THE SUN RISES
Gio Basco
THE SUN RISES AND IT IS STILL DARK © Gio Basco 2016
Free to reproduce with proper attribution. For queries: giobastayunayon@gmail.com
“Define loneliness?
Yes.
It’s what we can’t do for each other.
What do we mean to each other?
What does a life mean?
Why are we here if not for each other?”
-
Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
1. Some happenings cause distractions The lack of them also does, but in difficult to notice and understand proportions. Things do not happen a lot always, like a fire, a rally, an election, a raid, or a murder. But there are days when huge, dark-blue and grey cumulus clouds appear like monsters caught in the middle of their escape during the very early seconds of the morning. They do not appear like wisps or thin, feathery things that dissolve with the increasing light, but enormous, living blobs, elongated torsos, tentacles, limbs, bellies, bumbling and tripping as they flee. They distract us from watching out for the next bus headed to the busy south, distract us from the passengers, the seeming lack of public utility vehicles on a dreary Quezon City Thursday morning. They distract us from thinking of the seeming lack of better and safer highways and trains, and everything that circle back to the personal and the political and vice-versa, from ideas on taxes we pay with the inconveniences and dangers of working at night in the city. They distract us from the idea that there is loneliness in working at night, or that we really are alone in this crowded city every night. They sometimes prompt me to ask, what have you monsters been doing up there all night? Were you watching us small, distracted things working through the darkness down here?
2. During bus rides every morning from work, I often find myself thinking about what would happen if my phone gets stolen while my wireless headset plays music from it. Will the sound disappear with a snap, or will it slowly fade as the thief moves away from me, far from the ample distance for the wireless connection to work? There was a time when I used wired headsets and changed them regularly because they get broken as frequently as I would have had my haircut. One time there was a thief riding beside me inside a bus traversing EDSA. He almost got my music player. It was my two-month long hair that saved me. There was also a time when my music player really got stolen that was at EDSA too, around Makati City but I was sleeping then. It was easy to assume that the music just stopped when the plug was pulled and the phone was taken, but I will never be sure. I was sleeping. That was a missed opportunity for me how can I compare the sound of a phone being spirited away as heard from both a wired and a wireless headset now, if I was sleeping then?
3. I once had a learner in class who mentioned how hard it is for her to not have good earphones at work. I asked her why this, from someone who does work listening attentively to people. Headsets are not part of the daily motions and necessities of work. She said music makes her concentrate this came from someone who is used to working unsupervised. She is a math tutor for kids. I advised her to drop the earphones once they are turned over to the production floor from training, because one needs to be attentive, one needs to be aware of being called, one needs to learn how to not ignore someone asking for attention. But then again, I thought, isn’t being unable to ignore another form of being distracted? And distraction destroys focus, which in turn destroys productivity, yes? I continued training with these thoughts, setting them aside to bide my time for contemplation. There is work to do; these musings are like headsets, preferred but not part of work. There’s always work that needs doing.
4. There was a time when I would buy three pieces of cheap, peanutflavored doughnut whenever I come home from the night shift work. It was from the corner store in Comembo, Makati, near where our extended family live. I would eat one or two on the way, and leave whatever was left to my youngest brother once I arrive. That was the time when it was easy to look like a good sibling “see? your brother loves you he brings you snacks before he goes to sleep”, my grandmother would say but the praises were expected motions and necessities. I was the eldest son, after all. My then-seven-year-old brother must have been clueless about what it was all about, he was a mere child, as I remember it.
One can accuse me it was all an act, no matter how sincere I was whenever I leave one or two pieces of nutty, cheap doughnut for a sibling. Maybe it really was, no matter how often others address it. Maybe it might look like a lie to convince others by acting the role. Or maybe it was another distraction, a way to not feel the death of another day. Or maybe it was love. I cannot say for sure; I cannot prove it myself.
These days, I live alone, and I buy a big piece of plain, white bread every morning, eating it on my way home from work. It was all for myself, it was everything I can distract myself with. I am all by myself now. And I think I have always been.
5. One day, on this year, I realized I cannot stand living with others anymore. I cannot stand living even with the siblings that I value with a gentle and silent kind of intensity, like silent monsters floating in the sky unnoticed every night, so enormous and vast, but too fearful of being seen in the open, actual, happening. I wanted to leave and keep all of it to myself. It is frightening. I packed my clothes and all the small things I thought I might need and went away to our abandoned house in the mountain-top subdivision in Rizal to live alone, away from where the monsters can be found out.
6. It was a long time ago when I promised myself that I will never be lonely without my permission. This mirrors my idea of dying due to lung cancer. I wear a face mask whenever I commute in and around the city, and I avoid secondhand smoke, but I smoke every once in a while myself. I figured that if I will develop lung cancer and die of it someday, I will make sure that I am the sole responsible person for it occurring. This is how it works with my idea of loneliness. I will never let other people make me feel lonely, and if I do find myself feeling lonely it must be because I chose to be, even if it doesn’t feel good. I have taken this as part of my personal responsibility to myself.
“… We look for someone to blame and turn to you, wretched city, because we are men and women of honor, we feed our children three meals a day, we never miss an election. The only explanation is you, dear city. This is the end of our discussion. There is no other culprit.”
- Conchitina Cruz, Dear City
7. Or, in other words, speaking of loneliness I learned that through a simple change of paths followed in coming home, a particular kind of comfort can be found. It was an accident waiting to happen, one that waited for me to make the mistake of isolating myself. I never got around to feeling at home anywhere around Makati City, or anywhere around EDSA, even after five years of living there and traversing its sooty, busy ways and people. I imagine people living and passing there from all walks of life covered in soot and busy what are they busy about? I ask. The people there are like children trying to make sense of life, only they don’t have fun doing it. Only get sooty and busy. There was no time to be lonely because busy demands time. Have I been lonely during my entire time in the cities? I guess yes, I did. Was I ever busy? I guess I should say yes, too. I was covered in busy trying to escape loneliness. Looking back to it, and with how cozy the streets of Anonas feels like now that I spend a lot of time after work there with its train station beside both cheap and expensive commercial establishments and a parochial school/church and lots and lots of vehicles hiding under the elevated track’s shadow I now understand that I have been living scared of loneliness all this time.
8. Things distract, and distractions gradually make way to forgetfulness. Distractions help make us realize other things, our attention moving from one important thought to the next with impunity. The whole thing makes sense once you realize how much you have been led away from what you originally intended to think about. For instance, in this train of thought, we find: the irony that one needs the city to know what being alone is, and yet, one builds and maintains the city to make others survive, become busy. The irony in the event when one associates one’s self to the city’s construction, becomes the city itself, becomes its corruption in the process, becomes the carcinogenic source of its twisted loneliness the irony being one then begins to build, become, and maintain not the city, but its infection, its degradation, to survive.
Now I listen closely as the city its embodied infection begins to spread itself, listen to it assert itself to the entire nation. Have you heard of the cancer the heroes of old were talking about? I heard it from numerous taxi drivers, the passengers in the UV Express and city buses, from the busy commuters going through with the motions and necessities of work, with and without earphones on. Have you witnessed the corruption growing as the city spreads itself? I have seen it in the newspapers both online and on the sidewalk stalls, I have seen it on posters on social media and the walls along EDSA, I have seen it on the cardboard signs on the random dead at random streets, streaked with random blood. I wonder what exact type of cancer it is. Is it the same with the cancer I am waiting to happen to myself, a cancer I hope would be my sole doing?
Elizabeth Bishop said losing cities is not a disaster. I listen to her. I listen to the cities as I lose them during the late hours of the night Makati City, Mandaluyong City, Quezon City I listen to them give up on me, listen to them as I forgive myself for leaving without a word, listen to myself as I forgive them for keeping me for so long. I listen, looking forward to the dilapidated, empty house away, far away from them.
9. The sofa is a sentence between talking and sleeping. The sofa sits between thinking and sleeping. In our old house in Rizal, it is old and worn out, but not broken. The subject matter sits comfortably with dusts and cobwebs accumulated over the years. The subject matter stands between serious things and things ignored with comfy, old sheets and pillows. The subject matter was never thrown away along with other things that qualify as unserious and/or ignoble, but it remains undisturbed and unused, it remains, but is skirted around a lot.
I return to our old house which is not really that old, less than twenty years existing, furniture bought within the last ten years and the sofa remains there, waiting. I return to things that are not thrown away, I try to find what is broken so I can begin throwing things away, but I can't find any. Nothing inside is broken. The subject matter sits in my living room, in front of the television, facing a brewing seriousness, facing someone sleeping.
10. Once, before we slept, I asked you where exactly your birthmark is. You told me there is a belief that birthmarks are from fatal wounds dealt to us in our previous lives. I imagined yours matched mine we could have died in our previous life pierced by the same arrow or bullet, our bodies close together. But yours is down your back, near the hips, while mine is near the heart.
We might have died in our previous lives differently you must have died saving someone, you said, shielding someone with your body, getting killed with a bullet through your lower back. I must have died trying something like that too, getting hit on the chest. We have these noble thoughts distracting us from the possibility that there was a time in the past that we died.
Or maybe we died random deaths random bullets spilling random blood at some random street. We will never know the distance between the deaths of our previous lives, we will never know the distance between these distractions.
11. Notice the calendar and take note of the distance between the days when we’ll turn a year older in the same calendar we gain a year together, but then again, I am a month ahead, still, days, weeks, older than you. Notice how we grow farther and farther apart as we break down a month to a couple of weeks, a lot of days, down to enumeration of each excruciating hour.
Notice the calendar as we sit beside each other. Notice your chin barely making it past my right shoulder, my forehead just a few inches higher than yours. Notice how the distance so small does not seem important but notice how hard it is for me to kiss you in this position
Notice how I try anyway.
I like seeing people up and about at this time of the day. Different sorts make you think less of yourself as being alone alone, but not lonely.
You run to and from the city, I run through and around it. It is a collection of places to you, but to me it is a living thing that sleeps, wakes, crawls while groaning under the sun and moon and stars, and occasionally weeps. I imagine you getting eaten and regurgitated by the city five times a week, smoked and blown and exhausted by its breath and lights and sounds. I am a parasite of this city, living off its hopeful weakness, latched upon its nourishing tubes five times a week, smoking and blowing and exhausting its breath and lights and sounds. We hope for the dreams inside the guts of this city, inside this living thing that contains us, feeding it and off it. Every morning, whenever the sun rises and it is still dark, you bow your head and pray for our lives. One such morning, I looked at the clouds, early summer, after work, and asked the monsters desperately escaping the light just like me: what have you been doing up there all night?
