I needed a title for my old short story, and now I realize I've lost the knack for titles alltogether, even in my blog entries.

Two hours ago, when I just got home, I was thinking, well what do you know, this new blog has increased my blogging productivity and willingness to post, yeah! Only to realize that that sort of enthusiasm wanes on the second hour. Unfortunately for any one who enjoys my entries (including me, when I'm being narcisstic) I've let the feeling sit too long and it's dried up into an raisin, or the pork oil in cold adobo. Plus, I remembered I still need a name for this place. It's much like choosing a color to paint your new apartment with. Once again, I bump into a Title issue.

I need to get published. I want to be a writer. I want to be a short story writer. I don't write novels, or anything epic in length. I don't even write shorts stories that reach the word count for an average short story. I write short stories in it's truest and most sincere length: short.

And I realize my short stories are sedimentary rocks compared to the marble and limestone that is commonplace in the short story circuit. Even Bobbie Reyes, my age, my highschool batchmate, writes a short story-poem hybrid that's leagues better than my best. Not that I write hybrids, no. I mean my best anything.

Found this in the CD of my old files:

April 19th, 2006

It Has Been Whittled Down to a Few Seconds of Perfection

by Bobbie Reyes

i have dreamt this scene so many times that in my mind it has been whittled down to a few seconds of perfection, that when sunlight wakes my eyes with its gentle warmth, i seem not to move from dream to reality, but reality to dream. your presence in my dreams is as true as your absence from the air i breathe.

i know just where to kiss you. right there, where the stars fall to meet your upturned face. right there in the shadows of all the secrets that hover in the corner of each and every smile, in the hollows of your cheek as and in the parting of your lips to breathe. i will fill these empty spaces with a slow, exquisite burning that could transcend the neon and nuclear of galaxies.

i know just when to kiss you. right before the soft silence to which you open your eyes, when the world can not yet steal you away from the sheets blanketing our tangled legs--and then, right then, just before you sing. right before the tips of your fingers play into the rippling of my waist, and again right after your hands slide down my side to remember how to unzip my dress.

i know just how to kiss you. like the world will end if i hesitate, like the way the grass mourns the passing of the wind, like the way the wind mourns its intangible self. like how the breeze slights against the top floors of the buildings in makati and blows out the windows like candle flames.

i will kiss you
when i can light the dawn of
an inspired smile upon your lips,
so that when you kiss me
we can ignite tens of thousands
of cities,
and in a single breath,
short-circuit every lightbulb

because when you kiss me
there will be no need
for lightbulbs
ever again.

i will kiss you
soon
when i can cup my palms
around the back of your neck
and whisper in that curve
where your hair falls in wind-
blown waves upon your cheek
that i love you

(and in this dream you
tell me that
you love me
too)

i will kiss you for everyone who has ever known touch
and for those like me who have known kisses only in dreams

Her ears are obviously working, and mine even tingles in the course of reading the piece. Tingles and jingles and reggaes with the rhythm of her lines. Even the title works. Ah. Whatever. If I had that talent I wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. I hope Bobbie publishes a book of short story-poem hybrids like this one.

I need to stop fussing about the careers I don't have the innate talent to pursue, and get a life. A LIFE. Not 86% of it.

It hit me, just within the day, that before my saturation, I can only really spread myself so thin. I mean, I've tried spreading myself thinner last semester while accomodating everything, and I ended up accomodating just enough in my academics to pass. Now, it's the same way except it's not the academics that's getting the blow. Hay, and all I have is a very obscure sense of which is better.

I am eager to get to the end of this semester, when I will be relieved of some of my extra curricular responsibilities and maybe restructure my life more to my liking. No more biting off more than I can chew. Re-arrange my priority list. Get my life in order. Fix the creases. Untangle the knots.

Maybe I've had enough of life to download...Maybe i'm more in need of defragmenting...