UNTITLED
By Jan Philippe V. Carpio



Fancy that women actually do stick postcards, fliers, photos, tickets and such on their walls.  Fancy that these women, these artistic women do hang their artworks on the walls of their bedrooms.  Fancy these women that I fancy exist not just in dreams or in the rooms C – designs so lovingly as if they carry the unmistakable traces of herself: the hair strands littering the floor and pillow covers, the radiation of odor left by an intermingling of oil and sweat that even disinfectant – no matter the potency – cannot mask.
I assume I woke up beside her just a little before six.  I wondered to myself if I had at all been able to get back to sleep after waking up even earlier that morning, after having one of those dreams again.
 

It had been weeks since film, absurdity and memory intermingled into a half-awake moan that bled from my mouth.  The sudden breaking of air by that disconcerting human gush caused her to nudge me awake with her elbow. 
 

The most vivid of our mindscape’s travels really do emerge at the point where our mind’s eyes see the dream, while our flesh eyes realize the possibility of more than one world.
 

So there was a moan and an elbow pressing into the back of an arm.  She asked me … Y asked me what the dream was all about.
It was the first time I dreamed of her in the months that we had been together.
 

In the dream we were lying also in bed, in darkness, side by side.  That much remains domestic.  The rest involves the undead, literally cannibalizing oneself and a blow impaired – a blow that could not be stroked in defense of the aforementioned unnatural desire for nutrition.
 

I was merely supposed to get a drink of water downstairs which I did.  But I refused to go back to sleep right after.  I moved through the house, supplanting a silence different from the one in the condominium.  A silence you can only notice amidst your noise making.
 

In the condominium, the silence seems to fall over the noise like water, allowing it to carry through but the letting the minute constriction of its coils push the air out of it.  Here, in her new house, the noise reflects high altitudes and seems to go on forever. 
The only sharing comes from how noise from the outside carries across the space as I hear a telephone in another house across the street ringing – so similar to the cell phone text messages beeping their life seven stories down on the sidewalks of the building I live in.
 

Later, instead of getting back into bed, I watched her sleep: the spread of her arms, the cleanly shaved armpits, the suggestion of a nipple making itself aware against the fabric of her camisole, the inward thrust of her knees towards the wall with her legs and feet springing away from the door, the look on her face that even in sleep seems to indicate a frown.  I watched her sleep standing over her – my breath not really in time with her chest rise.
 

Then I sat down on the floor beside her and took in her room as I noticed it from earlier.
 

I returned downstairs to dawn prayers from a nearby church, a sound that reminded me of my own breathing unconsciously before the roosters’ crowing and the predictable roar of the passing tricycles suddenly reminded me of the difficulties of being awake, elsewhere.
 

I watched the wind take the curtains of the window beside me in a way that only a lover can approximate.

​



April 1, 2007 – June 3, 2008