Now/here no/where woman

2009 rode roughshod over a lot of people. I had a miscarriage in January 2009 and with that baby, who waved at me in the ultrasound with ten fingers and ten toes and a face I could almost recognize, I buried a dream. Even so, I had imagined a seed was planted in that grave and that it would sprout from the earth, grow into a towering tree of love, and spread it's shade above us. Months later I was desperately drowning my sorrow in all the wrong waters. I found myself at the dead-end of a wonderful relationship that had lasted eight and a half years. Hundreds of people were left reeling from the aftermath of Ondoy and Pepeng. I didn't get the giant tree of love I wanted but in it's place a beautiful, lush, disorderly garden was thriving and teeming with untamed life, and death, and life. I only had to see it for what it was. Also last year, my family mourned the death of a grand aunt whose love for all of us was greater than the sum of all parts of the clan, and whose partin

It's so cold this morning my fingers feel stiff and clumsy as I type and my penmanship sucks more than usual. This is one of those mornings that brims with scintillating dreams that ripple up against the dam of frustrations of a peripatetic who is only here, still. So I retreat into a decade-old memory of sitting on a platform in Canterbury on a bright winter morning, waiting for the train to London to come in, shivering and writing an old-fashioned pen-on-paper letter to some one I love(d) and telling him how strange it was to struggle to move the pen across the page. It was important to me, in that white sunshine, to understand this cold, to feel it completely without giving into it. So I wrote to him about it with my fingers freezing inside my gloves. Looking at the scrawled lines I wondered whether he would be able to read what I had written, and also what I had not written -- of the lasting warmth and moments of heat I wished to pass between us. Now I understand that the lette

I'm back!!! With a vengeance! Rrrawwwrr!