Before the third episode of the Philippines Graphic Literary Workshop (PGLW) concluded on April 18, 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.
#098
Not very long since I moved to this part of the city, there has always been that peculiar building in the distance. A dark rectangle that seems to hold an entire abyss in its stark outline, against the wire-ladden sky. I thought it to be twenty floors up when I noticed it the first time. Nondescript, until you stare a little longer from the MRT seat, and then it towered over many others to be just twenty. I don’t pride myself in my spatial awareness but it nevertheless surprised me today that the building creeped up on me. All along it is the perpetrator for the lack of sunlight in my apartment—more room or superimposed box. Hundreds of meters away, this distant westside neighbor… but it doesn’t matter. I am rarely home anyway.
#111
No matter what street I glance up from, amid the shiny glass or worn concrete, that black building seems to stubbornly maintain its shape. Parallel vertical lines and a roof. Two-dimensional. An anomaly! Although perhaps it’s the paint that confounds me, encompassing a color deeper than the night. Now, what do I know of a deep night when all my life I’ve resided in urban cities, part of a generation that does not know silence and has forgotten stars still twinkle in the sky? I wonder if this split from the heavens is the reason I, and many others, am this way. I wonder too who has the money to enshroud their building with the blackest possible black. Likely the same type of people who dump us mountains of work with considerably little pay in the far side of Metro Manila. How tiring.
#122
A black cat. A black coffee. A black building. What fascinating creatures accompanying me today.
It seems the building has caught my fancy for I’ve made it my subject twice already. You simply have to see it and notice how it swallows all light. If I were to draw close to it, it might just devour me whole and never let me out. Somehow, a better fate than a desk job and its overtime hours, allayed only by my novice charcoal sketching that goes nowhere but a box under the bed. Or the rare pizza or pansit-sa-bilao days in the office. The rent is rising again too. The streets are wider, the cops have chased the streetsellers away again. I lay upon a bed every night with all sorts of trouble digging into my back and I dream of debts. I need to get myself a better bedframe, but maybe a better job first. Perhaps that building can offer me one. It has become my unnatural beacon, accompanying me rushing past crowds to catch the soonest train at Taft Avenue. Maybe it can save me in another way.
(Clipped to the page: a charcoal sketch of a black cat, a café exterior, and a black rectangle. There are smudges at the bottom corner, the artist wiping their fingers clean.)
#128
I am visiting my older brother today. I haven’t seen him in months. It brings me joy that he’s found his home in Quezon, doing something he’s grown to love. In another life, I would’ve wanted to live far from the city and work in a plant nursery too, but I’m not taking away this fulfilled dream from its toiling hands. What do I dream of? I don’t deny, at least in these pages, that I sought him out since our last argument months ago because I felt like I was becoming a little less human. Man becomes less when by itself. And for how much we have had fights, he’s the only one who understands me the most.
I brought him a book I’ve annotated but I don’t think he’s finished the first one I gave him. From when we were still young. Nothing odd about that, he was always more partial to movies and video games. What’s odd today is that there is another black building here. Is black paint in vogue nowadays? I had a funny thought that it followed me like a lost black cat. I’ve always wanted a house of my own, one where I can paint the walls black. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to such a point and so my mind clings to this black building. Hmmm…
#133
How does a whole building disappear?
No noise, no dust needing time to settle, but worst of all, no one knows what happened to it. In fact, others act as if such a building never existed. One afternoon, I went home to a sliver of yellow bathing my room. I looked out the window to see that building gone. As quick as a shadow, a space opens for the sky. Tita Ruth, my neighbor who’s a single mother to five cats and a child who never visits, asked me if I was drunk when I asked her about it. Kuya Deg, the owner of the karinderya downstairs, laughed and warned me not to eat black rice. I don’t think the legend went that way anyway. And there is nothing mythical about Metro Manila. Risa told me it was probably just demolished and I had been too busy with work. And it’s true. Rising prices, rising rent, rising headache of a job. They’re asking us to take work home every Friday now but rushing the tasks as if one day offsite would mean we’re not still working.
Something in me oddly aches. Hunger pangs? I need to eat properly. I need to cook again. I haven’t touched my kitchen in months, opting to eat downstairs or just shrivelling up if I don’t notice the time or that the karinderya happens to be closed. But it’s not just that. A part of me has wilted like a flower without a sun, me without my black beacon. I saw it everyday, I didn’t even notice it made its home in my heart until it’s gone. The world feels a little louder. Everyone has their weird fixations and mine’s a bygone weird-looking building.
#135
I am in Quezon again. I cooked for the first time in a while: spaghetti with toast. My brother has shown me his newly adopted orange cat and they’re quite a timid pair. I don’t know if it’s a good thing, a good thing that I can’t exactly read him anymore. Maybe it is; I hardly recognize him as the boy I once traded tirades with yet found a fellow feeling in. Something in those walls brought out the worst of us, I think. They ought to break them down and if they find black mold, I shouldn’t be surprised. But I’m here in Quezon now, miles and years away. A grueling commute, a long conversation, and a washing up later (their water smells and tastes different somehow), I think of our old house.
I cannot deny that I was eager to visit again partly because of the other black building, the distant sibling, but there is no black building anymore. I asked him about it and he said he’d never seen it. I distinctly remember us standing on the gravel and myself squinting at it from behind sunglasses. It was cloudy but I was being threatened by an oncoming migraine. The wind whipped into my ears, a sound of discordant humming. I remember the vivid bougainvillea at the other side of the road, then that monolith. It feels like I made it all up. I hadn’t eaten black rice, hadn’t I? (What am I thinking!)
#138
I came home to find my window open and objects strewn about. Nothing is missing except the box under my bed. I could not have misplaced it. So who the fuck would enter my apartment just to steal a crappy box?! None of much value was taken. I cannot wrap my head around it. All I can think about is a certain old sketch I may have lost forever. I have tried to recreate it but it’s not the same.
I was almost scared to ask Tita Ruth but she too was confused. It had been quiet, she said, and it’s challenging for someone to enter our apartments from the window. She invited me in to share her dinner with me and I saw her window. It doesn’t look into the gap between the buildings where the black building once was. It sounds impossible when we’re literally side by side and the gap isn’t that far and small. I don’t get it! I don’t get anything that’s been happening!!!!
To make matters worse, the karinderya is closed for good. It hadn’t even been that long since I last ate at Kuya Deg’s, and now they’re gone. There is no sign or any trace left, save for the poor dog they used to feed curled up in its usual spot. It feels like everything’s disappearing without my knowledge. Why?
(Clipped to the page: a rough graphite sketch of a modest two-story house. There are shrubs outside, a mango tree, and the view of a single illuminated window. A candle sits there, waiting for its owner to arrive home.)
#140
The shadows in the room are all wrong.
#144
I got accepted into a higher pay job. I sought it out, I made the effort of hiding my application from my current employers, but now that I have it, I dread it. Have I made a mistake? I don’t see myself thriving here personally but if I am indeed transported into yet another limbo, it is not something I can afford agonizing over. I wonder what my life would have been like had I not taken a dead-end degree. If I hadn’t been blinded by false promises of that company and its cartoonishly evil managers. If I had been smarter and possessed even a semblance of foresight. Or, if I hadn’t broken away from familial ties so early in my life. Had I endured a house that gnawed away at my soul a little longer… Did I have a soul then? How should I know I have a soul? I wonder and I keep wondering…
I will make it work somehow.
#161
It has only been a few days doing my work in the Laguna site but the city keeps changing. I don’t recognize my home. I don’t know why the shortcut road to the cemetery’s been blocked, the nearby café is gone, or the green patch of land in the other street was cleared for a parking lot. Most of all, I don’t know why there is another stark black building here and it’s nearer. And I don’t know why I’m so unsettled and that no one else seems to be. People rush past me and no one cares about the rapid changes in the world. No building was erected in the specific space it’s encroaching. It’s taken up the small space the other apartments used to share and surround, but it looks like they—yes, the damned buildings—made some space for this prodigal one. If I am only ignorant of how to measure distances, fine, but how was it that there were no scaffoldings, no trucks, no noise, no dust? And yet it’s here, pristine, and it’s so quiet. Save for the ringing in my ear when I look at it and try to decipher where its corners are. It stares into the windows of my apartment with its own. If there are windows at all. I cannot see them. I have drawn my curtains shut despite how humid it’s become and now I struggle to sleep. It’s no use to try to sleep so I should just eat or clean or watch a stupid movie or work. Work again. Sleep no more.
#162
”Journeys end in lovers’ meeting — every wise man’s son doth know. What is love […] What’s to come, is still unsure.”
#163
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Maybe this new job is just making me mad. Can I take any more of these charts and numbers and condescending looks and cold shoulders and sleepless nights? Have I done something cosmically wrong? I must get away. From what, I am unsure. I want a house to retreat to.
#165
In the mirror facing the window, I don’t see the black building. Am I
#168
Starting to wonder if I should call a priest or get another prescription.
I thought my own familiar wooden door was my shadow. It was big and it looked like it moved. Within the next second or so, I thought the shadow was then instead the black building, that it was here with me, that it was part of me. Tethered itself to me. What
#169
Tita Ruth is acting weird. One of her cats hissed at me as I left the apartment. I got yelled at at work and then ignored all day, which should’ve been better than being yelled at again but I don’t know. I called my brother after work but he’s busy and hung up quickly. I look up at the building from the street of my apartment and it’s still there. I don’t want to seek it out. I don’t want to know which street its doors yawn open wide at. I wish to move away. Not just from this city. I don’t want to be in Metro Manila, or even Luzon. Just anywhere without traces of too many tall buildings to darken the city and enable one very sinister structure to spring out of the many shadows these wretched ones have cast. Are people aware Metro Manila is a portal to hell?
#172
I haven’t felt this lonely in so long. I still write because I have no one to talk to and no one to assign my witness to show how I tried. Dammit, I tried. And yet the world has no space in it for me. I belong nowhere but to myself. Do I really? Can I? A tortoise is a funny thing whose shell is itself and its home. This apartment isn’t my shell. I don’t have a shell.
#173
If I should have a house, it should have a high ceiling to combat the tropical heat. I should have a cellar for food and wine, or just somewhere to hide away; an attic to ascend into dreams, with spiders and cobwebs as company. I don’t know if I’d still want to paint the walls black. It doesn’t really matter though, does it?
#177
I wear my competence like jewelry, later a shield, then it falls apart like a fake string of pearls. I gather them in my arms but they are incomplete. I painstakingly stitch them back together. Repeat. I will run out.
#181
It has a lone window. Far up the top, near the sky. At least, one window that shows itself to me. It doesn’t stare this time, it is anticipating. A light that keeps vigil. A house that waits. All noise of the city falls away once I have gazed upon that lone, distant light. Repose befalls me. O light in the sleeping house. It invites me like a somnolent reverie. I sleepwalk. Crawl, if I must.
#
I can feel it tremble. A storm is coming. All the lights have gone. Everyone has whipped out their candles but I think only of that warm, peculiar light burning at the top. Burning. Waiting. Holding vigil.
It will disappear again. I can feel it. But now all the doors have opened. I need only to walk slowly, slowly. I shall walk to it come the fleeting hour.
I imagine its walls to be a deeper black than the shadows. How deep? It may stretch into corridors that never end, but I will not be lost, for I will be home. I need not fear the dark in the house of my dreams. It is mine. It is me. It is my shell.
How had I not seen it all along? I hope you haven’t been waiting too long, dear old home. I will scrape the wax off the floor if it has run itself over and make you a new one. Soon I will descend the steps of this house of rooms I share with others, inch by inch, and I will come towards you. I will ascend your steps and burrow in the nest. It shall be just you and I.
When you go once more, I would rather we disappear together. I can hear your song now. The sound of blissful silence.
I tremble at the thought of your embrace.
Written by Nadine Belarma
