Dear reader,
When I was a young girl, aged fifteen in 2012, I had written in a Word document, I want to die. I was certain of it, the way only a teenage girl with secrets could be. It wasn’t on my list of sins to repent for, scribbled as they were on the back of a spiral notebook along with a pastiche of roses and clouds. I wanted to save face – conform to the configurations of wickedness that possessed girls of my age. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, I am guilty only of: boys, scheming, kissing, lying.
I would not have actually killed myself. I had no will outside maternal behest, and so the will to die I didn’t claim as my own. Instead, it was like a doorway that materialized out of nowhere. There was the open threshold between my life and death, and the obstinate desire of not-being-where-I-was. What lay on the other side of that door, Heaven or a common oblivion, was of no consequence.
For this reason, I think I lost a vital part of my girlhood. A spontaneity that was cut short too soon, supplanted by a feral self-consciousness. It was a new subjectivity that hinged on my perceived social value as a young woman. Early on, a girl is taught how to fawn: was I pretty? Was I nice? Was I good? In translation: could I be the subject of a gangly boy's wet fantasy? My depression begot a kind of conditional knowledge – or was it this knowledge that begot my first come-upon with depression? – not about the world, but about my identity in relation to other girls. I had become eloquent in the language of comparatives, the -er's and the -est's, just as surely as I began to believe in the hierarchical classification of my own femininity as the moral order of my world.
Slowly, it became easier to think, Was I prettier? Was I nicer? Was I better?
More and more, I came to understand that there was currency to beauty, though not my own. No qualities about me announced that I was a Lolita– no sway of the hips, lithe wrists, or long, silky hair that I could brush aside delicately. My femininity was a secret stowed away inside me, so remote that to allude to it anywhere or to anyone gave me a sense of mortification. Instead, I had frizzy, black hair that grew down to my flat chest – a pale, yellow-ish face studded with acne and excess sebum. There was nothing more unforgiving than the scrutiny of my own gaze.
Twelve years later, now aged twenty-seven, I cannot say that I have nothing in common with her. The young girl is not a stranger but she is not me. Her pubescent scars have gone; her skin now held a permanent display of tattoos. Over twelve years have passed, years that came and went with its typhoons, impeachment trials, peace talks, beauty pageants, national and local elections, all in the process of being forgotten. What I still know of that young girl is enclosed by the years that move farther away so that the reality of her life is tangible but unreachable.
Still, there are chemical sensations that recrudesce in my brain.
What I mean to say is that I have carried the young girl with me – her awareness, her sorrows, her sins. She is still real inside me – her thereness retrievable as the memory of the house where we came of age with its neglect and credenza of overlooked things. And when the black dog comes to whine and lick me at the feet, I am reconciled with the middle-class girl from the province, with long black hair and loose, girlish clothes who once had asked her mother, “Am I ugly?”
For our sake, I have tried to find ministrations.
There were the doctors and the drugs. Over the years: Wellbutrin. Amisulpride. Escitalopram. Vortioxetine. Always that mild equanimity, So, my dear, why are you here? It used to be a bespectacled woman in her 30s, donning a white coat. A widow in Makati, with a big mole on her right cheek and photographs of her late husband in her stuffy, overly-embellished living room. A Fil-Chinese mother who had Love and Hope in her full name. A Reiki healer and counselor in New Zealand who made me cry every time she said, “That must have been hard, love.”
I'd give some oft-rehearsed yet orderless account of my afflictions and misfortunes. Sometimes it was about my mother, my body; a lack of meaningful friendships; an unabating loneliness, and its accompanying sense of rejection and abandonment close to paranoia. A catalog of existential aches that have rejected self-administered remedies.
What else?
When I felt the real possibility of romantic love – even its mere pretense – I held on to it when I could, longer and harder than any kind of therapy. I’m guilty of assigning romantic love its unduly task of making my life vastly more endurable. Having the capacity to dream and write and see the silent fluency of ordinary things, and not be without grace, completely vegetative and hopeless in bed without sleep nor sustenance for days, lay in finding someone who could love me, and love me enough to become a mirror. A mirror that would hold up a shining image of myself that was beautiful and good. And I confess, I have loved. More viciously, I have been loved.
The week before I turned twenty-seven, my relationship of seven years reached its end. I celebrated my birthday with friends at a natural wine bar in Salcedo, looking straight at the unknown, reassured that at least I had these people and my job to give my future some shape. I had broken up with him, equipped with the same reasons that had haunted me two years before.
I realized, at some indistinct moment, it was important to fully meet the person I’ve become, with her new desires and visions of love. My desires had shifted, my understanding of love had changed, and he lingered on the periphery like an idea I no longer believed in. At 22, I would have fought tooth and nail to keep him, imagining that my happiness depended on his place in my life. But now, I see that I was clinging to something I didn’t yet understand how to release.
It was only when I settled into a restaurant booth alone, at a katsu place in New Manila, that I finally felt the gash of my estrangement: It was high noon. I was surrounded by families and lovers and friends. My set meal included a breaded, deep-fried chicken cutlet, shredded cabbage, tsukemono, miso soup, steamed rice, a dollop of karashi mustard, and watermelon and pineapple wedges. All of a sudden, I could no longer figure out the sequence in which to eat them. It was excruciating to think that I had to dip each piece of katsu into the tonkatsu sauce, pair it with a bite of steamed rice, eating shredded cabbage in between. So I cried. I cried until I felt limp. Until I was left with an acquiescence to everything. A big, middle-aged waiter did not ask questions but refilled my glass of water soundlessly. And I dared not to look anyone in the eye.
He’s found someone new, I heard. And I know more about her than I should. If I let myself, I can picture her clearly: a writer, a copywriter, a reader. Twenty-four, short hair, glasses. I confess, I’ve imagined her without trying—a version of myself at that age, one who might have passed my book among her friends, quoting lines, finding pieces of herself in its pages. Perhaps she’s even the sort who might have once sat in on one of my readings. I know it, I’ve been there: expectant eyes and this clamorous desire to write more and prove something to myself. It’s not jealousy exactly, but the strange feeling of seeing yourself as you once were. The way her existence folds into my own, how close she comes to something I once was and filling the space I left, without hesitation, without meaning to.
I could easily map the places where our lives might touch, but to what end? There is no use in drawing lines between her life and mine. I regret nothing. She belongs to herself, after all, deserving of something new, something untouched by my shadow. She is entirely her own being, worthy of a love unblemished and near complete, if it ever reaches that fullness.
I am faintly reminded of what I forfeited all these years.
