panagupnop

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photo by: moe

 I woke up with no arms. The nurse was a familiar face. Everything seems familiar when you are trying to nurse a broken heart. And the phone rang “I miss you, I have been seeing a lot of toy soldiers and marionettes.” Sometimes, the agony is the deception between pity and love.  I was thinking that my legs were the ones to be removed because they have been running: away from anger because it destroys the faith, away from false people who hid in quilt, away from years in black and white, towards a calloused chin— because it is the sanest possession.Losing the arms was not easy, a man came to visit me and told me that I have been throwing dynamites into the ocean believing that I would find this chest full of my childhood photographs. I told him “I thought this whole keyboard exploded, it exploded and shattered my arms and there was a dog barking near the door and a boy dropped his feeding bottle and ran to me.” He said no, “you were throwing dynamites from a boat and you were wearing white.”

Then my parents came in, my mother looked 28, my father looked rotten.

My siblings brought baskets of things that I have missed when I was young. The baskets were empty. 

then there was this sculptor, a familiar face and familiar scent. he brought a fish in a plastic, it swam slowly and its eyes lit on me like a spotlight and the police asked “why have you forsaken sadness?”

—

“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. There are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing.”

— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

for erman and tepoy

for answering my silent bomb that it is best

to jump off from the wall and betray the war.

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