The train howled: Its screeching sang in my ears. Blurred by blitzing traffic, the months in which I wandered Taft consisted of hazy vignettes. A joke I would mention in passing was that it was impossible to be an optimist in Taft.
Yet, still, I cannot seem to untangle the mess it persists in being. Images (cameras serving both as eye and mouth) are my way of speaking. But when the images of my constructed life fall flat and crumple, when my life metamorphoses into free verse, when days no longer tarry with recognizable rhythms, I am left retreating into the solitary vocabularies of thought.
Taft witnessed my life unfold as a photomontage of inflating uncertainties; uncertainties limply hanging on LRT handlebars—its tardy arrival at Vito Cruz being the sole order amidst this confusion. An indecisive lover; a Villa poem in half-dark, half-light; a living art house film with images superimposed on images superimposed on images ..
. Taft is a paradox: How is one supposed to recognize a face? How is one supposed to carve out a life? All of Taft is faceless; formless. Tucked away, a rugged bookstore gave some solace.
Vanishing into shelves became a frequent hobby. Any book pulled: an unloved, ripped copy of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” the complete Poe, or some other bard, I would bury my nose in and whisper their pages, like some incantation, in the hopes that poetry would ooze some order onto my life. “I have fallen in love with the wrong type of Cinema,” I wrote in a nai.
