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Like Sand Thru My Fingers Mark smiles at my compliment. I ask about when was the picture taken. "More than thirty years ago," he says. I cannot get my eyes off the portrait, off the beautiful face. Thirty years. What was she thinking back then? What did those eyes conceal? Now, thirty years later, I stand before her, wondering. Her face juts out of time and space to smile at me, pregnant with meaning. I smile back at her. |
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"Used to live here when I was a kid," Mark tells me while gobbling a plate of steaming rice and beef stew. He pours Coke into my empty glass. "My Mom—the one in the picture—still lives here. When Dad died, we converted parts of the house into dorm rooms. I hope that explains this mess." He grins. Yeah, I tell myself. The house looks worn down, dark, and foggy everywhere. Mark goes on to tell me that it was built in the early seventies, that it was here where he grew up. "After my wife and I separated, I came back here. It’s eerie man, how you find everything still in place, although in older faces and shadows." I gulp down the Coke, and think about the lazy afternoon beckoning us. Mark is our newly-hired web developer, and, perhaps out of the need to establish a few friendships, he invited me to have lunch in his mother’s house. Here, I mean. And because he didn’t look much like he’d poison me and feed my carcass to his dog, I relented. I stand up and linger around the framed pictures and portraits. I pause by a large collage. "That’s me and my former wife," Mark speaks from behind. He betrays an undertone of sarcasm with the words "former wife." I stare at the collage. It is a universe of torn old pictures of Mark and his wife: half-smiles, deliberate over-exposures, former selves, former lives. "What do you feel about it?" "About what?" "About you and your wife, you know." "Ah," he says. "But we can’t do anything about it. Life should go on, don’t you think?" The cliché amuses me. Life goes on. But what about time and space? Time and space go on. But how? And why? I wonder about how many times we have invented helpless answers to the ravage of time and space, over irretrievable fragments of our past that have slipped through our fingers like grains of fine sand. Sand. Time. Space. Life. Us. But time fools us and plays a trick on us. Now we are left with photographs. Sepia pictures yellowed on the edges, crumbling like some flimsy breath at a touch. Our puny attempts at taking snapshots of eternity. I hold the framed portrait of Mark’s parents on their wedding day—I see a young couple with expectant faces, full of years before them. I see Mark’s father looking young and defiant with his short-cropped hair, standing beside his wife in his white suite like some sartorial titan. Two faces, two shadows, thirty years ago. Two people who once had their moment, who probably never realized how brief it would be for them. Like what is true for the rest of us. *** A day later. I walk along Malvar Street with an aching head, the sun above my nape. The jeepneys roar past me, fumes billowing behind them. On the corner of Pilar Hidalgo Lim and Malvar, a makeshift food stall prepares for another day. A gaunt, harried-looking woman peels a potato. A child with an enlarged head (probably a victim of a brain disease) cries on the floor. I glance at my watch: 9:25 A.M. I’m twenty-five minutes late for work. On the Leon Guerrero intersection, a dead kitten decays on the pavement. At the office, as soon as I sit in front of my computer, the phone rings. I answer it—a sweet, melodic voice traverse the phone lines to greet me about the morning. I glance at the wallclock: 9:45 A.M. "I miss you," the girl’s voice says. "I’m bored, very bored here with all this work." "I am, too," I tell her. "If only I can stay there." She tells me she’ll call me up again tomorrow at 10:00 A.M. I tell her I love her, then hung up. I glance at the wall clock: 9:55 A.M. She says she’ll call me up again tomorrow morning, at exactly twenty-four hours and five minutes later. I’ll have to count 86,700 seconds before I can hear her voice again. *** Twenty four hours later. The dull taps of my shoes on the dusty pavement ring in my ears. I glance at my watch: 9:15. I’m fifteen minutes late. The woman at the food stall berrates someone that I don’t see. With trembling hands, she peels the rind off a potato. I pass by her. She throws me a quick glance—an angry one—then goes on hurling invectives at someone I do not see. The little child with an enlarged head sits quietly in a wooden cart, eating a piece of fruit. Suddenly, the little child starts to wail, as if in pain. The woman hastily leaves the potato and attends to the child. Then they both look at me—with terror, helplessness, or desperation. I stare at them like someone who do not understand; I stare at them through my own glass walls, unfeeling, numb, confused. At the Leon Guerrero intersection, the dead kitten decays a little further. I pause for a while to look at it a little closer, then wonder about the absent stench. Little maggots are squirming out of a hole on its stomach, out of its eyes, its nostrils, its ears and mouth. There is no stench, only emptiness. *** 3,600 minutes later. 3,600 revolutions of the minute-hand. I am standing under the waiting shed in front of the Philippine Women’s University, at the Taft-Malvar intersection, waiting for the traffic light to shift to red. People walk about in the rush hour like a multitude of rats looking for an escape. They rush past me like shadows, then disappear into the cracks and crevices of the city, leaving no substance, no vestigial trace. They come and whirl around and fizzle out. Like vapor. Like the morning mist. Like me. The traffic light shifts to red. The morning sun burns the top of my head. Malvar seems deserted: no vehicles, no drones, no exhaust fumes. Only the dizzying bright yellow of the sun on the cement and asphalt and on the buildings’ walls. At the makeshift food stall, the woman sits motionless on a wooden bench, her hands on her lap, her eyes red and tired. It was unusually quiet, no wooden cart, no child with an enlarged head. I pass by her. She doesn’t mind me. She stares into blank space. She glances at me, her pale and bony face devoid of expression. A tiny tear peeps out of her left eye. The dead kitten is no longer there, only traces of fur and skin that had been burned onto the hot pavement. I give it a little thought, then hasten my steps. Inside the elevator, I tap the button that will ascend me to the fourth floor. I feel the walls around me vibrate into a dizzying frequency. The light inside the elevator flickers, grating my eyes like razor blades. I imagine a vacuum sucking me up through some fold on the fabric of time. I imagine myself reliving what happened hours, days, months, or even years ago. I see myself walking along Malvar, tossing the dust about me, making split-second decisions inside my head. I see myself pass by people, and quoting the poet Eric Gamalinda, pass by lives I will never know and faces I will never fall in love with. I see myself sealing my fate with the choices I had made, and plunge headlong into the consequences I never saw beforehand. I was blind, very blind. I was blind, deaf, numb, and confused. I see myself walking along Malvar, I see the woman peeling a potato, the child with that enlarged head—I see these characters doing what they must, consuming their time on Earth, and when their choices later turns out to be the ones that would destroy them, they shrink back into the corner of their lives clinging to memory and little else. They spend their lives floating around, bouncing off one another, then disappear. Like bubbles on the face of eternity. The elevator door opens, and I step into another day. As soon as I sit in front of my computer, the phone rings. I answer it—a sweet, melodic voice traverse the phone lines to greet me about the morning. I glance at the wall clock, then close my eyes. "I miss you very much," the voice says. "I’m dying of boredom here, Bert, with all this mindless work." "I am, too," I tell her. "If only I can stay there. If only our decisions do not seal our fate and hurl us into futures we do not want. If only—" "What did you say?" "Ah, nothing. Nothing." She tells me she’ll call me up again tomorrow. I tell her I love her, then hung up. I glance at my watch. *** Life goes on, says Mark. He runs the back of his hand on the rough surface of the collage. "Do you think I deserve this?" he asks me. "I don’t know." He stares back at the collage. Then here are the two of us, he tells me, who don’t even know if they really deserve these things. He tears the collage off the wall, and motions me to follow him. We walk outside. He makes a loose heap of the torn pictures, and sets it afire. The dry paper quickly burns, sending off a thick smoke. I know what Mark is thinking, but I remain silent. He gazes at the burning heap blankly, watching fragments of his life turning irretrievably into dust.
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