(no subject)
I don’t know what to do about the spider egg cocoon at the corner of your bathroom door. I wiped the army of dead ants off the window ledge with toilet tissue, and then I cleaned the bowl. You make me pick my hair off the tiles. Cleaning does not soothe me, I only clean angry. I tell you I never learned laundry the way women used to do laundry, stretched stiff with carefully mixed starch water, lavender-scented sachets tucked in pine drawers. As you know, I burn my thousand peso bras accidentally with too-hot irons. Sometimes when you kiss me my hands grip your perfectly ironed shirts like I feel you’re going to run away. This is it. This is me. If this ends there will be nothing left of me. I can give you all the metaphors -- the plague town, the ruined house, the overgrown forest path. I tell you all the fairytales don’t prepare you for how mundane life can be, how easy it is to segue from one to two to this to nothing. It’s easy to be nothing when you’re old. I’d feed myself to Baba Yaga for some sort of feeling. I don’t know what to do about our afternoons, when you sleep and I lie awake listening to the outside world, to the rumble of the jeepneys outside, to the man who sings that same song every Sunday like it matters that he sings the same song every Sunday and look I sing the same songs to you too.