My body, it’s upside-down from lack of sleep. It doesn’t know whom to listen to: this girl’s heart, or this girl’s mind. It stays awake even though it’s tired, it dances even though its feet are sore. I fell asleep at five in the morning.
Three hours later I was awake, vision askew and distorted. It was still raining then, and the pavement was just too… wet to be walked on, erringly I cancelled all my plans and rolled my first cigarette of the day.
Since my sister is a doctor, I pored over her medical books and found a nice drawing of a heart, penciled and shaded, ripped it up and tacked it to the wall. Left ventricle. Right ventricle. Aortas, veins, and arteries. Do you know what God is? God is a philosopher. He makes the right side move the left, and the left, right. Every step is a step closer to heaven, and every new heaven is falling to the earth.
Now, i can’t create utopia from eternal depth, because I don’t know how deep I am. Maybe, this day and age, the idea of not knowing where you’re heading is the indirect consequence of your unconscious worry of your vein (left atrium’s oblique, for example, if ever possible, because I’m no Medical student) bursting, or arteries clogging. It should be of importance, physics declares it should, chemistry demands it, and my mind is just wondering.
So dismiss this, dismiss this as psychobabble, dismiss this as a head-stuck-in-oven mood, call it anything you want, I don’t care. Only a girl knows what goes on in her mind, when her body changes and her eyes are layers of mist, because a girl knows what she knows and won’t explain it, it’s more of a mystery to herself than to others when she lifts her gaze to the bathroom mirror at five in the morning and pinches her cheeks to make them apear redder. Strange. She won’t explain it. She can’t.
I had a discussion with my friends over a late dinner, and one of them jumped to the topic that girls were the moon, la lune, no light of their own. But dammit, he said in an explosive voice, reclining in his seat and blowing out a steady stream of smoke that was hypnotizing, what infinite beauty girls were, they could make you ache with their yellow tint, hanging out in the sky like they do, they could change their (ph-)faces like geishas, they could raise the tides during the night and you’d never know of their doing, until you saw the wave patterns on the sand the next morning. “And fuckit, they run in your blood like it were the only thing to save you from drowning like the helpless fuckface you are, thinking they’re all important and shit… they think they’re the goddam Queen of Your Aorta or something, hahaha!… fuck that! But… you know if they stopped flowing in your veins, you’re dead, pare, you’re fucking dead without the moon. You’re a corpse, that’s what you are.”
I don’t think it’s just women (I’m terrifically bored with men-versus-women gender debates because my stand is on individualism) who are…well, moons, and I argued with his point till the last drops of our cheap wine disappeared and till we had nothing more to smoke. But this guy was serious about his girl-moon theory, la lune as he put it in his fancy faux-French accent, ang buwan, as he put it in Filipino, calling it this way and that. Calling me, unintentionally, a geisha, a disguise, a tide-shifter, a (ph-)face changer, who turns the sky into Starbucks and draws men closer because we know that the point of view, from the earth to the moon, is as close as one can ever get.
I didn’t have the heart to remind them that man has walked on the moon, and that one could perfectly use a telescope for a closer look. In a way I owed them my silence that much, because it’s bloody sweet and morbid to be called Queen of Aortas.
