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.

Blue and black are kind colors

Nameless-Beach-Somewhere-In-San-Antonio-Zambales

The sand in Zambales has always been black. The only time that the beaches had been washed white was in 1991, when Mt. Pinatubo awoke. Further inland however, there is sand instead of soil, and this sand is white as ash. The land is white with the memory of Pinatubo wherever the sea could not reach.

Before the surfing boom, everyone went into the water with their clothes on. Children learned how to walk and how to swim almost at the same time, and in the same vicinity, and that there were two kinds of blue: the blue of the sky, and the blue of the water.

My fondest memory of Zambales is of the sea: as a child, falling asleep dreaming of the movement and murmur of waves, and that if you were to lay still enough, you could feel the sea beween your fingers. People choose their memories of the sea, over the beautiful, giant flower of a cloud, and the mad descent of ash and rain and terror. It's because the sea always changes back, they explain, when everything else does not, and would not, the sea always will.