7:16 AM - May. 31, 2002
handwritten
(for RB) so i'm trying to write a letter, a handwritten one, complete with bottle of black india ink and rusty-green copper pen circa 1750 or at least i'd like to pretend it is. maybe it's the ink, or maybe in a past life i wrote copies upon copies of the sections of the Bible on leaf-colored vellum that few people read. sure, everyone knows something about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and crazy John, but the poor fellow who wrote Tobit or Kings II, he must not have had good PR. sometimes i dream of sitting in chair, four bottles of red, green, gold, and blank ink and three quills, a rag so reeking of oil and dye and crushed fruit i didn't know whether to suckle or pass out. and so next to my orange and white Bic razor i stare at this letter, it's a little about me, about my life, about what i would say at my own eulogy -- yeah thinking about death is not fun but it's what i learned from my mother. it is what my culture does well. there's a region in the Philippines where my father grew, Batangas it's called, where the roads are dirt and the sickly brown brick fences of each subdivision have "BAWAL UMIHI DITO" it is forbidden to piss here scrawled in big blue spray paint, and the skies each day are hot and the air is wet either from the rain of the previous night or the puddles that will themselves back upwards. and the people are without TV or electricity or the concept of blender, microwave, or law, and anything colored white on your person means you must have went to the Bayan and bought a T-shirt new, or you have an American visiting you, or you have bleach and have not been sharing, or your teeth need to be pulled from your mouth and sold. and i remember sitting out on the small hill outside my grandfather's house, staring out over the city and watching the people farm their plots of land, how the walking skeletons of water buffaloes dragged their plows, and my cousins running up the hill with handfuls of their best papaya, mango, duhat and tiny bananas, eager to trade with me for two M&Ms of yellow or green or brown color, and with paper and pen in hand because they could read English better than they spoke, and even then in my best broken Tagalog and while the mango juice dripped down the sides of my mouth onto my sweaty Hanes T-shirt they all giggled when i said i feel like i am cheating you.
