like scattered memories. Stay present. Sprint back to another late reply, another professor tapping a pen, another error across the page. I try to stay awake at seven. Some days, I think I can adore my mistakes just by watching. But this isn’t yesterday, not the first of its kind swallowed. It doesn’t soften, whatever this is. Not in your hands.
I call return when it refuses to linger. When I lose a book, forget a street’s name, forget the professor, her judgment, myself in sprinting. Today is years since I wandered off the trail, turned the wrong corner, left. I convince myself by calling: look at your footprints, how you mistook their absence. How instead of going, they have made home in the air.
And I hear them tapping when I wash myself. When I language hurt into water. When I convince myself, unfazed by repetitions: there’s nothing to be rid of, nothing to disgorge, no point of origin, there was no point at all. Yet the mirror returns face, the cold looks back from the puddle. And I remember the road, how I walk the avenues, how mud clings to my shoes.
It’s gone now.
This isn’t the past. Not the first of its kind swallowed. I try to hold it, call it life, call it something. The years pass, easy, unnoticed. I reach for them as they go, hold them back as with a door screaming shut, enter the class. And maybe I’m glad I came. Some days I can taste the days by mistake, adore their intrusion, pattern them from life before, pardon their presence. And still they do not soften, just because I hold them.
Ronnel Bermas (he/him) is a first-generation undergraduate at Ateneo de Manila University whose work has appeared in Aster Lit, The GUIDON, and HEIGHTS Ateneo. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he was also named a Theme Winner by Aster Lit and a finalist for the Lasallian Scholarum Awards.
Featured image by Siora Photography.
