by MT Vallarta
CW: Suicide
I am having dreams of Los Angeles. I am walking the city alone at night. With the palm trees, neon lights, and gum-speckled sidewalks, I could be anywhere: Pasadena, Downtown, West Hollywood. I am afraid of Lucas Ave. Not only because I almost crashed my car into Miguel Contreras once when I was trying to retrieve my phone under the gas pedal, but because I have to pass the apartment you and I once shared. When your mom and friends came to clean, they found pools of your dried blood and vomit on the floor. They were only given an extra week to get rid of everything. I had moved out two weeks earlier and packed the most benign artifacts of our relationship: a wok, a painted ceramic plate, wooden spoons. Whenever I pass our place, I think about buying flowers and tying them around the bars of our old gate, but I don’t think I want people to know or wonder. They rented the apartment immediately after our remains were scrubbed.
::
You hated ghosts. It wasn’t until your life became so terrible that you were able to watch scary movies with me. But I could never tell you ghost stories. I never told you about the burnt and scarred lady who lives in my aunt’s abandoned house in the Philippines. My cousin and younger sister saw her once. She opened the door to the master bedroom to take a peek while we were there, watching TV. The burnt lady shut the door and left when my cousin and sister met her eyes. They screamed, ran, and left. I was too busy watching TV to notice.
There’s also the bald and bloody middle-aged man my cousin and uncle have seen in my aunt’s sari-sari store. We believe he was the previous tenant who killed himself. We know he is real because people don’t just see the same visions. Doesn’t truth always begin with the eyes?
I should’ve known you were cheating on me when you refused to meet my eyes. You were growing smaller, quieter. Being with you taught me that compassion is not candy. I can’t keep feeding myself sweet drops but not get a full and healthy meal. When I found out you were cheating, there was a part of me that was relieved.
Our relationship was a mirror, but I pasted a happy picture of us on the surface. I often think of our family rings from Thailand, how the words glass lotus twinkled on a bed of crimson. We joked about how bloody your family history was. The rings did not fit our fingers. Your father returned them to Thailand.
We also joked that we fell in love because of how our nations meshed. Both of our countries are neocolonial playgrounds for the U.S. We fell in love in our rage. We read poetry together at rallies, marched in DTLA until we collapsed on the train. Our relationship was the thrum of sweet highs. Getting older changed things, hurting each other fucked things.
::
In EMDR, I am fighting the image of your animated corpse. My reoccurring nightmare is you coming back to life. You knock on my apartment door and you march in, ready to continue our relationship. I don’t want to, but I am incapable of fighting. Sometimes you are a zombie, sometimes you are a marionette. Regardless, I always end up back in your arms.
::
There was the year you didn’t have a car. We were living in Koreatown, down the street from Dumbfoundead’s mural off Catalina and 8th Street. It was the millennial Asian American dream: we were a young couple in love and in a big city. We were walking distance from Korean barbecues, bars, and some of the best public transportation LA had to offer. We were a bus ride to Little Tokyo and West Hollywood. I once met you at UCLA just to go to the gym. We took the bus back together.
I loved you because I could show you my world and you didn’t just listen but also traced my city’s contours. I showed you the Historic Filipinotown I grew up in: the little strip mall with Temple Seafood market; the local Korean church’s wrought iron fence covered with red bougainvilleas; the quaint Victorian houses of our old and fierce Filipino neighbors. We ate at my family’s favorite restaurant in Chinatown and shopped at our favorite grocery store in the Little Tokyo Galleria. I will always return to these places. You are so intertwined with home.
::
“I am sitting in a courtyard. There is a statue that looks like a giant sandwich.”
That was one of the most humiliating moments of my life I was crying on a stone bench People looked concerned but didn’t approach I didn’t answer your calls My friends were texting me We were supposed to meet for noodles On our birthdays my mother always made noodles They symbolize long life We were supposed to get ramen We fought and I don’t even know why I ran I bumped into the dude who sings karaoke in the courtyard My friends are calling I am trying to snap out of the fog I am drowning in air
::
Last night, I dreamt I was a tourist in Los Angeles.
What would that have been like, to look at this city with bright eyes. I was one of those LA children who rarely saw the ocean. Whenever I had to take the bus anywhere, my mom would follow, watching me wait at the bus stop from a distance. I am afraid of taking the bus to the beach. I have nowhere to escape if I see you, walking into the waves. In the end, you chose salt water. I can do nothing but gaze.
::
MT Vallarta (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, disabled, Filipinx poet and Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Their debut poetry collection, What You Refuse to Remember, won the 2022 Laureate Prize from Small Harbor Publishing. They have received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Kundíman, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, and others. Their scholarship and creative writing can be found in Amerasia Journal, The Asian American Literary Review, Shō, Nat. Brut, Apogee, and elsewhere. Find them at mtvallarta.com and IG: @__melkteaa.
Image: Jun Yu
ID: A smoggy Los Angeles.
Psaltery & Lyre 