Begnas di Yabyab (Written last Nov 2013)

 

Little cutie all dressed up for the Begnas di Yabyab

It was not strange to find the street empty. Thousands of miles above and away from the lowlands where I was raised, the people of Sagada rose before the sun did, and at almost 8am I had already missed them by hours. It was the morning after a storm, and plants that had been too weak against the rain and wind lay helplessly in the mud. The air hung warm with the steam of the wet earth, relief from the cold. Minutes ago, a friend had said brusquely through the phone, to come out by the road and wait. Not knowing what to expect, I drifted into a nearby weaving shop to pace, first out of faith, and then desperation. The storeowner, amused at my unease, later took me aside, asking if I was there to watch the indians, and, confused, I stood with him by the door as he explained what warranted my waiting.

Mental Picture 4

We are making our way through a labyrinth of tombs, taking shelter from the noon sun underneath the overgrowth of plants in the yards of some of the neglected dead. In their wild, abandoned state they have managed to grow more beautiful. We try entering forgotten tombs and look at the pictures and paintings, most of them faded and dark. Sometimes only their sad eyes remain.

I realize I have become more reckless. Thrilled at the idea of exploring, i take several turns and find a lion dog embedded in a strip of wall. I realize that i talk to myself less, when i say to you, "someone's watching over us," but it dawns upon me that i had lost myself in the maze. It takes me only the sound of your careful footsteps to find my way back.

Sometimes i fancy us being guests of the ghosts that still wander the cemetery: the helpful old man on the bike, the old lady with yellow hair peering out of a mausoleum offering us some shade. The statues you photographed, bleached white by the sun. Souls watching over others. What a day, to think lightly of our mortality.

Mental Tryptich

Morning
I awake to the sound of you getting down the ladder in complete darkness, and again as you return. I follow you out of the hut to wait for the sunrise. We are the first ones up, in the whole village, and we sit on a wooden step watching our breaths form small ghosts in the cold. Sunrise begins as a sharp streak of gold tearing through the sleepy pastels that make up dawn; perhaps this is why they call it daybreak.

Afternoon
On my descent to the river, I stopped to gaze at the mountains. You'd think we were in the sky; maybe if I stood here, a stranger from flat lands with the sea in my back yard hundreds of years ago, I would have indeed thought that I had come closer to the gods, seeing the clouds so close to where I stood. But I keep descending. Some small boys, naked as the day they were born, run swiftly past me. "Where are you going, big sister?" they ask, and I answer, to the river. To the river where you are. I laugh as I come upon you, an adonis in the rain brushing his teeth.

Midnight
"Come look...you can see the Milky Way."
For some reason, the skies had cleared in the night after an afternoon of unrelenting rain. I hurry dwn the ladder and join you in the dark, following only the pale figure your shirt cast against the night.  This is the first time I had ever seen the Milky Way. It felt more like looking up into a chasm made up of stars, and the dense, fluid black that is what I imagine makes up the universe.

Mental Picture 3

We find ourselves walking in the rain so often in this city, you and I. We take small, careful steps: you holding the umbrella, me holding the crook of your arm for warmth. The fog is so thick among the trees it is as if the sky had decided to descend upon us. While walking, you tell me that you like the ghostly effect the rain and fog has on trees, and everything else that surrounds it. We pause to look at the flood of houses sprawled along the hillside, asleep in the gentle white mist.

Sometimes I wonder how far we've come on our feet alone. We walk to a park in the middle of the city, abandoned in the rain, and walk under weeping willows--that shed actual, heavy tears--and watch a lone swan boat languish in the lake.

Mental Picture 2

Imagine a rock formation at the edge of the sea while the tide was low, topped by a single, forlorn tree.

Imagine jade waters slamming into jagged, dark edges of rock. I ease myself in through the cracks underneath. I want to take my clothes off and swim there, in this forgotten pocket of the universe, barely hang on to the rocks with my fingers, scream and laugh as the tide pulls me away, shed useless tears as I cut my feet on the sharp bottom. Our bodies were not meant for this pocket of the sea: unlike the tiny creatures that lived in the corners where only the water reached--small crabs and snails, little sea-blossoms that shrank to the touch-- we are larger, softer and more awkward by comparison, and we would have paid dearly for our intrusion; torn to shreds over time, i imagine, and it would have taken us years to wash ashore, swept smooth and blanched bone-white, to truly belong.

You took my hand as i slipped over stones carpeted with moss, and i thought about how nobody else knew where we were, and it must have been the cool relief of the seawater streaming in and out of the rock wall we spent for god-knows-how-long, but i felt that it would have been a mistake not to kiss you then, in the blue shadows, away from the rest of the world, but as i started to pull on your hand, you looked back and kissed me.

After the River

Once upon  a time, a great, grand, raging river

At first we had no words. Instead, we stood close together and stared and stared and stared. And the air was so dry our lips cracked as we gasped.

"Can you imagine, people lived here hundreds of years ago?" and people used to--still did-- in the wake of an ancient river. In the museum, they saved the little burros made of twigs that the Havasupai inhabitants made--and the dry, dry air kept safe for 800 years--in little glass boxes for the rest of us to see.

Mental Picture 1

In this one, imagine a mango tree, seen from an archway, its leaves heavy with rain. Young red-brown leaves gather on some of the branches like lazy hands. Two young lovers venture closer, take pictures on the damp lawn. The air is heavy with steam, this afterthought of a downpour. I am seated on a bench with someone I barely know, and he instructs me to take a picture of the mango tree beyond the arch. It is very humid, and I am very nervous, and I could not help but apologize for ruining the moment by being a sweaty, fidgeting wreck. He tells me it is natural, and that I looked pretty anyway. I cringe inwardly. A silence follows after, in which I can feel him quietly looking at me, and I wanted to reach out and wrap my small, small hands around his, but I was not brave enough. 

There is an actual, physical photograph of that mango tree, but I wish that by the time I see it, I wouldn't be as much of a terrified wuss.

Islanders in Desert Country

A patch of vast, vast Arizona

I've been wont to repeating the same phrases whenever a situation calls for it, and perhaps for something as large as a desert (to which any thing made by man--even words--fall flat, or dim, against its endless, excruciating horizons) such a weakness could be forgiven.
        "I could not," I wrote on several postcards to friends, "even begin to comprehend the vastness of the desert." My sisters and I drove for miles, and the desert spread beyond the reach of sight, beyond all my islander's comprehension. Miles upon miles of bare land, essentially; uninhabited land.

Oh but how they burst with color, and life. At times, a stretch of desert with sand so bright and yellow it hurt to look at; purple and blue and rust--oranges and reds--spread out in patches of open space, under cloudless skies, indifferent and blue. Small, hard plants growing in clumps, waving to us in the harsh wind. Tiny bright red flowes. Curls and waves of color and movement etched into enormous walls of rock where rivers must once have flowed.
        "America is so...big," one of us said. And then I wonder if America's need to turn to other shores came from this--this same unfathomable emptiness.