Dorothy Dances in the Land of Oz

Photography by Johnny Gordolon

A/N: Lovely spontaneous readers, my short fiction was published by Swept Magazine, a local mag in Toronto. Check it out here.

–and I’m holding her hand as tightly as I could, like capturing light in between clenched fists, like encapsulating a deluge in a teacup—hopeless, but I held on anyway.

In hindsight, this was the essence of our friendship—undying love and futile desperation; starvation only the half-dead could relate to, that addiction to life and omnipotence and everything in between.

At the crosswalk on the corner of Bloor and Spadina, I saw her: that slump of a walk and lucid shoulder movement couldn’t belong to anyone else. We glanced at each other—she was wearing a plaid shirt and blood-red pants, while hemp bracelets clung to her tiny wrist.

I was different. Blazer on top of a pencil skirt, eyes behind purple-rimmed glasses—could she recognize me? Despite my lack of bright colours, despite the absence of ripped jeans? I dressed carefully now; identity has now taken the backseat, while caution steered the wheel.

And yet she did. It was unmistakable. A look crossed her face like a death sentence: her lips were firm, unmoving. Dorothy, across the street, beside Second Cup, where we once entered, holding hands at three in the morning—four golden years ago—in between cars and the 510 Spadina streetcar zipping by—held back emotions so efficiently.

She recognized me, despite my un-dyed hair and clear fingernails.

The language she spoke through the stillness of her body was raw, un-edited, and Gonzo. She communicated to me unapologetically and relentlessly—as pertinacious as she was when she used to look at me with those eyes that stung of contradictions and lullabies. I quivered in response, so silently gripped by guilt and regret: I didn’t mean to leave you, but I did, and even if I knew why, the reason wouldn’t be enough to heal the scars I left permanently etched in your history.

So in the time it took for the pedestrian light to turn on, I backtracked:

We met at the twilight of our lives on our first year of university. I met her in a party made of mostly boys. I was drunk and just starting to feel unsafe, when she calmed my environment down by sitting next to me, smiling awkwardly, telling me about her sister, and how she was sick. Her next confession was whether or not we should go, but even then her vibrancy got the best of her—so we decided to stay. I learned then that I was going to live next to her for the rest of the year. Even then I knew she was the kind of girl I could fall in love with.

Our friendship grew through moments of “we have to’s”. We were seventeen when we first explored downtown Toronto, dressed up unapologetically, leather jackets and mini-skirts abound. Every bar turned us away: “If you don’t have ID’s girls, we can’t serve you beer.”

On one last act of desperation, she called her 19-year-old friend, currently frat-living. He met us, casual and cool, in his white shirt and flip flops. He led us to a dingy bar lit by candlelight, filled with other college students, and ordered a pitcher as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Heart-shaped Box filled the awkward silence in between sips of watered-down domestic beer.

Through dark streets, she led me; we danced to the light of her white sneakers—it showed us the way. She took me in her room and rolled a cigarette wrapped in tinfoil; I hugged her from behind and smelled her hair. Sweet Jane played forever.

And then a dull came into the chaos of our lives and shook everything into standstill: her sister’s funeral. I said, reassuringly, “Yes, I’ll come. Of course, I’ll come” knowing, even as I was saying it, that I wouldn’t. Was I that horrible?

When she called me the next day I didn’t pick up. Eventually, she stopped calling at all.

Two years passed before she saw me at a party again. I was drunk and was just starting to feel unsafe, when she calmed my environment down by sitting next to me, smiling awkwardly and yelling over the music, “I missed you!”

She took my hand and led me away from the bustling house, past the dancing bodies. We spilled outside, where she sat me down in the middle of the street and began a tirade of what happened to her in the years of our silence. Her confessions were heartfelt and saddening, and I tried to make the mood light by laughing. She looked at me weird for the first time. It was our first miscommunication.

We ended up inside her room, two girls on top of a bed, suddenly feeling very stretched out and exhausted. That night she told me more about her sister, and how she missed her, and asked me if it will ever be possible to get over this kind of thing. I couldn’t answer her with words so I held her in my arms in an attempt to join her. We shared each other’s tragedies.

She was driving. Her hair was in a ponytail and her fingers drummed on the steering wheel as I stared out my window and watched the blur of downtown lights. I remember her saying that after I graduate I was going to be insanely depressed, just like she was, after realizing that the world didn’t give instant feedback, like the ones we got when we turned in a good essay.  But that being insanely depressed was somehow okay, as long as we had each other. I remember feeling really good about that, and feeling confident about a future I was sure was going to happen.

A few hours later I got tired of sitting across from her in the bar so I sat beside her, and with a huge grin on her face she put her legs on top of mine and said, “I’m doing this because I love you” and it was the first time in a long time that I heard those words and actually believed them, without feeling scared, without feeling hesitant.

She looked at me, her eyes glazed over, barely open. The only thing someone could see in her face from a mile away was that giant, genuine smile.

Our lunacies and weekend benders on Queen Street became inseparable from her; she rented a tiny apartment on Stephanie Street for $1,100 a month so she could continue. This one-bedroom became the starting point of all our Friday nights: from her balcony we smoked and drank and watched the CN tower change colour. By midnight we were wandering into Sneaky Dee’s, Nocturne and Labyrinth. One night we tried to eat at Smoke’s Poutinerie and met two guys, where our conversation went from colourful nails to after-hours hangouts. Before we knew it we were descending stairs towards either heaven or infinite abyss: laser lights spewed from every corner, sticky streamers bled on the floor.

And then I went to her parent’s house and she left me inside her sister’s room while she slept . The room was green and strangely empty, despite all of the things her sister left behind. Nothing was moved or re-arranged. The only sign that told me she was gone were her ashes inside a silver cup placed on top of her desk—a vibrant green room that holds in its hands—the ashes of a girl forever twenty-one.

Despite my conscience, I sat in her sister’s chair and opened the single notebook laying there. On the first page, Dorothy had written: This year is the first year that I am older than my sister.

It hit me then—whatever it was—and a cold, sad desperation held me and wouldn’t let go. How does grief work? Does it go away as time pass? Or does losing someone just becomes more and more hauntingly familiar?

Eventually Dorothy’s calls became more frequent, at random times of the night, 3 AM, 4 AM, her panicked screams on the other line. The responsibility that came with loving Dorothy began to weigh me down. Other times it was good, like when we watched the sunlight stream through the curtains and listened to the birds sing—but they became fewer and fewer and too far in between.

The last conversation I allowed to have with her took place in the bathroom stall of another’s bar’s washroom; I was taking photos of the graffiti when she said, choked up and sniffling: “You’re my sister now, do you understand? That’s who you’ve become.”

And I said nothing.

Just stared at the wall that said in felt marker: But for now we are young. Let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.

Dorothy: I think you may have been the closest thing to love I ever felt. But when you’re young, something in that feels too fragile, too frightening.

I could explain to you why I left, and pepper you with apologies. I could write a long reply, to make up for the e-mails I ignored, in an attempt to jot down what I thought happened, in a cogent, logical form, with a clear beginning and an even smoother end.

Or I could insert answers to where there are none, and form conclusions to the things we never addressed. I could start by saying, “Loving you came with the commitment of healing you, something I couldn’t handle at the time, but I didn’t know it.” I could give reasoning to my actions, even though I know, deeply, that my actions lacked meaning, nor thought, that I had lost control over time, and words: all that existed during those days was space, filled to the brim with emptiness, overflowing with mindlessness.

Or I could tell you that I’m okay, that I have a job now, and that I moved to Toronto. And so, what are you up to now? Maybe we can meet up for coffee sometime—and end it nicely, neatly, as civil and cautious as it could possibly be.

Or I could do nothing, because she didn’t warrant a reply, and I wouldn’t want to overwrite.

And so, when the light turned green, all I did was whisper wordlessly—

Dorothy—

And hoped the half-sound would turn her into the woman she always wanted to be, the one that danced in transcendental existentiality, the girl forever young and euphoric in the confines of my mind, as she stood in the afternoon sun that peeked through the buildings of downtown Toronto.

© – Ellise Ramos 2013

Living in Transitory

lost child by vanamonster

I came to Canada when I was 14 years old. When I arrived in Toronto, it didn’t register that this would be my permanent home. To me,  it was a long extended vacation that I had to overcome in order to go back home, which was Manila, Philippines.

I always thought that by now I would have adjusted to seeing myself as Canadian. However, as much as I am starting to exhibit Canadian values and traits, it is only now that I’ve grown into adulthood 10 years later that I am starting to realize how incredibly non-Canadian I am, especially when I’m with a group of people who grew up together in Canada, talking about their childhood.

They forget that I didn’t grow up here as well, because from time to time they’d look at me for recognition — “Remember Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood?” No, in fact, I don’t — I didn’t grow up to Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood. I grew up to Batibot, Blue Blink and the Tagalog version of Bananas in Pyjamas (you must empathize me when I discovered that this show wasn’t, in fact, a Filipino original –  it felt very surreal when I discovered that I was merely watching the dubbed version of B1 and B2).

While on our walk yesterday, my boyfriend and I realized that what I thought was a twinkie was in fact, a strawberry flakie. He couldn’t understand how I didn’t know what a twinkie was; it’s apparently a staple treat while growing up. But those weren’t my treats — my treats were dirty meringues and bananas deep-fried and covered in melted sugary goodness.

These yummy meringue kisses are sold as street food in the Philippines.

Banana Cue – the yummy goodness that is future diabetes.

When my boyfriend and I first started going out 8 years ago, he made it his mission to introduce me to everything he enjoyed when he was a kid: from eating Kraft Dinner while in bed to enjoying every South Park episode ever made into existence, along with a Hungryman Dinner. I would try to explain to him the joy of sitting with your maids under mango trees and eating green mangoes with bagoong, while telling ghost stories about the monster capital in the Philippines: Capiz.

I would help him envision living  weekends by the ocean, and how I captured a squid and a starfish and put them in a cooler, hoping to take them home as pets. When I checked in on them later in the evening, I was horrified to see nothing but blackness on what was once clear water — and upon reaching in to pet my creatures, came up with mutilated bits and pieces of starfish instead.

Even talking about our old accidents makes us marvel at the stark differences of our origins. While his scars can be attributed from single accidents in playgrounds, mine varied by intensity and environment: a long and deep cut on the side of my thigh from falling from the top of a natural waterfall, drowning not once in my life, but once every summer, and that time I almost died drowning in miserable, thick goo made of mud, pig food, and pig feces.

While he talked to me about his bullies and the fires they set in the fields of New Brunswick, I’d tell him about the nipa huts I slept in during the times I spent with my aunt in her farm, while the chickens crooned underneath the bamboo floors.

Not the actual nipa hut I spent my summers in, but you get the idea.

He would tell me about the afternoons he spent with his babysitter; I would tell him about the afternoons I visited the slums in Taguig (called the squatter area) to visit relatives, who would pepper me with money and food they didn’t have, and how my mother would reprimand me about accepting these gifts — about how, for the longest time, I assumed everyone was the same, and that money and hierarchy didn’t matter because I saw, first hand, what it was like to be stricken with poverty — and how the lack of money and material things never had any significant effect to the happiness and content they still experienced in their every day.

An aerial view of the slums in Taguig, Metro Manila. Photography by Jason Doiy.

So when I sit with my friends and they talk about how they grew up wanting Swatches, and Tamagochis, I find myself not being able to relate. Because even though as a child, I had wanted the same things, it didn’t decide my childhood, nor mark it.

What I remember from my childhood is the environment, because that is what I cannot recapture: the warm, enveloping sun, the sounds of stray dogs barking, the smell of saltwater wafting in from the ocean, and that feeling of endless sand as soft as flour sifting through your fingers, embracing you deep into its melting arms.

I remember being grateful for the things I had, not constantly pining for the things I didn’t posses. I remember being perfectly happy by myself, because social connections did not define who I was. I remember having a sense of completion and progress, and having that knowledge nestled deep within me, because I didn’t feel the pressure of societal expectations.

I remember spending afternoons watching my dogs give birth, feeding my chickens, and climbing into people’s homes, pretending we were being chased by aswangs. I remember trying to convince my grandpa, my tatang, to stop giving me hundred peso bills, knowing he couldn’t afford it — so he built me a bamboo coin bank instead, so that I wouldn’t see the amount of money my relatives were giving me.

What I remember from my childhood is quite different from the childhood my friends remember in Canada, and I wonder if there is ever a time in my adulthood that I would be able to reconcile my childhood in the Philippines with the life I ended up living in Canada.

It just seems like the more that time pass, the more I feel disconnected from the country I made my second home, as I recall more and more vividly, the picturesque surreality of my old life, which I was too young and naive to understand and appreciate.

The Thin Line that Separates Madness from Creativity

creativity by crisvector

Response to Daily Prompt: A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma

Tell us something most people probably don’t know about you.

I am, more often than not, looking for the right words to say, and it is only when they come to life in written or spoken form, am I so thoroughly convinced, that they were the wrong ones to begin with.

Most of the time, I feel this immense pressure to write something grandiose and meaningful, as if I everything I say or do needs to matter, otherwise I’m just wasting my time.

This leads to countless of half-written drafts, always beginning with so much promise and enthusiasm, only to end in a half-mark, majestic and marvellous ideas forever left behind. I have more incomplete drafts than published ones, and I always prefer the former.

The only thing that keeps me sane is reassuring myself with the thought that I am just a side character in everyone’s stories: that most of the time, I am just a dot in the span of their whole existence, and that the things I write/say are so insignificant that it barely registers as a complete sentence in their lives. This makes me feel better about myself; knowing that I am unimportant.

But sometimes, this very thought is what keeps me up at night. On most days I want to re-position myself in everybody’s minds and force my identity to reside permanently inside them, so that they can only think of me, and never forget who I am. I suffocate at the thought of mediocrity, so I aim to gather as much attention as I can grab, so that I may reaffirm my existence through other people’s words/thoughts. If I am not talked to, or talked about, I get surreal: if I don’t make a sound I will revert to the abstract, I will cease to exist.

So I write! I write thoughts and ideas to frame my identity, to solidify my being. I let the words form physicality so that even though my body keeps aging, becoming stranger and stranger to me every day that I look in the mirror and  fail to recognize myself, my words are what remains the same and what I will undoubtedly know is still mine.

And yet it is the very pressure of having to write to re-establish my existence that drives me crazy: and so I try to convince myself that I don’t matter – it’s a never-ending thing, these fears and insecurities.

Most people think that I’m just creative. What most people don’t realize is that I have, in fact, driven myself mad.

On Being Freshly Pressed & Other Doubts

Writer by AmythePirate

When I wrote “Absolute Certainty and Infinite Confidence“, I was sitting in front of my computer at the office, typing fervently yet sadly. I had stayed behind after my work day because I forced myself to keep working, even though all I wanted to do was  write. As soon as the clock struck 5, I opened my wordpress account and began typing.

This blog was always meant to be an escape pod. I tinkered with it and made it colourful, and it helped me get through my worst days. I find it hard to admit to people close to me when I am sad, especially when I have to formulate it into spoken words. I am never the one to say upfront, “Please stop doing this to me, because it hurts me”. Instead, I turn to my computer and write a poem or a short story to alleviate the pain, and transform it into something beautiful that I can read, and unashamed to share.

My friends have told me in the past that they had lost faith in blogging because it offers a venue for criticism: it allows you to be vulnerable and open to interpretation. This is all I think about when I write, and it proved to be incredibly limiting. I tried to find ways in which I can present my words to be selfless: to have it seamlessly combine with other people’s emotions and have it malleable to their experience. I wanted  some good to come out of my words, instead of a monologue about pain that was selfish and internal.

When I wrote “Absolute Certainty”, I was fully aware of my urge to write, and an adult voice telling me to “wait”, to “keep it inside until work was over”. And I suddenly had a longing for those days when I stopped at nothing just to write.

And halfway through the article, I began to discover the person I had grown into, whose behaviour crippled my  writing. Controlling that urge to write so that I can be productive while I’m at work made me so lonely because it brought me closer to the realization that I had transformed writing into a past time – a hobby, along with video games and watching TV, when it used to be the one and only purpose that motivated me, the one true weapon I had against the world.

And it made me so sad after I finished writing it, that I cringed when I hit “Publish”. I thought I was alone in feeling this way, that nobody else could understand that sense of loss we feel when we realize that we have lost control of meaning in our lives, that the purpose that once shaped our identity has become an illusion, and has left you disenchanted.

When I received the email about being Freshly Pressed, these were the words that stood out:

“We enjoyed this nostalgic post about your childhood love for reading and writing, and growing up and having less time for books. We think the rest of the community will agree.”

The first emotion I felt was sheer and complete terror. My old fears came back to haunt me: This was a terrible mistake. They read the article wrong. It can’t be this good. I’m going to have a lot of comments bringing me down and making fun of me — and to be honest, I was this close to deleting the post and shutting my blog down.

Because who could’ve thought that something beautiful could come out of  fears and insecurities? And yet it did, because I had forgotten why it’s so essential to document the narratives of our lives: so that we can all take part in the human struggle, so that we can build a community of support and encourage others to keep going despite obstacles, despite our own fears.

Reading your comments has revived that idea within me:

Writing is important because it is an extension of our souls – it is the process of creating something tangible and shareable so that we don’t have to internalize pain, so that we don’t have to be alone with our conflicts. It is the human mind solidified – and it can be a truly beautiful thing that evolves and manifests with each new reader gained, with each new meaning spun from the words we create.

A young writer from my university once told me that writing is a solitary activity, and to this I disagree. Because from now, every time I write, I take you all with me.

Absolute Certainty and Infinite Confidence

Creatures of literature
by *BeatrizMartinVidal

When I was young, I used to fill notebooks with words.

When my mother found my secret stack (under the cupboard, inside a pile of garbage bags) she held them to the sunlight one by one and read each page with wide, disbelieving eyes. I stood there with clenched fists, watching her go through thousands upon thousands of words.

She cut my lunch allowance, which I was laundering to go towards my notebook addiction.

Not to worry: I learned how to use the computer instead. This is how I started typing over 80 words per minute.

Every day I felt this rising urge to achieve complete and utter bliss. I can only describe it as an overwhelming desire to write, and that full confidence that I could. I started out typing short stories copied from books. Lion King was the very first to be transcribed into MS-DOS. Eventually, I started typing out entire novels. As time progressed, I created my own.

Page after page of words. The only thing I remember from my childhood is sitting in the garden, writing words, and as I grew older, sitting alone in a room, in front of a computer screen typing out words.

I remember my friends yelling outside my window: “Ellise! When are you going to play?”

“Nope, gotta type,” was my reply.

When I was young I used to go through great lengths to quell my thirst for literature. I would sneak inside a library and try to borrow as many books as I could. I spent every lunchtime and recess in the library reading. I was the only person there. In retrospect I realize the librarian knew I had “borrowed” more books than I was allowed to because it was a very small library and I was its only customer. She smiled at me every time I left, even though I had books stuffed inside my shirt, inside my skirt, making me limp as I walked past.

I began selling my stories to get even more books. Eventually the teachers had to sit me down and told me I was in trouble for taking other students’ lunch money. I told them: “But they’re buying my stories.”

“Well, you’re not allowed to sell your stories.”

“So how am I supposed to buy books?” I asked, horrified.

“You’ll need to figure something else out.”

Now that I’m older, I’ve learned to quell this desire. Even though I thought of stories, I kept them inside, controlled, and had the patience to wait until after my commute to write them down. Of course, it never happened — by the time I got home, I’d be way too tired from work, that all I would want to do is sit down, watch TV, stories and ideas long forgotten.

Sometimes, I’d sit down, stare at my computer screen, forcefully will myself to write, only to be hindered by self-doubt and criticism: What’s the point? It’s too gimmicky. This is too much of a sell-out piece. Way to add to the cliche train. And before I knew it, I had paralyzed myself into immobilism, infinitely frozen into standstill, stories and ideas quelled and quenched by insecurity.

I find myself walking through bookstores and staring longingly at books I want to read. I devise a million reasons why it’s better I don’t read them all: full-time job, no time, no point. I try to make myself feel better that I did the right thing: you saved your money, now you can spend it on something else. Like phone bills. And rent.

And instead of feeling happiness inside bookstores, all I feel is loneliness, and that sinking realization that I will never have enough time to read all of these books, nor the mind to understand and remember them.

Ultimately, I think, I’d rather be the literature-addicted child who stopped at nothing to be transported into the world of words without any regard to the consequences that followed, instead of the responsible adult with a full-time job who walks into bookstores wistfully, hoping she could read all the books ever written and wanting so badly to participate and give back with words of her own some day.

The addiction is still there: the only thing that faded through time is certainty.