As the first episode of the Philippines Graphic Literary Workshop (PGLW) slowly came to its conclusion on February 28, we knew that we had one more thing that we can offer our bright young fellows: a starting platform for their creative endeavors. Here, we present one of their final outputs from the workshop. We also asked them to provide an artwork that they think best represents their stories. Read on.
I gave you my right heel, a promise to be re-paired.
I never knew how engulfing the tides had been. Not until we tasseled by the shoreline, our imprints consecrating the sand: you your heavy boots, mine my yellow dancing heels. The salty tide lurches, melting any traces of our soles at its reception; of us, in its recession.
Burying soles now adrift, apart, departed.
Across the coast I’d wondered if our horizons were shared still. Ours, a brilliant violet twilight, fluttering among stardust petals. Yours, a crimson lesion obscured by smog at the precipice of war, peppered with mortar shells.
How did the sea breeze feel for you that day? Was it clinging onto your coarse skin like the veneer of our final parting embrace? Or were you clinging onto the sands of life, with brass and blood wrestling the salt laden air into your nostrils? Which did you hold more firmly, as both escaped your grasp? Was my lip’s parting gift the final prayer of your sinking gasp?
You went on to heed the call of duty with your arms. We were arm-in-arm, stretched together on the grains of the sand bed. You talked of your return like those little sweet promises you whisper, crawling on my skin into my smile. Our champagne mornings toasted together, longing by the seaside. But they sent a letter in your stead, a flag, a barely sympathetic apology. Your crumbly cushions beside me, now empty.
A bare right foot imparts its last imprint, with a stiletto stab wound to its left — forever missing its twin.
Awash, my sole is buried in blue. As the waves break and take me by the neck, twisting tighter. I gave you my heel, a broken promise of us to be re-repaired. Now I renounce what you have left, me. Blanketing my soul in a vast salty grave — we’ll forever share.
Karlo Mikel C. Terrell is a University of the Philippines student born and raised in Legazpi City, Albay, now taking up philosophy as his major. Before he took up the study of the meaning of life and the world through academic philosophy, he had first explored what it means to live in it through writing simple poetry. | https://medium.com/@karloterrell
More details on the artwork here.
