Dear you,
Hope the sun is hitting nicely where you are. Since I last wrote, a lot of little things have happened in my life. As crazy as it’s been, it isn’t enough for one big essay1, so here are three things written about this year so far. Thinking of all of y’all all of the time.
Flowers for the runt
Back in January, my babies had babies. Sherlock and Nala tied the knot sometime in November and one Saturday afternoon two months later, Nala’s water broke and she gave birth to three little pups: Zendaya, Kovu and Sasha.
In the weeks leading up to the birth, I’d read everything I could about caring for puppies: What emergencies were most likely, the mortality rate within the first week or two, how to revive a fading puppy. At the time I came to see love as a form of knowledge: If you know how to care for that which you love, it will survive. This was naive.
Kovu always ate less than his sisters. We tried to give him a little boost and bottle-fed him but he was too weak. Two days after he was born, he started to fade. My sister lay on the floor rubbing his frail body to try to revive him. I breathed into his mouth to resuscitate him. After about half an hour, his fading heart stopped beating altogether and we had to give it up. We were told to leave his body with Nala so she could understand what had happened. She sat by the body in silence for a few minutes then left the room. The next day, we prepared a simple funeral in the garden. On my morning walk with Sherlock, I foraged2 some flowers from nearby houses to make Kovu a little bouquet to be buried with.
But our troubles weren’t over. A few days later, Zendaya started to bloat and wouldn’t poop. What we’d initially suspected to be very bad constipation turned out to be ascites. A puncture in her intestines was leaking milk into her stomach cavity. Because she was only a week old, the only thing the vet could do was aspirate the milk and hope the intestines would heal on their own. They told us her chances for survival were very, very low.
After they’d gotten home from the vet, we all wept. I held Zendaya on my chest, trying to cherish these last moments with her. I went foraging flowers again and kept a bouquet for her, too, thinking we’d need to bury her next to her brother. Every day, we were ready for her to pass, but she… just kept living. To this day, she feels like some miracle. Zendaya and Sasha are three and a half months old as of this writing and they’re as joyful and demonic as you’d expect. I’m happy they’re here.
When all of this began, I’d believed that, by the very power of love, I could gain access to the powers of a healer, of someone who could breathe creatures back to life. If love were enough, the world would be a very different place.
Having a pet means to constantly grapple with mortality. I am always thinking of Sherlock and the little white beard growing under his chin. This year he is seven. If the life expectancy of Labradors is to be trusted, I only have three years left, five if I’m very lucky. Dogs reach an age when all we have left is borrowed time. I want him to have every comfort available in these final years. I want him to leave knowing he has been loved all his life.
At a routine visit to the vet in February, I was waiting outside for Sherlock to finish his checkup. An elderly couple walked out of the clinic and sat across from me. The woman pulled out her phone and played a song; the man took her hand and they sat there sobbing. There are moments you see so clearly into the life of a stranger, when you have no key to its many minute secrets but become keenly aware of its shape. All I could see was years and years of love. After a few minutes, they stood up and walked back into the clinic for one final moment.
I started to cry, too, because I understood. Because one day I will be the stranger crying outside a veterinary clinic. I will play a song, wipe away my tears then walk back in for a goodbye.
Airplane diary - 03/18/22
Why am I writing elegies for this trip before it’s even begun?
Someday I will have a proper vacation, but my mind is on all the work I left behind in Manila. Things that require me to correspond across a 12-hour time difference, things pulling me out of the suspended disbelief of a holiday. This is not a new feeling; I enjoy a wall-to-wall schedule. Once when I had Monday and Friday engagements for work, I flew out Tuesday night and was back in Manila before dawn on Friday. The immigration officer looked at me funny but ended up having to let me through. I had promised myself a trip this year where I would not have work on my mind, but unfortunately this is not the time.
The last trip I took before the pandemic hit was to New York. It was just a little over a week in March 2020, but it is painted in my heart as a fresco of the world as we knew it. A world that, for once, felt potent, felt rich with possibility. Then very suddenly, every door that had opened shut with a catastrophic urgency. Today I am on a plane back to New York. When people ask me what this trip is for, I have no answer, really. The city drew me back.
I have hidden many things from myself, but one of them is my fear of denouement: the moment an ending becomes final. I am afraid to knock on doors to find they’ve closed for good—to acknowledge that some things are magic because they happen once and never again.
Three hours into the flight and I’ve fallen asleep and drooled into my mask twice. Do I even deserve to be on this trip? How do I get them to turn the plane around?
I distract myself with a bad movie, and the monologues suddenly become my own. I begin to write what I would say to you if I could tell you everything. But telling people everything is the stuff of bad movies. Some secrets of the heart should never be revealed.
My favorite art installations are the ones that ask you to leave something of yourself. Once in Jakarta, a piece by Lee Mingwei asked that I write a letter to someone, so I wrote to a boy I loved and left it there in a little envelope—then I forgot it. Who knows what I said? It’s lost to the universe, or the hands of some stranger collecting envelopes and secrets.
I wish I had written you a letter, too. Maybe this trip I will. Maybe I will unravel before you, like a sweater you can unspool from its seams into a single string of yarn.
Funeral parade with birds of paradise
When we started going to parties again, I was suddenly tireder than ever.
Here was the old social schedule, just the way I’d longed for it to be. Here was the spontaneity of a 9:00 PM text message that had you out of the house 30 minutes later, and it felt like a little too much. What happened to the little world I’d built myself in isolation? What of the certainty I’d be in bed by 11:00, be up by 6:00, then do it all again the next day?
I convinced myself that it was just muscle memory. I could relearn squeezing through a crowd of strangers kissing on a crowded dancefloor, start talking all day and all night with friends old and new, begin working in smaller and smaller windows between benders. All of this is so exhausting; I can’t get enough of it.
I can’t help but think I’m mourning all the time; there is always something to be crying about. My life is blossoming in a million new ways, but I can’t help sing a little song for the self I found in isolation. It was a cruel time; I will never say I want to return to it. But who are we after surviving it? I refuse to think of it as wasted time.
The world is blossoming; the world is dying. As am I. As are you. So let’s sing a song.
No more dirges, only carnival songs,
Apa
or its shape has yet to reveal itself to me.
stole