.....and all you can do is understand that everything I ink undergoes fictionalization.
“You know you can get parasitic worms walking around bare feet,” I said as I look at the mud trapped between his toes.
“You should have told me earlier. I heard the call of crow billed drongo, I thought I could see it,” he said.
“Did you see it?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. He reached for a knife that was under my chair. The night before he used the same knife to cut triangle squares of watermelon. He scrapped his ankle with its dull side in short repetitive strokes.
“I am going for a swim,” I interrupted the silence that has formed between us.
“Uhhmm.”
In the daytime if he wasn’t showing me new species of insects, plants or trees, his words were completely rationed. I was in his world and I followed his rules. I too prefer silence. Words often fail, corner and defeat me. We speak five languages between us but in the daytime we were voiceless.
Frederik was my first lover. I’ve had boyfriends but never a lover. I was entering a new phase of relationship. I was undergoing transmutation, leaving my earlier ideals of relationship, its hope of a future. I was leaving behind words that I scribbled on my high school binders: love, together, forever, soul mates. I wanted a new word, more sober, impermanent and fleeting. Sober in wanting companionship. I no longer wanted to be wistful. I didn’t want to push my image of love to anyone because mine had been of dependency and need to fill hollowness. My past relationships were optimistic attempts to find love; along the way they became lessons of attachments and habit. I didn’t want to waste my youth in chastity either. I wanted intimacy but not the pain of goodbyes.
I first saw Frederik when I was leaving the island of Palawan and heading to Sabah. I just spent 16 months in Luzon searching and linking pieces of stories I remember, to stories offered to me by distant relatives, their friends and church records. I was curious when I saw him at the port. I was taking a local leaky boat and wondered if he had made a wrong turn somewhere. His clothes were worn out but clean. I studied him in intervals, taking short glances, cautious not to be caught. For the next month our path kept crossing. Our eyes met as we passed each other by the road. He became a familiar face amidst constant changing landscape and transient people. It wasn’t until I reached Kuching that we traded words. I can’t remember who initialized it but we established we were heading to Bako in two days. We agreed to share a boat to reduced expense. Hiring private jetties had been the biggest cost of moving from Sabah to Sarawak. My funds were dwindling and I needed to find people to share costs.
Talking to Frederik was different. He didn’t immediately ask where I was from or where I had been. Travelers at an instant will ask you where you are from and boast where they had been. I didn’t want kinship based on political lines of nationality. I was glad when he didn’t ask me. I didn’t want to explain. I wanted no narratives and he understood. I agreed to meet him at a bus station. The following day we hopped on a local bus that had no doors and windows. It was a half hour drive and when we got to the port we met a man named Abdul. Abdul was a tall man. His job transporting people from Kuching to Bako required him to spend countless hours in the sun which made it difficult to access his age based solely on his skin. Abdul spoke English to us, “One person, forty ringgit. Five person forty ringgit.”
“Let’s wait. Maybe someone will come,” I suggested.
“Okay,” he agreed.
We sat on a riverbank and stared at houses across. The stilt houses were still made of natural materials, I wondered how long before concrete and stucco replace wood and nipa. The more affluent families in Kuching had already made the shift. I made a mental note to pick up a book on Malay architecture.
Kids played nearby and I could still pick up the odd word here and there. The islands of Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia are categorized in the same family language. Distance and isolation created hundreds of regional dialects. If political lines were drawn based on language they would divide in hundreds of regions.
Luckily we didn’t wait long. The next bus dropped off a British couple and a young American man. The poor guy spent a rough night in a bug-infested hostel. His swollen body was covered in red welts. Punctured marks on his forearm and face displayed where bugs made their incisions. As we got on the boat, the first thing the British woman asked, “Didn’t you wake up when they were biting you?”
“I was too drunk and felt nothing,” he embarrassedly admitted.
Abdul started the engine and everyone grew quiet.
