Factory of Souls

It takes just two people to bring the world to ruin. So goes the history of love. At the end of the day we tally the casualties of war, victory for the one who gets wounded the least. You say it’s time for a change but I don’t know to what end, change being just the skin of some incandescent creature whose grotesque beauty is what we adore, whom some people call love, whom we venerate because it consumes us, slim pickings for its huge soul. My people say, don’t look or you’ll go blind. You say the end was always just around the bend. I say all we have is unconditional surrender to the future. So unreliable is the past that I feel compelled to leave unmourned the blind, relentless loves that may have scorched into our hearts the way the saints accepted stigmata. My people say, look back or lose your way. Or, walk backwards, if you can. So I found myself on a bus to New York City to lose myself completely. Past Hunters Point we hit the factory of souls—a thousand tombstones from which a silk-like canopy of smoke rose to meet God knows what—a spacious emptiness, the end. I’ve heard the world’s never going to end. I’ve heard it will go on and on, and we will be as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar, our live not worth a footnote, our grandest schemes no more than feeble whispers, all memory shifting like the continental plates. In the future, all science will finally come around; genetic engineering, I’ve been told, will be all the rage, and we will be a super race in a world infallibly perfected, where trains run on time, love never dies, and hope can be purchased by the pound. It’s called immortalization of the cell lines. We will choose what will survive. Our destiny made lucid, we will find the world contemplating itself, like the young Narcissus, one hand about to touch the pool, his body lurched towards that marvelous reflection. I suppose we’ve always felt compelled to desensitize our failures. My people say, to go unnoticed, you play dead. I myself may have chosen to forget a face, a name, some cruel word uttered carelessly, but not, after all the harm is done, intending any pain. And many others may have chosen to forget me. It works both ways. My people say, nasa huliang pagsisi: regret is the final emotion. It’s what you see when you look back. It’s what’s no longer there.