BLOOD BANK
for memories
we wish
we will never,
ever,
never ever forget
…and the baffled king composed the Hallelujah.
Dear Sister Alyssa,
If you could have a deal with God, get him to swap places, what would you do?
What would you do if you could be that very God written in the Bible you keep by your bedside, if you could be that God whom people go down on their knees to pray and worship? What would you do? How would you feel? Do you think you’ll be pleased enough if David plays a song for you?
I’m sorry that I was born to grow up like this, you know, a heretic, much less self-proclaimed. This isn’t even genetic so please leave how my family brought me up out of this. They aren’t actually at fault according to the law that you observe, or so I think. In fact, they were pretty much devout that it chokes me, it suffocates me. I feel like as if I’m at the back of a crowded elevator full of people, skin on skin, sweat pouring out of their pores, mixed breath creeping in the air. You know how I was brought up since I told you my sad excuse for a life story during our first meeting. I also recalled bringing a dozen of eggs along with me as required, or is it really required?
What do you do to those eggs anyway? I know a lot of people visit the monastery and they would usually bring a dozen of eggs so how do you keep all of them? DO you eat all of them together with your fellow sisters? Do you sell them? Or what? I’d really like to know.
Anyways, if you ask me, if I could have a deal with God and get him to swap our places, I’d be running up the hill. I’d run up the hill and never get tired. I’d run up the hill.
Yours,
Emily
ICHI
One two three four five six…
Seven eight nine ten.
Ten to twenty.
Twenty to thirty.
Thirty to thirty-one.
31
She counted again, counted the thin red lines under her breath. She counted and traced the red swollen work of art on her wrists. Thirty-one cuts etched on both her wrists that night. There wasn’t even much blood to begin with, no there just wasn’t, but the blood that she was able to harvest from her pale flesh was enough to drench her brown handkerchief wet and red but she was not contented.
It was intentional, the slashing of her wrists, not the act of suicide. She won’t die now, it’s not yet her time and she’s very much aware of it. It’s a fact she was able to gather from intuition, fear, and pure instinct. She’s not even the type of girl who’s into what her friends refer to as S&M.
“It’s bullshit.” She said, long ago, when she and her friends were inside a vacant classroom, hiding from the melting heat of the sun and amusing each other with their individual sexual exploits, talking about sex, about humping, intercourse, about fornication, about what a male and a female specie do when both a horny and both enflamed with raging hormones.
Emi, a girl of 16, decided that she liked what she did on her wrists. She liked the blood and the pain, oh, the self-inflicted pain.
NI
“I’d like you to take these. One tablet each per day after you’ve eaten your breakfast,” the doctor said, “they will help you. See you on your next appointment.”
Now, isn’t this always the way?
The doctor looked up at her after scribbling down on her prescription pad with a practiced smile on her face. Emily stood up from the chair and left the shrink’s office. Spotting a nearby pharmacy after exiting the building, she headed there and went straight to the counter. After her business, she left with what her shrink said could help her.
She started to feel extravagant; no tinge of self-pity is visible on her face. Long ago, she’s been wanting to go to a shrink’s office and now she got her wish and the pills inside her bag made her feel as in she’s just brought 6 pairs of fuck-me-pumps. She’s excited to try the pills tomorrow, excited to feel what she might feel.
SAN
Three months ago, after she left the city, Emi told me a story with detailed information about what happened, a story about herself, about her forced experience. One night, or so she said, she focused her eyes on the bright screen. The letters were blurry, the colors mixing together. She said she blinked hard, gluing her eyelids hard shut together then fluttered her eyes as slow as she can until her eyes propped open wide and about.
That time, in every single second, she felt like her mind is shutting down into a forced form of sleep. She barely moved and told me that her shoulders were slouched against the white painted wall while sitting Indian style. “Why is it called Indian style anyway?” Emi asked me, “Maybe some other people coming from different parts around the world pretty much sits that was too then it was just stereotyped.” I only shrugged my shoulders at her as a form of reply and she only gave me a warm smile. “Maybe they called it Indian style to make things less boring, don’t you think?” She added. That night, the thoughts inside her head were in full speed and Emi thought if it would kill her to take another dose of the pill prescribed by her doctor. She said that the thought of her taking another pill went to another plane which too of right away and came back on full speed at the runaway after a snap bringing another new set of passengers. “I was feeling weak by then,” she said, “but I fought against it.”
Emily told me what “world” she was in that night. She said she can still remember how the air conditioner hummed or how her room smelt of a homey vanilla scent and those two things made her want to snuggle her pillow and fall into oblivion but as planned, she wasn’t going to give in. Slowly, she stretched her legs and stood up with her head spinning like mad, adrenaline rush reversed. The floor started to incline and shake like there’s an earthquake. “Was there an earthquake that night?” She asked me and I told her no, not that I can remember. “Hmm,” she only said. Continuing, Emi told me that she walked towards the bathroom while attempting to make a bee-line towards the door but failed, nearly stumbling along. Her knees gave up in the middle of the way and she found herself sitting on the floor laughing to herself like a drunkard who came home for another round of booze after a wild party at somebody else’s house.
Emi laughed, reminiscing and probably trying to picture out herself during that night, sitting there on the floor and laughing at her own demise. I urged her to continue, not wanting to hear her laugh any longer. It was pleasant enough, the way how she laughs, but somehow it managed to send chills down my spine for reasons that I can’t understand. She sighed and told me that she finally decided to crawl back to her bed while still fighting the sleepiness out of her was just so she could test if she can defeat the purpose of the sleeping pill she took a while ago. She also told me that she lost the concept of time, unaware if ten minutes really is ten minutes. It could be longer, or it could be shorter. After which, she told me that she mustered and gathered her strength, if she had any that night, she went back to her laptop and started chatting up some people she barely know. Her hands were shaking, she said. She can’t even read well, and she’s not even sure if the people she chatted up were really the same and very people she had in mind that night.
Emi:: is itt ok if I take another pillll!
Jess:: What pill? Are you okay? XD
Emi:: sleeeeping pills to sleep, hehehehe
Jess:: You shouldn’t
Emi:: hey, is itt is ok if I take anoter dose of sleeping pill?
Frank:: what did ur doctor say?
Emi:: justt one haha she said just 1one
Frank:: 1one? Wait whutt?
Emii: I mean1
Frank:: then 1 it is
Emi told me how frustrated she felt, how badly she wanted someone to tell her that it’s okay to take another pill. “I don’t know what was running through my head that night,” she inserted, “it’s like I have all the right to take another pill since its right beside me but that night, I wanted to hear it from someone, to hear that it’s okay, I mean, taking another dose of the pill.” A weird silence floated right through between us and I urged her to continue. After she shut off her laptop, she told me, she decided to surrender. Black rained on her parade, her head thumped like a drum on a death march on Bataan, like the sound of atomic bombs falling from the sky and landing on the grounds of Hiroshima.
YON
Taken from Emily’s diary, Wednesday, March 27, 1985
Before my grandfather died, I didn’t know how to play the Solitaire.
Before my grandfather died, I didn’t run out of fare coins.
Before my grandfather died, I could eat whatever I want if I’m visiting the ancestral house. He would buy me the best barbeque in town if there was no decent food on the table; I mean meat, even if I didn’t ask him to.
But that was before he died, before I was him lying on a white coffin at the living room, body injected with formalin, eyes closed shut forever. That was before they placed a divider between his coffin and where my grandmother is sitting on her wheelchair for she can no longer walk by herself.
The thing is, their children, my aunts and uncles, decided not to tell my grandma that pops is dead but we all know that she figured it out by herself. Sometimes we would see her cry, a silent form of cry where no sound came out from her mouth, just tears doing the action. The tears would just fall down from her wrinkly eyes, rolling down her pale mestiza face. People would often come by to give their respects to my dead grandpa and they would sometimes check on grandma too and ask her if she knows where pops is. “He went out to the market to buy food.” My grandma would say in reply or sometimes, she’d tell them that he’s in the kitchen cooking food for lunch or for dinner and then, she’ll cry.
Several months after pops was buried, she would tell her children that pops visited her and asked her to go with him, wherever he is. Everything was white, she said. Pops was wearing a white shirt and then there was a blinding light which signifies the end of the dream. It broke my heart when I first heard the news that pops died, it broke my cell phone too because I threw it three times on the floor of the school library, not accepting the news that I just heard from my mom over the phone. He was the best grandpa ever, as most favorite grandchild would say.
Now, I no longer have anyone to put eye drops on after dinner.
Pops was something. He fought during the World War II, he fought the Japanese ten hours after the big event on the Pearl Harbor. When I heard the story about how he met my granny and how he fell in love with her, I wished that it would sound better if I heard it directly from him. I thought the story was pretty cruel and unfair at first but love is interesting in a crazy way even decades and decades ago.
It was the year 1945 and soldiers were everywhere. It was wartime in the Philippines and my grandmother was 16. My grandpa on the other hand was a soldier of the Philippine Army. One fateful day, as probably written from above my granny and her family was busy preparing for her big wedding to a man who lives in a nearby town. As festivities were back then, wedding days usually lasts for five days of even more, depending on the family caste status. Granny was walking alone on the dirt road when my grandpa first saw her and it was, cliché but oh well, love at first sight. He started to follow my grandma but she ran away in fear for he was a soldier and he was in his uniform, carrying a weapon. But boy oh boy, pops pursued her! He meddled in granny’s relationship with her soon-to-be husband using his being a soldier as an advantage and was able to break them off. Unfortunately for the other man, he went home, unmarried and fortunately for me, if it weren’t for my grandpa’s brave act of love, then I guess, somehow, I wouldn’t be here writing in the stupid diary.
In the end, they got married and survived the war even if they lived in poverty. They were able to produce a dozen of kids and sold one to a different family. Pops was especially close to his youngest daughter. Actually, we had a reunion yesterday that’s why I decided to write their story down. Yesterday, I and my aunts were hanging out on the living room together with my grandma, still attached to her wheelchair. Then, one of my aunts spoke. She said that they were once wondering and asked my grandma about it. They were wondering why, why even if it was a one-sided and forced love affair, they were able to produce lots of kids. Maybe my granny learned to love pops after all those years. Maybe, only maybe, it was simply supposed to be.
GO
The day after I met Emi, after she told me her story, I took a cab upon going home ever though it was completely impractical and unnecessary since the distance is an understatement. I can actually walk my way home but I wanted the easy way and knowing myself, always driven my emotions, I did take the easy way. I walked fast towards the taxi lane and embarked the taxi on the first exit, thankful that I no longer have to wait since no one was in the waiting for taxis. After getting in, I gave the direction to the cab driver who responded with a nod and started the engine.
My gaze was fixed outside the window, observing the line of both old and new buildings along the way, thoughts lost at the very moment into something that I can’t catch. Today was the very same day for me just like yesterday, except that I met Emi but still, things at school’s driving me crazy. I needed a breather even though it was only four days since the beginning of the new term. The cab turned left and I snapped out of my own little world realizing that I’m near my destination when suddenly, the cab driver spoke.
“Do you know what a silver lining is, Miss?”
“Err, no. What is it?”
Piqued, I scooted over to the middle of the backseat as the driver pointing up the sky and lo and behold, there is was, beautiful. But then, I didn’t actually find anything special in it and thought that I had seen it before both in pictures and with my naked eyes. The driver, still pointing up the “silver lining” spoke again.
“That is a silver lining. I was gonna say ‘wow’ but then I stopped myself. I’m quite surprised to see one today. It’s not every day that I get to see it. I mean, wow!”
What’s so special about it?
“Oh, what about it?” I decided to choose my words.
“It’s the opening from the heaven. You know how it goes; every cloud has a silver lining.”
I arrived home and gave the driver a considerable amount of tip who responded with a smile. I can still recall how dark his skin was, hair long, black, and curly tied into a ponytail.
Talk about freaky.
ROKU
Dear ****,
From the Marriage Plot, page 173 (Grammaticus)
…God is beyond any human concept or category. That’s why Moses can’t look at Yahweh. That’s why, in Judaism. You can’t even spell out God’s name. The human mind can’t conceive what God is. God doesn’t have a sex or anything else…
“So don’t tell me that fiction novels are all fiction.” I told him.
…Some people need a picture. Any great religion has to be inclusive. And to be inclusive you have to accommodate different levels of sophistication…
Then, we had a conversation. I started the lame conversation.
“Do you want to know what I think?” I started.
“What you think about what?”
“Well, uhm, what I think about fiction novels.”
“Oh, sure.” He sounded hesitant.
“Well, I think that not all of the things written in fiction books are fiction.”
His mouth hung open, I laughed.
“First of, in my own opinion, not all of the events that happened in a certain fiction novel aren’t really what you call a make believe. I guess except those which are categorized as pure fantasy.”
“Go on.”
“Maybe some of the events happened to the author. Like maybe, when Murakami and his wife woke up in the middle of the night they both felt a certain pang of hunger greater than the hunger of tsunami trying to swallow every single thing on its way. So, he decided to write about it, changing only the characters and added some superficial events.”
“And?”
“And like, you know, love stories.”
“How about sci-fis and fantasy stuff?”
“I’m getting to that.”
I started to feel nervous.
“Second is, like those fantasy fiction novels where Neil Gaiman wrote about a guy named Fat Charlie who is Anansi the Spider’s son, being a god and all that jazz, is what Gaiman wanted to happen. Like maybe a childhood dream or something. Or maybe he dreamt about it when he was still a young lad and wished that he could be a demi-god and live a very cool, un-boring life. So this is the part that makes up on the make-believe portion.”
“I really don’t know.”
“I was just saying.”
“Oh, okay then. Maybe you could tell that to someone who’s interested in books. Like someone who knows Mura-what’s his name and that Gaiman dude. I’m clearly the wrong person.”
Defeat.
“I’m perfectly aware of that.”
“Then why did you still bother me about the fiction thing you just explained?”
Justice.
“So that somehow, something that is of substance, would seep through that empty brain of yours. Good day.”
I walked away from him.
After a few days, I met him again. I was sitting alone at my usual place in the coffee shop where I usually go to either alone or with the company of my friends. I was drinking hot Caramel Macchiato and I was fully absorbed reading Kenzaburo Oe’s The Changeling, which by the way, is something I don’t really get what it was all about, when he came up to me and said hey.
I said “hey” back as he sat right across me with his backpack, a newspaper, and a cup of coffee. How rude. How very very very rude of him. We didn’t arrange to meet and now he’s claiming the seat right in front of me, the one where you were sitting on when we met. It’s not like I was waiting for someone to arrive. I came in peace, I came in to read a book, smoke my Marlboros, and drink my daily dose of coffee. He didn’t even ask me if he could sit at the vacant chair across me and if I tell him to get lost, I’d be, no doubt, the one who is rude.
Love,
Emi
NANA
Dear Sister Alyssa,
Faith is a rational weapon, more powerful than any implement of war ever made by man. A mass of dead people are walking in this Earth, eating with me, living with me, laughing with me, conversing with me. My thoughts about this matter are beyond words. I am an apostate.
I believed. I yielded. I learned. I deviated. Am I to be considered dead as well? I was raised as a Catholic, papers and act. I came from a family of devout Catholic believers. I was educated in Catholic institutions. I went to Catholic events and took part in its religious practices. I was the Redeemer in my dreams. I talked to saints in my dreams. Then I became an apostate, a turn-coated rat.
Now I find myself extremely liable for my own accounts on whatsoever that is veiling this huge and revolving breathing sphere. Noticeably, I just earned myself a label that will soon provide no significant memory as each day would pass and die. As an apostate, what will become of me? A quisling capable of ruining her own youth?
Rotting in hell is a rational and sensible thought to give me the creeps for a moment but then, what comes next? If faith is rational, then so is fear. A biological being I may be, wandering in this world with the auras of things and emotions that my eyes cannot see, am I still subject to feel fear? Am I not exempted to be saved when the so called Rapture is transparently roving the face of this momentarily living planet?
I am an apostate, self-proclaimed. I lie. I laugh. I trick. I fool my own self, utterly lacking the beliefs that was presented to me by my family, my alma matter, my mentors, and the last priest who heard my awful deviation during my last desireless and regurgitating confession on the holy grounds of a sacred and antiquated Catholic colony.
I looked up, today, at the crying sky and saw a big man looking at me from above. He had a gun and he pointed the weapon at me. Bang. Bang.
Sincerely,
Emily
Emily sent this to me after the very last time I saw her. Her eyes were hollow and red, skin pale and she no longer smiled. When she visited me in the monastery and tried to talk to me, I felt something painful in my heart when I was looking at her talk. I felt her pain and felt the need to help her, to help her recover from what she’s going through in her life. She handed me her very last letter and just walked away quietly without saying a word.
Only later did I hear from her mother that she was missing that afternoon and was under the influence of mixed psychological pills and drunk on a bottle of vodka. That night, I included Emily in my prayers and the night after that until it became a habit, out of my passion, not because I was getting used to it. I pray to God not for her soul, but for her pained heart.
HACHI
Emi told me what happened after three hours, after she decided to give in and went to visit dreamland. After three hours, she said, she found herself stirring from her sleep and her breathing matched with the ticking of the bronze vintage alarm clock beside her head pillow. Orange dim light streamed through the gap of the dark blue curtain against her bed. I can tell that Emi was quite well with details, especially if it was the details of the events that she wanted to always remember and it was detailed enough to the extent that made me think that she planned it all. She told me that when she checked the clock, it showed that it was 0430am.
“You know, they say that when you dream between midnight to three in the morning, whatever happens in the dream will be the opposite once it happens in reality,” Emi said, “they say that if you dream between just after three until you wake up when the sun’s up, what you have dreamt will happen as it is but in my case, I can no longer dream.”
KYU
Taken from Emily’s diary, last entry.
What are dreams for? Why does our mind and soul wander when we cannot control it? Why do we recognize and feel at ease towards the places that we can only go to in our dreams? The people that we see, we don’t even know them. The things that are happening, what do we know of them when we dream? Yet only in dreaming do we fit in, we fit in the society without any questions and derogatory situations even in the Other World. In dreaming there is no religion, no questions of science. We can only see ourselves apart from the lump of flesh lying on a bed. Dreams are mirrors of what we want and what we are afraid of. No matter how hard we scream, no one can hear it but us and only then can we realize and finally feel that after all, we are alone. In dreaming only can we die and once our eyelids flicker back to life and when our lungs take in the first breath for the day, we feel as if nothing has happened. Some people are aware, some are not. Others are blind to see what’s happening on the Other Side.
I’m a girl who’s afraid to sleep at night, afraid to sleep even if my body is screaming from being awake but then, no one has ever died from the lack of sleep or otherwise, not even those with the Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. What does a person with a Sleeping Beauty Syndrome sees in her sleep? I’m afraid that even for a second I’ll close my eyes and then it’ll become a minute on the Other Side, slowly wearing out the light inside my soul if there’s any. In dreams only my soul can feed itself. In dreams only I can be immortal and I won’t have to fear death and dreaming itself. What will only take place is the fierce battle between Eros and Thanatos.
I entered the Other Side panting and dirty. The smell of burning things filled up my nostrils. Dust flew everywhere as screams from the underground rang up in my ears. They were loud screams. Screams from the core of the human soul all over the world, screams of the demons and the tortured souls but I was with an angel, an angel whose face I cannot see or speak of. All I know about him is that he was wearing a white shirt. After we climbed up the stairs from under the church, the angel was gone with his shinning sword, leaving me alone by myself in a nightmarish sea of the Unknown.
I trudged along the dusty dry path and saw women wearing black veils, murmuring strange things against one another under their breath. Their eyes dark, diluted, demented. They looked at me as I trembled in fear with nothing to defend myself with. Fear filled the gaps inside my heart and I saw demons trapped in their eyes.
I walked on and on and found another group of women on their knees on a spread of green grass, each clutching a rosary, chanting the mysteries taught by the Blessed and when I walked on, I saw Him, He who was nailed on the cross, His body illuminating a strange glow of ominous pearl-glowing light, not blinding enough that I was able to approach him. He was clean, without wounds and with a face ever gentle, a face I have never seen before but felt as if I have known it forever. His robe white, His demeanor kind and He looked down upon me and whispered with a smile.
“Come closer, child. Do not ever be afraid again. ”
JU
Thirty-one slashes. She cried harder until her mother found her, curling on the bed and noticed her artwork.
“Why are you doing this, Emily?”
“I don’t really know.”
She heard her mom sigh as she stood up and took a cotton swab with povidone-iodine. Her mom took her wrists and started cleaning her daughter’s self-inflicted wounds.
“If you’re thinking of doing this,” he mom said, “think again. You’re going to leave me a lot of problems while you’re out, escaped from it. Don’t leave without closing the door.”
Her mom stood up and turned the lights off, locking the door behind her. As soon as her mom was gone, Emily counted from one to thirty-one. She took the small knife from under her pillow, cradling it.
“I just thought that it would be nice to do this once in my life. I think this is nice, a nice thing indeed.” She whispered in the dark.
AliceInMyHead 