AT THE STOA

  Seven hours later, the dying notes of Far Out and Karra’s Constellation were abruptly broken by Bjørn’s call blasting through my headset. After Erik’s call ending our conversation and me looking at my phone, I put it away, went to my desktop, and looked at my workload for the day. Another long day, for which I am thankful: work, like dishes, keeps me sane and drowns the cacophony normally in my head. “I’m leaving in two weeks,” was the first thing Bjørn said in the voice call. Having too many things happen all at once made me constitutionally unable to react to his pronouncement. He continued, not hearing my stunned silence, or perhaps not thinking anything of it, “Captain Josef of the Florence encountered rough seas on their run, and his first mate has been hit on the head by a crab pot. He had to be medevac’d the one thousand two hundred-mile distance to the nearest land.” “The Florence ? Another red king crab vessel?” “Not mainly. It hauls skrei off of Skarsvag and...

  I was to about to read the second piece out loud, which starts with an epigraph from Jacques Derrida’s A Silkworm of One’s Own , but then suddenly, and painfully, remembering not what I wrote but the style in which I wrote the piece, I stopped. I hoped Bjørn didn’t notice. Let’s put it this way: it was way worse than me harping on and on about the sea when I was younger. No one should be put through that. My youthful pretentiousness is a sight no one should have access to, put under duress or not. So I settled for the epigraph: I have promised. A lapse of time: it was only an interval, almost nothing, the infinite diminution of a music interval, and what a note, what news, what music. The verdict. As if suddenly evil never, nothing evil ever, happened again. As though evil would only happen again with death – or only later, too late, so much later. “Anyway,” I said, echoing him, “what I think of when I do of home is that apartment in Manila ten years ago where I lived...

Watch me gather leaves, and bits of broken armor, and words, and memories of fucking, and shape them into  a forest of my own making. Stay a while and see, ephemera laid on the anvil of my mind and slowly become monoliths,  undeniable and always real. Listen  as my voice finds my voice and joins the thunderstorm, a music you do not know. Know, finally, that in all this creation comes a god beautiful and terrible and alone.

 I need to go home. For the past three weeks I have been subjecting myself to inordinate and ultimately irrational amounts of writing, working, and increasingly less sleep.  Let me explain. I never thought I had a short story in me, much less three. The first one was special; it was the first one I ever wrote, never thinking I could sustain a plot line to save my life. The second one I wrote nine chapters of in one day. The third one was a cruel kind of child: it nearly took all of me and my decreasing work hours and demanded that it be clothed in words I was losing more and more. When it was done I felt as though I was the Christ on the cross, with his final breath and words.  The real world calls, as it has always done. I had to work amid my writing, for there are bills and rent to pay, family to support, vices to keep alive.  Now I am spent, always, always. I feel naked. Worse: I feel armorless in the mornings now, grasping for reality and finding just phone calls...