Blue

Last Saturday we learn about images. “An image is an internal whole in the mind’s eye complete with all the sensations surrounding it, full of meaning for the writer. Images have strong visual significance, but they also evoke the feel or sound or smell or taste of things. Images are constant in all natural writing for they heighten or intensify the implicit, often becoming interlocking patterns of related images full of meaning.”

Where do images come from? Aside from our five senses, they can also come from daydreams, fantasies, internalized experiences of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste, as well as from dreams and nightmares.

The exercise that day was to cluster around the word color. I choose blue, and then I let my pen guide me, totally disregarding my left brain, and words tumble, and they continue to come out pouring, gushing from an unknown source, as if possessed, wanting to come out. I instantly felt the shift, and I was surprised where it led me to. (I almost choked at the last two lines when I read it in class.)


when i think of blue, i think of the sea,
the shorelines, melting away with the sand
the aquamarine, the greens, as they dip further away
into the deep blue yonder.

when i think of blue, i think of its many hues
and like its palette, emotions weave through me,
evoking, stirring nostalgia--
The Fine Romance. The yesteryears.

when i think of blue, i get the blues
i think of jazz, the crooning, the melting,
the sound of Billie Holiday's Yesterdays, whispering,
Norah Jones's, "Come Away With Me", sadly beckoning.

when i think of blue, i think of you
i catch the blues and the darkness
surrounding this agony. let me be.
stay away. don't go.

when I think of blue, i think of you.

Twee (that’s how she wants to be called) was pleased with this one because she said the clustering led me to a very personal experience, and she clearly saw (and heard) that.

***

Believe it or not, all of us, though solely interested in our own progress in creative writing, looked forward to each one’s readings. We know each one has their own style, and slowly, we can already hear the difference in our works from the past weeks. Twee said, “I can now hear your voices. This is what clustering does to your writing, you find your own voices.“

The doctor has now slowly used less medical terms as he described the color white telling a story about a patient friend describing a very bright light at the end of the tunnel. Still, Twee tells him to stop censoring, to tell his left brain to shutdown. Bunny, the creative guy read about A Lesson in Photography, and as I listened, I closed my eyes as he keeps repeating the line, “Tell me a story” to create recurrences in his vignette. I saw each one of the pictures as he read it with my eyes closed-- now that is what photography is all about, telling a story! Bunny is very creative and when asked to write about color, his vignette was, “The Darker Side of White”, deprecating white vs brown sugar, white rice vs brown rice, and so on..

Marilou still wrote about Frank, while Susan (the 40 year old married to a 70 year old) read A Lesson on Letting Go, which is more aptly titled “A Lesson on Coming”. (Yes, that kind). I sat next to her, so I tell everyone I am not reading my Letting Go piece, and instead chose to read the Driving Lesson. Marilou requests I read both, but no, I have decided already after majority of the votes I took from friends said hands down, I should read the sadder, melancholic one. Twee wanted me to read the Letting Go piece too, but I figured she must have written about it a thousand and one (better) ways (more on that later). It was fun to read my inspirational piece, and as I looked up to the men (emote ang lola when I read the line about being undmindful of how men see girls drive), the doctor’s eyes were twinkling, and when I finished everyone clapped and Twee said it was very good. Ysabel, the 24-year old Povedan alumna told me she loved it, “It’s really all in the mind noh?” I replied, “You don’t drive noh?”, and I remember Puto. Go girl, you can do it!

Marilou also intimated to me that she only learned to drive after Frank died; she had no choice (Ahh, that is why she always asks to be led out of Salcedo to Ayala Avenue every Saturday. I drove ahead, leading her this week, and we wave goodbye at AIM). Even Ysabel started using wonderful words, as she used Tumble Down for her recurring piece, and it was great to listen as she used these two words to describe how she should live her life. Tumble Down, make a mess, let go, have fun, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, she seemed to say.

***

So the competitive me was not competing with anyone but myself because I want to learn from this expensive class, yes? But I thought that everyone anticipated my reading, as well as that of Susan and Bunny. It’s not yabang, DEP, it just is. Tita Nida’s short, rhyming funny vignettes ceased to be- she was harried and will be missing the rest of our sessions as she will be traveling. Actually, now that I know more, I dare not call myself a writer- at least not compared to Bud! (Maybe I am a good reader, now that’s yabang- hahaha). Actually, Susan is very good with poetry, her words, when put together, they are something else.

***

I borrowed Twee’s book, “How Do You Know Your Pearls Are Real?:On Single Parenthood and Other Ms. Adventures.”

Last night, as I lit up my green tea home fragrance oil after insidiously, viciously cleaning my toilet, prepped my feet up, fluffed up the pillows and turned on the airconditioning, I started reading. She writes so well, all these feelings associated from everything, from the mundane to the ordinary, to the gut-wrenching emotions pulled from girth, the knife-sharp images about her separation, the end of her marriage, and her fight to be alone, earning her own money and coming into her own as a woman, brought alive, from pages of her diaries, her poems, lessons she learned about her men, and put out there for everyone to see. I text her that I can now understand why she chose to hie away to Cebu the day her book was released in 1991. I also told her I could relate, and that I am stopping reading her book for the next few days because they started to make me feel the scars and the writhing, living worm traversing inside my blood that I kept asleep, thinking it has gone away, flushed out of the tear ducts that now remained dry. I was so wrong.

I started weeping and realized it will leave me scarred forever.