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We haven’t talked about it but I think we both know it’s crumbling like a house of cards, that it’s losing air like a punctured balloon. Fallen or deflated, metaphors do not describe the helplessness that steals my breath whenever I think about us.
How can I forget you? On midnight before our seventh (or eighth or ninth, I can’t tell) monthsary when I was at work, you sent me a message, go down to the lobby of RCBC Plaza, and there you were, edgily circling the metallic columns of the skyscraper, kicking imaginary pebbles on the ground, your hair, as usual, hanging over your beautiful face like curtains that beg parting. And during the birthday of Karen’s son in Dencio’s in Jupiter, while waiting for the food, you folded the paper mat into a heart and wrote our names on each side. Mushy, I admit, but the paper heart stays buried in my bag, along with the little booklet you made with a collage and my name on the cover, the minuscule bottle of mouthwash we bought during the night we first slept together.
Things were crazy when I met you, remember, more than a year ago at the height of the campaign against the tuition hike. Then I met your brother, Nikko, who was supposed to be a freshman in UP Manila but defered his enrolment due to financial reasons. With this, I thought you’d easily understand when I had to cancel dates because of Kulĕ pressworks and the like and I joked that I was doing it for the people, yet you pout and curse ‘my country.’ You wanted to keep our relationship devoid of social relevance.
Yet now that uncertainty hovers above us like a malevolent raincloud, none of those seemed to matter anymore. I try to comfort myself, heed the perennial counsel ‘marami namang iba d’yan’ but I know that you are the habit I’ll be most sad in breaking. And while in the future, I might find someone who will reintroduce me to that rare feeling which you so effortlessly brought and kept, I know there are names and faces that change everything like cyclones in a field, that leave us with scars, beautiful, memorable, and we are never the same since.
How does one measure emptiness, I asked Melane via text one random Sunday morning, when I felt particularly gloomy about us. She said it is an entity in itself, and it cannot be quantified. Zero divided by two is zero and it’s true. Emptiness need not be measured. You just feel it, like a gaping hole, a humming zero, the screaming silence of a phone each night.
I refuse to believe that us was just a case of not knowing what we had until it was gone, for what we had was far too spectacular for stupid clichés. You, the meek but feisty one with your longish emo hair, your deconstructed tees, your Chucks, and me, the pseudo intellectual with my unkempt curls, my tight-fitting tops, my flip flops, overcoming the early differences and making it, until such time we come to terms with the utter brevity of things.
I am still looking for that day you went away, how we’ve allowed it to pass unnoticed and how now it’s too late. #Philippine Collegian
*To Church, with apologies to Banana Yoshimoto
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For many news photographers, covering Malacañang is a tedious assignment. Aside from the hassle of dressing up everyday for the Palace (jeans and sneakers are strictly prohibited and moving around in slacks can be annoying), the subject of your photographs is also a cumbersome matter: that’s the President day in, day out.
Shooting the president entails a different kind of discipline. You have to be quick and alert all the time because once you put down your camera, the moment when she is at her best or worst may already have passed, which means you don’t have the day’s picture. This, combined with the incessant shoving of her security personnel. Her activities rarely vary as she mostly shakes hands with foreign dignitaries and diplomats and goes to public gatherings. There is the pressure, however, to make a different picture everyday despite the similarities of her activities and the competition among photographers to produce exceptional photographs.
Wearing the prescribed polo, slacks and leather heels (something I haven’t worn since high school), and armed with my cameras and long lenses, I peak through the viewfinder. Today, she is talking in front of police officers in Bicutan as she inaugurates the Gawad Kalinga houses awarded to the police and military. She is talking about the surplus in her budget and how the police should already line up for the budget allocation. Laughing Gloria, snap. Gesturing hands and laughing some more, click. Now, cupping her hands with that seemingly sympathetic look, click. Then laughing again, snap.
Never mind that again, she is lauded for passing the state’s duty to provide basic social services, such as housing, to the private sector. Never mind that she is obviously lying pointblank when she says she is unaffected by the failed military coup at the Manila Peninsula Hotel. Never mind that she is again patting herself on the back for running the country ever so efficiently.
The basic requisite of photographing the President, of course, is to make her look Presidential, even valiant. But how does one focus on catching Gloria in her best angles when she is the same person whose name and face is plastered against ‘OUST’ slogans in the rallies I covered before? Whose face is distorted into an ugly effigy during her yearly State of the Nation Address to represent widespread discontent with her administration? And whose name is regularly mentioned in this paper as the perennial evil responsible for many of our country’s woes? A photographer, who was also from this paper, told me that he could not effectively cover Gloria. “Mahirap ‘pag wala kang respeto sa Presidente mo,” he said.
“Ibigin mo si Gloria,” another photographer kidded me when I related my difficulty covering the President. The solution seemed simple: detach yourself from whatever it is she is blabbering about and focus on the language of her expressions. Forget about the contents of her speech or how contrived the gift-giving to schoolchildren appears, capture the essence of the news, of the gathering. Smiling to a Muslim child while handing a small bag with groceries, click. Smile plastered on her face as she walks past government employees, click again. Waving before she enters her black luxury car, click.
In the anniversary of the Manila Police, she talks about how the peso keeps getting stronger and how her government is actually taking steps to ease the effects of the strengthening of our currency to OFWs. The economy, she says, is also at its strongest in the past years. She continues to beam with her “achievements.” I put down my camera and let out a laugh. # Philippine Collegian
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