Ay

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"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation

is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul,

and that, I am sure, is why he does it." -- Roald Dahl

not a writer i am, but a fool just the same.


i think myself out of something as easily as i could talk myself into nothing. this moment is no exception as i have always been into something like this, such that every moment is something out of nothing like nothing out of something.


i leave my thoughts scattered around like broken notes of some showers song that bounced off bathroom tiles, riding waves to nowhere, or taking refuge on this window. i’ll be proud if those thoughts were woven into words as breathtaking as yours, but they’re hopelessly not; i can even be prouder perhaps than the fool that i already am, as fools always are -- but words don’t come easy to fools who try to write like they do to writers though fools they have become.


i think me out of the morning when terror gripped a child of five summers as he witnessed a cop’s car ran over his pet dog; when mother laughed off the child’s face ashened by the sheer horror of it all, trembling as he peeped through a hole on the kitchen door.


i think me out of the letters when a lover fought a losing bid to save a faulty romance, to save whatever was left in the honored warrior that he was. i think myself out of a failed struggle for freedom, such that in doing so, i gain liberty, momentarily, albeit that of a fool.


is it my soul that speak if i talked myself into nothing from out of something like this, written out of a nothing that to this fool was everything?


is it my soul that has been shaped by fear, long shackled in panic, tortured by anxiety in moments like this, that sets time back to everything when it was?


i think, hence, i think.

.

ay am my soul.


not a writer i am, but a fool just the same. freedom i find in being a fool in spite of being not a writer. good thing am only half aware of it, as


i shut my eyes and leave my thoughts on a blank screen... and i won’t mind if some other fool would ensnare them in quotes, like i did yours -- i won’t mind because i wouldn’t even know about it, like you do now.

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Sum of the Missing Parts

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One. The other day, the Talk of the Town column in the opinion page of the inquirer dot net had this one headline: "Salvation through conversion." Click or not to click? Not to click. Why? Hmmm... heavy religious undertone. But, hey! the article is by-lined by one familiar name! Option: no more options... just click.  OMG!

Clicking the article-links in the opinion page of the inq.net has become a daily ritual since by some arithmetic, I estimated that a one-year subscription of the broadsheet by way of the street-corner newstand can net me the price of a secondhand pentium2 pc that's sold in a cafe just across. Well, a p2 can also bring you to youtube dot com even if you have to wait 2 days for the com to come. That's powerful enough if you'd just have to click the links in the inq.

But back to the "Salvation...." article. Ay! It was a one-paragraph item (at least that's how it appeared in the online version), and I just concluded that the rest of the article, that one big missing chunk, has been truncated due, perhaps, to some xml programming glitch.

So, off I googled the familiar-name byline. No, in my head the name is not just familiar, it's "family" -- he's an old friend -- not only because the assumed bearer was a march/demo mate during the confetti revolution in Makati in the '80s, but primarily because he was for a time my next-town neighbor whom I often bothered for a scriptwriting line or two over a SanMig bottle or two... or three, four.... He was still single then, and by some twist, not long after, we both went "missing" in each other's beer-radar. He went deep into TV (television); I got mired in TB (the baccarat).

Two. Google led me to http://missingyouangel.wordpress.com/ .

Three. Remembering that in January this year, I received a forwarded email whose main caption reads: "URGENT Appeal to locate a missing child." But since the caption included the name of a church group, I surmised that the message was just one of the millions of religious chain emails that clog cyber traffic. I did not click to open, did not delete either. Next message please.

***
You guessed it right. The missing child announced in the undeleted email is the same child in the missingyouangel blog, authored by no less than my friend, the missing Angel's father. I've never seen my friend's daughter in person -- or my friend, for that matter, the past 16 years or so, as I didn't even know, until 4 years ago, that he had started a family. But I did send him email moments after reading the blog.


***

Four. Still missing is the rest of the article "Salvation through conversion" in inquirer dot net days after I first clicked the headline, or is it? Still unanswered is my curiosity about the article's byline.

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Stillborn serendipity. My bad. In my email I forgot to ask: Henry, pare... wuz that you?

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