Breathless

IMAGINE that you are not where you are right now.

That instead of leafing through these pages and watching lines colors faces streak and blur you are somewhere else perhaps under the dripping leaves the morning just beginning to stir under the mist of last night’s rain or is it dream of rain the early figures bent to their destinations moving past blind to the trees blind to the patch of green diminished but not hidden by the high rises avenues shuttered houses dingy washing pressing against the restraining wall keeping something in or pushing something out it’s not a question that bothers three women out early dancing or still seized by last night’s fit traces still lingering in the leaves that drip drip one of them is past her prime but you cannot see wrinkles gray hair sloughing off cells from this far the trees make it too dark to tell it’s the dancing that gleams the dancing and the way a young neck snaps back tossing a laugh can one dance to the music of laughing these three seem to or don’t seem to mind if they dance to a tune beyond the hearing of eyes still weighed down by the march of Mondays tuesdayswednesdaysthursdays this edifice looks on bemused it knows that week and the week before that and the one that will follow it is just a building then unfeeling block just stone ingress egress except last night’s rain washed away dust tedium hours all that remains is the bright new morning framed by trees and softened by mist the building no longer steel and stone just a silhouette against the sky washed clear as marbles whose red blues yellows is a song of colors jigging with the women pining to join the running flipping boys why do the young wake early when there is no need for them to do so school teachers regiments hours and hours away a virtual lifetime held at bay it’s not an inner alarm that gets the young out early on a day when they don’t have to it’s life’s juice coursing responding to the promise of the day punctuated by slim young forms curling like commas uncurling to become exclamations that don’t crush leaf blade just skim like gust of breeze bending the overgrown grass this way and that two small boulders workmen may have left behind not part of some grand landscape scheme no disciple of the new aesthetic but the boys recognize and circle the stones reenact an ancient ritual recognizing these as promontories from which to launch the morning’s promise the tallest of them hitches long shorts or short pajamas revealing knobby knees and shins and still hairless haunches betraying no muscle of impending years just a quiver of excitement shouts challenges as boy backs up and the others cheer jeer egg him on to quit talking and an arrow is released from a bow he is launched one foot leaping on the rock and the rest of him goes up in the hair arches flips hangs and the breath is unfrozen and the moment passes boy pajamas limbs slip slide roll on the wet grass a grin the only answer the only challenge needed for the rest to follow and it’s like the world stands on its head and it is not sky that rains but grass raining a comma of boys curling flipping walking on air to be received none too gently by the blue earth vaporizing falling again the world one explosion of boys the trees look on without comment knowing how each moment shrill laugh boisterous shout brings them closer to who they will become men bent to their destinations walking past not seeing two boulders nearly obscured by grass unruly and growing wild except under the shadow of the trees drip drip dripping

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* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 26, 2007 issue