them on occasion.

The dogs' fleas go with them, as well, but this minor detail doesn't detract from our melancholy. Even our kids are quiet. There is no Ia to play with, to fight with, or to tease until she cries. There is no more haven to run to when Mommy and Tatay are mad.

There are a lot of changes, it seems. The apartment compound we live in is being sold to a young couple who run a school for special children not far away. It is being sold by our landlady so her son would stop badgering her for more money to finance his drug habit. We are leery of our new landlords. They are so young!

December

Atch makes good on his promise. It takes me a couple of weeks to remind him, though, throwing my sister and her hugely brilliant engagement rock his way to tickle his mind.

Finally, he drives me to an exclusive jeweller who crafts me a ring on which rests a brilliantly clear stone. I make a pretense of looking at it through the loupe. Cut...color...clarity...cocka-poo... Is a girl supposed to know all these things? Apparently I should, and the wonderful world wide web provides me with the answers.

Still, I get my (post) engagement ring, and all is well with the world.

December

I am within budget by a generous margin. Most of my Christmas shopping is completed by October. Perhaps the coming year will be one where I am finally free of debt.

December

For Christmas, Woog gets the much-coveted Nintendo Game Boy he has been whining about for the last two years. Atch's wallet has a hefty dent in it. But no matter, Woog is happy. He leaves his other new toys and books lying around like so much discarded fluff.

His four-cornered, damp-towel parents immediately establish the rules: no playing on school days, only on weekends. He is so happy, he doesn't care. In fact, he prefers his new electronic contraption over our nightly story time.