with Ian Rosales Casocot

“Life is random,” says the bird to the wind.

II.

I love the invisible inventiveness of winds. They touch things, and move them, and we are the awed spectators to their ghost traces. From my table, for example, I can see the door to this room propped open to still firmness by a slight chair. And the wind—which I know is present because it touches my skin, and makes strands of my hair fly—compels it to meet its given destiny to shut close. It pushes so, and the chair moves. When the wind just as suddenly dies, everything goes back to their static stances, and we are left with the ordinary world and this tragedy: where only the visible and has mass can move and shape everything, and we are left only with the longing for cool, invisible forces. Like love.

III.

I thought of how I had come to understand that there were always things unsaid between my mother and my father. You could have told by the way they held each other’s eyes for a few seconds—and the quick instance they looked away. Years later, when I would remember all these, I think: those were little earthquakes. They reverberated, and informed everything. They made perfect sense the murkiness of all that had unraveled.

And yet nothing much really could register on an eleven-year-old’s head. Except that mother looked constantly tired, and father looked lost. I now remember an instance in the kitchen, mother in a stance before an open door, in a white shirt and old jeans, and father in fading corduroy shorts and topless, his bulges spilling splendidly, and all she said was—

“I’m off to a Bible study.”

There was a hint of an accusation in her voice.

Father looked up at her from the plate of greasy bacon and runny eggs and heaps of rice—and said nothing. They looked at each other, and then, even before I could say goodbye, she was gone and father was back to his gradual demolition of a late breakfast.

But I never understood there was a battle being waged then. All I knew was that it was the fraught beginning of another week, and even at 11, I had learned to hate the intricate dramas of Mondays. Always, there was the business of saying goodbye to the weekends of games and runaway fantasies, and the thought of the endlessness of school never failed to fill me with dread.

That was a summer day though. And yet, although there was no business of school days to fret over, the Mondays felt the same. That morning, I must have been busy devising ways to spend the looming afternoon with. I knew nothing much would happen, and I know now that all sorts of promises for adventures must have beckoned like the lies we tell ourselves. I must have also thought, perhaps fleetingly: the silence between them was dramatic. But I was young. We never feel the gravity of the games people play until we’ve lost all vestiges of innocence.

IV.

I can imagine perfectly how we would meet one day. I would be doing something in a laidback cafe, in the corner of X and X, drinking my second cup of coffee. It would be a cafe near the sea, where we would feel truly the borders of worlds. It would be a bright afternoon, not too late in the day. It would be a Sunday. The air would have the breeziness of a lazy summer. The traffic would be a crawl. A man and his dog would pass by. He would also be carrying a pink parasol. A young woman would jog past him, and a young boy, about nine, would cross her path with a red bicycle some uncle just bought him for a birthday gift. I would not see any of these. Everything is telescoped into the thing that I would be doing—something. I don’t know what that would be. Perhaps I’d be reading a book. Perhaps I’d be writing on a laptop. Perhaps there would be ten ounces of worry in my hands, and there was serious contemplation to do. There would be no clouds, I suppose, only an infiniteness of blue. It is a blue that extends far to the horizon where I could only imagine a different world existing and not there, not where I would be in that forlorn cafe, doing something.

And then I would just happen to look up. Why? I don’t know exactly why.

But I would look up and there you would be. We both would catch each other’s eyes. Your eyes would hold me. I would not look away. I don’t know who would smile first. Perhaps you—I am eternally shy. And then I’d smile back, and go back to what I’d be doing. That something. I’d be smiling still.

The next thing I’d know, you’d be there right in front of me.

“Hello,” you’d say.

When I would turn to look at you again, my smile all nervous, I’d say—

V.

And the wind replied to the bird, “That may be so, but all things eventually connect. Sometimes all you need to do is close your eyes, and let the connections sink in.”

And the bird did. And he saw.