Bad trip

Faith waste man
Between the snickerdoodle drop top of plans-- crammed
I want to snatch, my urging act

--
I kissed the blue topaz stone embedded in the ring on my right hand ring finger and prayed, "If there's any power to you in this ring, Grandpa, destroy that sperm inside of her. Destroy that sperm inside of her."

Hexagram 26, 'Controlled Power', Line 1 and 2. 2nd hexagram: 52, 'Keeping Still'. They read: be still, be still, be still. My mind jettisons like tricycle taxis-- constantly picking up and offloading, motors wailing, unsettled.

The day before, hexagram 52 'Keeping Still', lines 1 and 3. Line 3:
Forced rigidity on the loins will cause the heart to suffocate--the heart smokes, "an anxious flame" one said. In turn, I pulled off her wet panties, my common sense turned to a dim flicker.

"No-baby. I can't have a baby" I tried to pull away, but she whispered "yes-baby", her grip ignited something tighter as she wrapped around me like the worst monster imaginable: one of Lilith, that can lull you deeper in wet funk, the oppressive dense slurping that devours you at the same time--

She wants to trap me, I want to give her a pill.
She said sternly, "No problem. My boss is doctor. I will talk." I didn't believe her, but there was relief on her word and I thought of her low fertility at this age.
"I'll pay for it."

And I'd pay for it either way.

--the SUV parked out front is named 'Escape'. How much longer do I stay? I've said too much, but promised nothing, my only deluge. She keeps telling me she'll wait for me always. I say, "don't say that. I don't know if I'll ever be back. My life is unsettled." And we read each others eyes until she responds, "I understand", without a realization of sadness, but of one that belongs to sadness, she simply has to pull the anchor to float down the stream again. "Bad trip" she calls it, and often says, "This is my life" with the same sense of sighed belonging. I want to grab her by the waist.
These simple acts, our seemingly simple lives become so complicated when the trivial pursuits aren't met, these of our own--of longing, one to be free, one to be attached-- what scatters and settles like dust. The involving acts makes monsters of us before the long stretch of responsibility lay bare.

"You're bad for me" she always says, smiling. "I'm good bad, not bad bad", I tell her, and she laughs and gives a gentle slap on my face-- a woman in her 40s and a 28 year old man-- our age discrepency is the glue to our misconduct. She showed me pictures of herself from high school. She was 'napintas', beautiful, and I wished I grew up with her-- I'd of married a shy lonely girl like her, running home to read and watch TV, comfortably, quietly to herself. I tell her so, and she smiles and blushes, and maybe that's my problem with sincerity 'in-the-now', my urging acts and flattery that can fall flat in an hour when I'm faced with it.
-- 'I have to keep moving', or so I say--it's romanticized. I just can't make my life here. So I give sanpaku eyed monologues of my life unsettled, and why I can't make a promise that may not keep--won't keep-- "there's things I need to do-- but", my eyes still drooping, "I do like it here-- maybe I'll be wrong for leaving". She'll let me finish then start laughing and I'll laugh with her, both of us shaking in genuine laughter at the same thing: "liar" she says.

In this country, the act of stealing is okay, so long as you don't get caught, you're clever. To get caught, you're in denial. Lying is on the forebear.

She made the mistake of showing me her and her co-workers' employee licenses taped to a bulletin board. They were old by 5 years. Name, age, picture, other things-- she told me about some of her co workers, innocently scanning through the license papers arranged side by side. Then she pointed to her picture and said "chaka" (ugly), and underneath it, age 42. She realized it and started tearing the licenses and papers off the board in self-observed controlled mania, saying she needs to replace them. I sat back to seem unassumed. Her eyes glanced back at the license of hers to reassure the printed age, that silent reaffirmation and chest patter in the heart to start up again at dismantling the board. She still tells me her age is 40, born in 1976. I play dumb and smile.

--
I make 10% interest off loans I've given to her co-workers. She added an additional 10% for herself in secret that she collects directly from them. Her co-workers are in on the secret, and somehow I still feel like the fool. It's better to be unassumed, whose the better liar.

Her widowed neice told me, "don't trust anyone here, even the ones you know."

--
"Did you have a good time, while it lasted" Donnie and Joe Emerson sang as I had visions of this country before coming. "Cos I know I didn't"-- those words formed like excited concrete.

She taught me the word 'lipatan'--to forget. And we taunt each other to forget each other.
A guest and the hotel manager: we act the parts, though it's the most valid relationship between us, our secret.

--
Whenever I move I leave things behind. When I lived in an old victorian house in downtown Sacramento, I left behind a huge 300 lb wurlizter organ piano--the landlord, Mrs. Fee Yee, a wonderful, beautiful, always friendly, Chinese woman, undeservingly left with the burden of my 300 lb excess. I still feel bad for that-- a younger careless me.
--other places I would only leave smaller things, sometimes useful, sometimes just material excretion, my shed powers: A boombox, a giant portrait of a mountain lion full sprint, a drawer full of broken cameras, a caricaturized realistic drawing of an obese co-worker named Daissy, a porch, two wooden punching posts still planted in the ground, coffee packets that absorbed the smell of old cabinets, clothes, hidden books, hidden objects, anything worth saving that's worth tossing-- but here, in Ilocos Norte, a foreigner of my grandfather's birthplace and upbringing, my 'ancestral home', my choices are heavy but tapping with lightness, and what I leave behind wants me to come back, painlessly hopeful at a sincere strange 'love', albeit misunderstood and sloshy foamed in discreet intentions that only we can understand--short lived and unpromised, "crazy" and unembarrassed, an accident, an excited hopeful disinclined future.

And she still tells me, "I understand. But I will always wait, and wait, and wait", without an ear for me to detest. True blue and napintas adu, we build on what lies.