Confessions of a Bilingual

1.      Cheater’s Heels. The Exotic Sun.  
   
Like how I love writing, I also love to walk. To really love me means loving me with my shoes off, along with my feet’s tired, dirty confessions. I walk wherever I go. And every time, I look for stories, revelations. One day, I found myself shuffling on a familiar street. Until now, after three years since it happened, I could still hear echoes of how my heels clicked on the pavement of a street I have never been on to for so many years. It hurt me a bit how foreign my shoes sounded like as they hit a once familiar ground. Click, click, click. The familiarity was strange and the strangeness was familiar. For so many years, I had both dreamed and dreaded lingering on those streets again. Being there seeing, hearing, feeling those familiar faces and stances—move, walk, talk, touch, gaze, dispute—reconcile to a language and manners that I have always cherished, made me feel like a cheater to an old time lover.  
   
The sun writhed and screeched above me. The heat it was giving off reminded me of two eager bodies in collision. At two in the afternoon, I felt my skin burning, my heels hellish against the rough asphalt. Nearby, was an old crumbling church I often go to as a young girl. I went inside for the shade. It was strange how some old, forgotten habit resurfaces after such a long time of not doing it. Like the girl I was before, I went to the darkest corner of the church then kneeled. I wanted to pray, but I guess I forgot how. Instead, I looked around and waited. After what seemed like an eternity and a couple of minutes of trying to find reasons to stay, an old lady whose face was obscured by a black veil came out of the confession booth. I have never been in a confession booth before.  
                                                                                                            [I was curious...]  
 
2.      Confession Chamber. Disjointed.  
   
The ache I felt inside the dark chamber of the confession booth was abrupt, indistinct, poetic. Again, I kneeled, but this time like a covetous woman who yearned for absolution. And yet, a part of me refused to repent. No, not yet. I heard myself murmur in between breaths. The dark, seclusion and intimacy between me and my confessor split me up into two: as a good girl who yearns calm, consistency, care and as a selfish woman who demands pleasure, bliss, risk. These emotions possessed me. They made me want to cry. The first sentence I staggered to voice out sounded like a choke: Patawarin n’yo po ako padre, ‘pagkat ako’y nagkasala…  
   
This is how I feel every time I write. For me, writing means splitting myself into two in the dark confession chamber of my mind. Whenever I get myself near a pen or a keyboard to confront a blank page, my demons, my faith, I wrestle against the boundaries of being a girl and a woman, a sinner and a saint, a giver and a taker, a truthful being and someone who compulsively lies. And to make things more complicated, I choose to write in a language that isn’t mine (and probably will never be mine.) Sometimes, I ask myself if that makes me a traitor, a cheater. However, I find baring myself in a language that I am not that familiar with truly outrageous, irresistible.  
   
3.      Page Exhibitionist.  
   
One morning after taking a shower, stepping out of the bathroom, the sunlight streaming through my clear glass window mesmerizes me. I walk towards its rays to feel its warmth, its beauty as it touches my exposure.  For a while, I let myself bask in the Pacific sunlight like a red-light district prostitute. Outside, I imagined souls and bodies desperate like mine, watching.  
   
This reminded me why I write in English.  
   
For someone who gets pleasure from the knowledge of being watched, being able to project glimpses of experiences by the strip tease her words on the bare page is like straddling on the boundaries of heaven and hell, pleasure and pain, fear and relief—and, the more witnesses to her heights and defeats the more titillating it is for her.  
   
4.      Typewriter Scraps. Bad Habit.  
   
Sometimes I would hear rhythm in my head. Most of the time they would come rolling like waves usually in the form of wild drumbeats throbbing images of love, ache, trembling, yearning, anger, pride, grief, joy, longing, love, loss, lust. But, sometimes, it’s the tap-tapping sound of my abandoned typewriter that comes to haunt me.  
   
A long time ago, I fell in love for the first time to a habit that has the power to either heal or hurt me. For some, writing can be therapeutic but when I write, I choose hurt most of the time over satisfaction because it is always easier to bleed than to mend.   So then, I allowed words turn to revelations and revelations to stories. But then, there were also these memories of my feet shuffling from places to places or glimpses of my body agonizing from moments to moments. And these—with both pride and shame, I can only express in English and nothing else.

Click click click.

 Tap tap tap.