All My Lonely Islands

prologueO Sea, gloriously wrathful creature. Unfathomable tomb. Liquid garden. Life-bearer and murderer... I must stop. I can always tell when an ode is not working. You must excuse me, I have a strange habit. I am standing on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, see, and every time I encounter a body of water, I always have to stop and address it with a lamentation or salutation. Sometimes I dig up memories of old poems, sometimes I make stuff up and I feel the water just getting angrier. My favorite, though, is confrontation with oceans and my go-to text for such an occasion is Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster.” It’s just begging to be recited when the waves are wide fingers trying to reach up to where you’re standing and wipe you out, Old Testament style. I don’t say my odes out loud though when there are fellow sea-starers around. I don’t want to preempt their assumptions of me. Let them think that I’m a Romantic Figure of Tragedy with my salon-brown hair flapping in unison with everything the wind orchestrates to move. Let them guess the reason for the longing in my eyes. Am I remembering an entombed lover in the depths? Am I some mad creature at night? Or I could just be a Nature Lover. Whatever floats their boat. The reason I am standing on this cliff in Batanes, the northernmost patch of the Philippines, is because of an American. He has swooped down like a gray-eyed eagle and snatched me from my quiet apartment in Manila with entreaties of “This is the right thing to do, Crisanta. This is God’s will.” I should have told Ferdinand Turner to go to heaven without me. But desperation is desperation. It is a permanent smudge on my eyeballs. The perpetual pea under my saggy mattress. I’m sorry that I speak to you this way. I don’t know how else to approach you. I feel like you’re Aurora before she became Sleeping Beauty. You’re in the woods and you are surrounded by a supernatural light, and you’re singing a spectacularly robust song about Dreams Coming True. And I am a squirrel hiding from behind a tree, mesmerized by you. I’m waiting for other woodland creatures to surround you so I could slip among them and be unnoticed. But there is no one else at your bedside. There is only me and Ferdinand Turner. And we have no right to be in the same space as you. If you were only awake, you’d probably bat us out of your room with a broom like a housewife throwing out a pair of rats that had managed to sneak in at night. You should see the desperation in our eyes every time we come visit you. You’d turn your face away. It’s that abject. When people have nowhere else to go but the edge of a cliff, they have few choices. Some cling to the rocks, taking to heart all that raging against the dying of the light. Some let go because that’s where everyone ends anyway, debris in the valley of death. And some, like me, sit down and write, because we’re not brave enough to live or die. We try to manage burdens by delegating the weight to a word, transferring it to a blank piece of paper, squeezed into familiar letters and corralled by margins. Like an insect you put under a magnifying lens. You pull a wing out or a tail, see if it bleeds too much. Words. Depending on what you believe, they’re either empty air or a prophecy that shall come to pass. We try to demystify ourselves through words so we could dismantle our bones and rebuild ourselves into something less monstrous. Yesterday, I was walking along my favorite path down the sand when I was caught in a sunshower. I love those, although my Aunt Ramona would always tell me that they bring unnatural illnesses, because various creatures are being married around the world. Monkeys, jackals, foxes, tikbalangs. My favorite explanation for it is that the Devil is beating his wife because, apparently, even the Devil’s bedeviled by a wife. But why should sunshowers be unnatural? Who says the sun and rain are not supposed to share the sky? Sunshowers fit these islands; these islands that seem to be part of nothing but the sky and sea around them. They float calmly on a moody Pacific Ocean, which often extends its fingers in a whimsical attempt to reach the sky and tear it off like wallpaper. When we first stepped here on Basco, one windy March Saturday, our 30-seater charter plane wobbled down a short strip of runway bookended by the sea. Quaint. That should keep the pilots extra vigilant. We came under the unreliable night and moved with the furtiveness of people with sealed letters, heavy and fat with significance, in their jackets. Except we are the sealed letters. We have come to be delivered. We lay in our beds that night with the coiled anticipation of a jack-in-the-box. We were ready to spring out onto your doorstep with our faded, button-like eyes; his seagull-gray, mine a kind of hazel. The morning only brought us to a hospital bed. You have been on it a month, Dr. Vasquez said. A month later, and we still flock to your bedside; thick, slow, and unfulfilled. Now I sit by your window and think of how we nearly sailed across the world so we could find you here on the very edge of the country, one foot almost out the door. I’ve come to understand why you chose to settle here, though I have often wondered why we do it. Uproot ourselves, I mean. Why we feel the need to travel and wander into strange soil. Why we can’t leave things alone. It must be the world calling to us. After all, they said it had been one giant continent once. Maybe this is why we feel drawn to each other, to the lands we cannot see. We think of new places as opportunities to build new lives, but all we’re really doing is trying to find our way back. It’s how I feel every time I watch the sun outside your window retreat behind the hills, surrendering to the blank comfort of night. For a few minutes, I can forget a river all frothy with dark brown water where a hand sticks out before submerging. Or the principal’s office. It had gray paint, Mr. Richardson’s office. Gray walls, a desk lamp, a large wooden coffee table with a glass top. A vase of sunflowers with slightly wilted petals. We evenly sat around the table like sunbeams: Mr. Richardson, Dad and I, you and Tito Diego. You were wearing a plain blue dress with the hemline cutting across your knee. It was an awkward cut, as if the lines of your body were ruptured. Tito Diego was a blurred figure beside you. You had your hair in a low bun. You reached across the table and took my hand and told me that it wasn’t my fault. It was an accident, you said. You were crying, but I could hear you speak slowly as if you were talking to a toddler, each word is deliberate, an offering of comfort. And I took it because I couldn’t give you any in return. You can’t give what you don’t have, Dad used to say. I clasped your hand although it was cold and shaking. It was as small as mine, and I remembered how they had glided across piano keys like swans on an early-morning lake. I thought of truth back then as supple, something that has room to grow. Now it’s just an old man. Cranky, balding, petulant; the jail warden who would happily open your cell and escort you to the edge of the cliff. I smooth out the sheets around you, wrinkling them in the process. I watch you sink into another life where there is no remembering. Some words have the power to resurrect, but all I have are these that have managed to claw their way out, disheveled and emaciated. Look how they falter, their see-through shapes, the loose spaces between them. These words will not guarantee a rebirth. The minute I started writing them down, all I felt was a methodical emptying. These letters, nothing but a wisp of someone’s hair you catch disappearing around a corner just as you were coming into view. Sometimes, I look at the back of my hands to see if I’m still solid. If I could enter these pages and not get lost, or die. Maybe this is a song to call you back. I am beside you now to ask you to come back out of the depths. Let us jump off this cliff together.