Calling Astro Waps

You spoke of the soul a year later while my clock says it’s been half that. We measure time with our words and time rambles. It is Sunday and the night is barking, the rattle of spoons in the kitchen, the chatter of a three year old about Mama Mary punctuated by laughter and hugs, even the waiting cursor seems to make a sound in what is silence. The past three days my baby sister would sometimes gently say Inay…Inay…Where are you? Because I have been silent and would go far away, would talk to the sky, finding corners in the kitchen or promised chairs or hammocks in houses. I would just say I’m here and point to this. You have forgotten that this silence would sometimes disturb those who love us. They are waiting and waiting for us to come back from the horizon where we are on the verge of knowing what is ineffable. At times catapulted into that black hole where letters become a storm and you feel as if you are falling, suspended in space. Grounded on the material, when will our feet touch Wonderland? Inay…Inay…Where are you? Sunday and the Easter Mass never happened. Always irreverent, the spinsters and their Father joke about the priest being somewhere else, perhaps the beach, drinking and whoring. Waiting, the children ask about the meaning of INRI, what are jews, where human beings came from and what was the first country, taking turns on my lap for their answers. And what is a democrat, I point them to sit on their uncle’s lap. I watch Mother’s lips and almost hear her prayers. That tomorrow her daughter who is a mother would be safe after steel would cut and pull mass out of her. And I, always the surrogate mother, would stay with the children. You they listen to, You they adore and fear, You with the love that has become patient through the years. Hours later I say out loud to Mother as I take off my new white heels how someone loved could say that I would be a bad mother. A second of the falling unto suspended space spoken. Ika kaya su pig-aalagaan. I nod and say that I do know how that could have been said, remembering seeing anger in women and grown men’s tears at my shrugging face when that was gutted out of my gritted lips. Ninang! We had our ultrasound earlier. Baby girl magiging inaanak mo. Kailangan kasing fashionista ng ninang ha! I say that I remember that whenever I see the children, when our boy asks about the why of the world. I say that I live with my faults. Mother says that she prays for the next time. But it will take a while, I say, for the heart has become a husk. I do understand and that has always been the weight scaled by the gift. Do you? Yes and that’s why the confounding come to me and feel like they have come home to that hidden planet of Cavafy. And if I look happier then it is because for years now there is acceptance of the daring madness in me without apologia, without wanting to kill its host. The mothers and the children ask as it is time to sleep Inay…Inay…Where are you? The end of each beginning is seen through. There is always courage to be the self no matter the toll and dues have been paid by the soul. There is now air and there is the horizon. There is that journey to gravity that keeps its silence about pillars becoming plagiarists and the politics of penitence. And time, like the future that we see, that we can put in words can make us speak of the year later now.