I will respect anyone’s convictions, but only to the extent you will respect mine. Goodwill inspires the same; tolerance results in cooperation. But I will not be told whom to love, whom to be friends with, what culture to represent, what mannerisms and interests to adopt and, much less, discard. I will not modify my behavior or limit my pleasures merely to please Cruz or bigots like him.

- From Manuel L. Quezon III’s eloquent retort, “The Grand Inquisitor”, to Isagani Cruz’ vitriolic attack against gays earlier this month.

I will sit with my legs spread wide apart.

I will color my hair pok-pok red and paint my lips crimson.

I will flirt with restaurant owners to get better service (and possible discounts).

I will smile at the MMDA officers who pull me over just to get out of a ticket.

I will tell the boys I like “I cras u!”

I will wear what I please, bellies and semaphore fat arms be damned.

I will sing at the top of my voice in a crowded elevator.

I will do what I like – do the hula while sporting a lampshade on my head, collect mass quantities of white pebbles, teach rapists how to write – because that is what I have in me to do.

I will write nonsense – my dreams, vignettes about cows and cow towns, long, winding essays about my grandmother’s hair – because that is what I have in me to write.

I will be happy because damn it, what else should I be?

In other words, I will be free.

… I am finished with the book. Hallelujah!

After “Pagpapakalaya at Pagsusulat: A Writing Workshop for Juvenile Delinquents in Bilibid”. Held in Bilibid, Muntinlupa on 13 August 2006.

Just when we were about to leave, the sky fell. The inmates held up umbrellas for us, but despite their best efforts, thick sheets of rain still wet our backs.

As we returned to the main gate, Terry, one of the boys who participated in the workshop, walked beside me. Terry is 22, in third year college, but he has been in prison since he was 14. He would not tell us why he was there. We were striding past the cells they would have to squeeze into later that night – 60 to 100 in a room that was half the size of a small basketball court. Some of them have to sleep standing up.

Terry had once read a poem by Pablo Neruda, “Body Of A Woman”. He said he liked it very much. I recited the lines that I could remember from it, there, in the middle of the prison grounds, under an umbrella held up for me by a young convict, my feet deep in muddy water and half my body soaked through with rain.

“Loving is a journey with water and with stars, with smothered air, and abrupt storms of flour,” I recite, though the words felt out of place and my voice sounded very far away.

By the time we reached the gate, Terry was trying to think of something poignant to say. In the end, though, all he did was smile shyly, and shake my hand goodbye.

… I gave someone a third in a series of ten letters.

Now that I look over these letters a year after I’d written them, it’s become clear to me that it wasn’t about him, or any man, for that matter. A part of me wonders how we got here, to the point of forgetting and abandonment, but this is the truth – we were only filling in that which we thought was empty. It should not have been this way, but then again, it is.

August 3, 2005

# 1

They say I’m good with beginnings.

My writing teachers tell me I have a knack for opening scenes. You make the reader want to read the rest of your story, said one venerable professor, while another had gushed, your first sentences are like lightning. Once, I began a story with a cat lying in the middle of the road, about to be crushed by a fire truck. In my most well-received story to date, I open with a young girl, who is petrified of driving, sitting in her mother’s car, trying to start it so she can run away from home.

In life, like art, I am the same. I am a magnificent beginner. I hit it off with people instantly. I can engage the grumpiest stranger in intimate conversation, get her to tell me her whole life story in the time it’ll take for us to change into our high heels in the locker room. Once, while waiting for my passport picture to be developed, the old lady at the counter showed me her high school pictures, then she told me that she was going to send them to her daughter in the States, who’s presently having problems with her Texan husband because he’s been working far too many late nights … etc. After ten minutes, I left that Floro-Foto shop knowing the minute details of her daughter’s complicated marriage – everything, except the old lady’s name.

It’s endings that I have a problem with. I don’t know how to finish my stories. More often than not, I go for the cliché ending: the wind snuffing out the flame of a candle, the little girl turning away from the grown man who’s in love with her, or the abandoned woman staring out of the window, into the dark of a future she doesn’t want to know or comprehend.

As such, I handle the end of relationships just as awkwardly. I never know how to say goodbye; how do you part ways with someone you’ve known (and who knows you) so intimately? Most of the time, I just disappear, drop out of circulation for a while, only to surface months later, sheepishly apologetic, bearing good will presents for the boy whose heart I’ve broken, hoping he’ll forgive me, at least enough for him not to make a voodoo doll in my likeness.

So, perhaps, it’s not so much that I’m bad with endings: it’s just most of the time, I don’t always get the kind of ending I would have liked.

I’m hoping that’ll change soon. I’m not getting any younger, and there’s only so many mistakes a girl can make.