today, i woke up with this weary feeling that somehow i have been drifting more and more away from my core.
a draft i could feel coming from my kitchen window. i got out of bed and could smell the air blowing from outside with the sugary scent of a threatening snow.
as i shut the sash window tighter, i remembered i had dreamed last night in english, broken, heavily accented. some immemorial dream about a beautiful man and mousy me. this only happened rarely, i mean, this dreaming in english.
for i dream, most of the time, in the language that my mother's comadrona cursed her when she gave birth to me - bellicose and scathingly honest bisaya.
bilat siyang ina. wa man niy pulos imong anak, moning.
cunt of your mother. you bore a useless child, moning.
i had flat feet, my knees twisted to waddle my gait. my limbs were lanky, very ungainly, never the stocky ones prized among sons born in our fishing village.
i, too, remember how my mother smirked at my undeveloped crotch every time she bathed me. and I thought that every word that manang buraska, mama's midwife, chomped out of her betel-nut-stained mouth were more than the truths of my present then. they were cruel oracles of my tomorrows.
intawon ang bebe, unsa-on man nimo pagkakita ug asawa?
pity you, my baby, how would you find yourself a wife?
manang buraska, she seemed the seer, the cynical one, whose only failing was to under embellish her visions too much. she only saw the frailty of my limbs and she seemed only to feel ominous vibes when staring at my puny crotch.
she glossed over the plethora of moles strewn over my then bald pate', like bands of kelp, beached, cringing under the sun yet still dreaming for that next big surf to rake them back to the sea.
in our island teeming with puff fish and superstitions, a kid endowed with a constellation of moles in his head was never expected to become anybody. just a ne'r do well, a dreamer, at best.
when my mother could still dupe me into wearing gabardine shorts while the rest of my boy classmates were already strutting around in bang-bang denims, there was no big eyed octopus too slippery for my spindly hands nor a curse too harsh for my tinny voice. at least in my dreams.
in my dreams, I could beat the airhead son of the richest family in our island in a boat race at dusk, across the lagoon, towards panangatan island of the sweetest coconuts.
he, limping among the waves, in their family's evinrude-motorized boat, i, surfing, no, hovering above the crests in our outriggered banca painted pale red, pink. mama had only enough money to afford the one dear can of the reddest of paints and three of the cheaper stucco.
lolo nimo, carding. usapa na. puro lang ka hangin da.
carding, you go masturbate. chew this. you're all air.
i was not only a delusional kid but i, too, was sincerely foul mouthed. again, only in the honesty of my dreams.
there was dreaming, even then, that seduced me like sin. all that would make me slip into dreaming was that stillness, that lull in the hum in any of my childhood afternoons and i would hear the swoosh of my dreams flowing, rushing out of my head. and how i would hear them crackle like the midday riptide pummeling the gnarly island reef.