IT ALL STARTED FROM THE END
By: Iris P. Concepcion
These three pictures were taken before I touched the sky, feeling wuzzy out of a sleepless night. My cheeks are red from dryness, my eyes baggy but blinking. In short, it is my plain ugly, hellish, self taking these happy pictures.
The last one is a futuristic look to a surname that's like a prefix to a gun. I got curious with its industrial design----a brand of some sort where bags get checked for inspection before boarding a plane. The background, the shadow stripes, is a bag I lent from a friend. As it is, the pic could stand for utensils, cutlery, sleek gate name for a married couple with a brood hellbent to learn softball. It can be a shimmering car's hide. It is overtly masculine, I think, not a trace of limpness there, with a little brash of poutiness that's like a courage emblem. I liked how it came out of my phone.
I was at the airport five hours before my sky hunting and I felt all the intersection buzzes, similar to that Brit flick "All You Need Is Love", only, people here were not kissing. Everyone was removing their belts and shoes (placed in trays like jewelry) for security check. I did not see its coolness when I got my turn to remove my own butterflied flip-flops. I got a super red wang wang though when I passed by the detector because of my pointy hair clip that was immediately placed in a trash can. As I was looking at these people, it struck me as funny that the airport ground was converted into one huge, bedroom lounge. A man who looks like Rolling Stones' Keith R. inserted his belt to his skinny pants and I sort of expected him to shave afterwards if he were wearing a beard while nuns without shoes were paddling on their toes like penguins at his back.
I am in Hand's zone immediately, the fictive journey back to Greenland (but they did not land there), lifted off from a book about philantrophy and flight. So, this is how it feels like to re-arrange people in visual vista. I badly wanted to check-in the lane where cut-outs of birds (as if pasted onto kindergarten walls) chirped muteless, beside the airline name. I mean, they looked so merry, like adornments in a fastfood resto for kids. Nobody stayed in this side except myself, and because they are worth mentioning, four backpackers, fresh from a camp in Mt. Apo, I surmised, tanned and red burned like the Mongols. Among the well-heeled and fair people milling around the open bedroom area (many were walking barefoot like the ground is sandy; males were holding their belts like upturned fishes), I fixed my irises on them. That's the story on the first shot.
I eavesdropped on what these guys were so anxious about. I found out that they couldn't book their tickets and hoped to get waitlisted. They were just standing while policemen were walking like ramp models beside my chair. The smallest one cornered the longest dialogue and in local speak (Ilongo), he thus spoke: "Indi na kita ma chance passenger. Maayo siguro kun magbarko na lang kita." (We couldn't be booked as chance passengers, we might as well sail on ship). I took a long shot of these four, burnt guys exiting the airport with happy cheeks and equally happy faces and I liked looking at them, like lost schoolboys who will turn into vampires once they sail on ship. I took a pic of the smallest and he smiled. He could be African and wouldn't want to capture his soul. He had a sheepish, contented facade. I thought, I could feed these guys with milk and they'd still be smiling.
But I have to fast forward to my post flight where a hefty guy cut my hair super short. He had fishnest stockings like Minelli would and all throughout, I was wondering where he was hiding his schlong since his front was so lady seamless. My cousin said, they kind of tie it at the back.It kinda freaked me out, the idea of a man's stick hidden like a filling to a pie, incognito. I think I'd be that kind of gay if I were heavy and a fishnet dupe with scissors. It is kind of eerie but the story continues. He was with insightful, passionate people having manicures like myself.
Anyway, the third pic is rocking like a hurricane. It is an Eggerian genius, of course, a humble humbug if you may, graphed dawdle in a book. That was my feeling while in flight. Five years of being holed up in the house, I thought I might as well sleep on it. I am so tired at that time but I was revved up to see my friends whom I am meeting after ten years or so. Including the great margins---people on the sidelines I would like to think of as my super friends.
Is this Manila? I asked upon the plane's descent on the tarmac. Where are the houses? Down below, it was like a barren field. I got out and again, it was like a film, this time around, the movie Intersection minus the smoky effect on the trail path. It is a new airport. I went out of the building and saw a church that is shaped like mosque but had a Christian cross sticking out from the horizon. The lane said, Bay Five. I mentioned my location to my friends. I did not feel like this is the city I left five years ago.
Anyway this is how the journey went: I always have abundant stories about writers, performing artists, musicians, poets and though I fail to recognize them sometimes, I'd know I am with them because I develop tingles at the back of my nape whenever they are around. I really do. It may be a wickedly artificial set-up but when I say "this is so weird", even if the omelet fictionally admonished someone mouthing the same line not to repeat it, otherwise, he had to tell the repeater to stop it, I would still (if I were in fiction) speak it: "THIS IS JUST TOO WEIRD!"
Like, there is a cool visage of a feisty, spunky writer who raised hell and razed iron bars, sitting like a doll,carving her own path by being independent. She was on the phone telling someone to pick her up. Beware: small people can pack so much brain you wouldn't know what hit you unless you truly read. I don't know, I always catch myself dumbfounded when I see the usual suspects. She is with the peppy, very admirable group.
Each one is created special. I will always share di Caprio entrances with my own weird Al, the sky discussions with the girls, twist and C (who was always with the mother, I discovered, rain or shine). I realized, I look at the window like she would: with wistful gazes. I wasn't just sharing something with nobodys in that sphere: I was sharing it with a shrieking beauty. I am wearing her comfortable shirt too. And the airy hairstyle now.
But before that, I pay homage to to the most gorgeous, exotic, priceless beauty above 200 pounds. She was wearing latex dress for all I care, her round stomach looked like it was sheltering a whale and the seven dwarfs, all snug and cozy inside her sweet bulge and she'd still be damn gorgeous.
This is the foreboding, whether or not she can pull it off. Like her confession : "Jesus, don't let me f*ck this up". And she did not. Never been prouder when she went "Tempura!" like she is John Wayne, speaking the language of smart alecks and while sweating it all out, while she was delivering all this in a background with eggerian touches, three lines overlapping, I said, this is the stuff of the world YOU CAN'T PAY. If you are given this guffaw by the best writers in the whole damn world, you better start asking what you've done in the first place. It is one helluva icky and dank and hilarious spiel and hahahahahaha, though when the latex lady whistled, you just go, "damn, beautiful freak!"
I was actually teary-eyed like my friends were even if she was having the time of her life making us all snigger. My friends went : Ohhhhhhh, how pitiful, she is sweating out. And we were, the four of us, corny as it may sound, kind of semi-weeping. Weird, terribly weird. Chaplin can make anyone cry the hardest. That, I believe, now. Of all the things you want to drop tears for, you do it for the bulging thing with the whale and the seven dwarfs inside it. Hahahahahaha. It is extemely weird. The brain did it by a video of making the world a better place. Now the Tempura man and the mini-me person dropped the tearducts off. Sort of. I love this slob and the mini.And you hit it right, Sir, my country is one brilliant cradle of artists----yes, they need money but you know they deserve everything thrown their way. Just look at them. Those pipes. They are Vegas classy but had to vogue-beg. Yes, they deserve all that praise. They truly do. The artists here, performing or otherwise, can pull your socks off without leaving an odor.
You are all beautiful, really. The ordinary daughter, the Mongols, musicians, the fishnet man, the swaying WASP, the book reading public (one needs to get impressed by the walking, Hawaiian-shirted man who was reading a page on the stairs as if by NOT reading while ascending the stairway, he'd miss a character which will not appear again..).
Need I say it again? Thank you.
My birthday tomorrow and when I did the groceries yesterday, there was a birthday message through a public system that greeted someone. It could be a message for the dead but if it were for myself, then, that's kind of okay--wishing the celebrator happiness and good health and whatnot. There is still justice in the world after all.
Why? I saw a security guard who was latently cross-eyed.
There are chances even for double-seers like him and I want to thank his employer, for giving this guard a place in the employment coterie--that he was not dejected for that weird sight.