26 February 2009
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on February 26th, 2009 @ 09:18:03 pm, using 266 words, 55 views
A blessing in disguise, we decided it was, my off duty rescuer and I. My designated rock this afternoon, when I came undone. And what a coming undone it was. The kind that’ll split you in two - split you into one who cries and can’t help crying and sees no end to the crying and one who looks on at the storm in a teacup, sympathizes and feels ashamed of the entire ridiculous scene.
We all have scenes we remember making and continue to make. We count ourselves lucky for small audiences and for the people who are able and willing to show us the angle we can’t find by ourselves. 53º may have been the (borrowed) angle today. Marking an end and then a beginning… maybe? Some cyber glitch or my own too fast unthinking click wiping the slate clean when I couldn’t have done it myself. A helping hand (like the colorful helping hand Facebook karma) wiping my desk(top) clean of that which it decides I have no use for, teaching me the hard, painful way to let things go, and let things be. We are more than words, my half naked rescuer and I.
I have suddenly been made to swerve from my history of matching history only with what’s registered and handcuffing the two. History is in what one feels and in what one builds.
It’s a new era, my rescuer tells me. And I believe him wholeheartedly.
23 May 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on May 23rd, 2008 @ 05:27:08 pm, using 546 words, 106 views
One day, his mouth dissolved from a rigid line, a stiff lipless line into a blur, a blotted out line behind which words might’ve been shaped and plans traced. But those particular words had made their way to paper instead. Invisibly, soundlessly, mercurially attracted to ruled white sheets.
And from that paper everything emerged and unraveled - the whole gamut of a compressed story, from A to Z and the couple of letters there were in between - the convex/concave form of a smile easily bending to that of a capsized one. Capsized like a boat that was going nowhere. A paper boat like the ones you learn to make as a child by folding paper repeatedly in such a way. Paper boats are part of our collective legacy, I guess. Paper boats and paper hats. Like lullabies and later proverbs. Things we borrow and adopt but never really own.
She’d ask herself in the middle of the most mindless of chores, feeling ambushed by these unannounced thoughts: ‘What does it mean to have someone’s pictures in your possession?’ Pictures sent, not taken. Pictures you’re not in. Pictures of places in the world that are not yours to see. Pictures that don’t belong to you in any sense of the word. Mementos of someone’s youth. Precious… or so they should be. Misplaced and not looked for. Not missed. Glossy rectangles you should feel the impetus to run to during a fire. ‘What does that mean? Does it mean anything at all if they’re misplaced and forgotten? Or is it just paper?’ Tearable… terrible thought…
The most satisfying conclusion she ever managed to reach was: meaning is as relative and personal as a choice of profession, as taste… in clothes, food, color… Not meant to be shared. Merely shown. ‘Here. This is me. Does it ring a bell? Do I?’ And when bells ring… that’s when you know you’ve got something. That’s when you feel hands are meant to be held.
‘Words are not always there to be believed,’ it occurs to her. Not in the context of candid exchanges and not in the context of deception, either. Somewhere in between, somewhere in the realm of grey - which may turn out to be nothing more than decoration. Enhancement of a particular atmosphere, of something promising. A little well-intentioned push towards what you’d like a moment to become. Words don’t always spring from a truthful source. Words sometimes spring from an overly optimistic, naive place.
The blurriness that one day sets in serves a purpose. A parental sort of purpose. It tucks a chapter in. A chapter and the nomadic ever changing characters at the center of it. It half covers an episode. It half hides it, prepares it for nightfall - for the darkness of night to come in and do what it does best. Gently. For time is gentle. The longer the stretch of it you manage to walk along (patiently and acquiescently), the gentler it proves to be.
FLICKR photo by beccabrian
Currently shattering window panes with a rendition of…
Radiohead - There There/Hail to the Thief
18 December 2007
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on December 18th, 2007 @ 11:19:20 am, using 1345 words, 596 views
Not being much for documentaries, I was pleasantly surprised by my on-the-spot decision to see Jogo de Cena - right at my first viewing of the trailer. The very second I felt that simple idea take charge of my head and branch out into multiple possible directions. One of those things you just have to see as a final product. When snippets here and there are simply not enough to quench your curiosity.
Read more! »
24 November 2007
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on November 24th, 2007 @ 06:08:26 am, using 261 words, 354 views
I read or heard somewhere recently that it’s easier to make someone cry than it is to make someone laugh. To that I would add, it’s harder still (and profoundly captivating) to make someone laugh past the point of sound, deep into the realm of tears, and leave them smack in the middle of a state of complete, agonizing, doubled-over redness, with no trail of breadcrumbs to show the light at the end of the tunnel to their convulsive body. It’s liberating and cleansing and best of all, laughable. Lovely how laughter begets laughter…
People who can make you laugh till you cry are angels in my book. People who can go from the subject of Click (yes, the Adam Sandler movie - one of the many I haven’t seen, save the couple of un-Sandler ones) and in ten minutes’ time take you through Run Lola Run, Saramago, hepatitis, the unwiseness of lending (despite its occasional ‘medical’ benefit) and India, only to end up recounting the painfully funny episode of tangled up Indians in a subway car at 6pm on a Friday… have got to be human treasures.
Thanks for the Saramago recommendation, CD-Rom! (It’s on my reading list) and THANKS for the agonizing, doubled-over, tearful redness (You’ll never know how much I needed it) :D
Click here to read the ‘Indians-tangled-up-in-a-subway-car’ story in its original Portuguese.
Currently shattering window panes with a rendition of…
Elton John - Tiny Dancer
29 September 2007
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on September 29th, 2007 @ 07:21:37 am, using 292 words, 99 views
These are my people. We’ve never been formally introduced and yet we’re part of the same tribe. Hunched over multiple copies of the same newspaper section… a flimsy 25-page guide that’ll be our anointed bible for the coming two weeks. Pens on hand, improvising choreographies as unique as fingerprints, a zigzagging dictated by relentlessly focused eyes as though we were looking for much needed jobs. Titles, theaters, showtimes, codes. RX, EC, EB, LB, IP, LA, OD… and numbers…
So many things to consider. Will I be able to make it to this one on time? Which are the now-or-never ones? The ones I may never get a chance to see…
We’re incomprehensible to some, I imagine. But I look at these people and I simply understand them. No effort required. We’re kin in so many ways. I can visualize the catalog of different ports they set sail towards when sitting on those seats…
- truth
- a mirror
- escapism
- high art
- easy laughs
- being moved to tears
- being moved to roll up their sleeves and act (acting does after all require a friendly push sometimes)
- being shown something they feel alone in feeling, discovering that what’s familiar to them but seen as uncommon, peculiar or odd by the great majority can in fact grow on a desert… can in fact grow through asphalt. It can grow anywhere, for no matter how rare its seeds, they are not exclusive to one location. Just as no experience is exclusive to any one person.
There is no such thing as an endangered seed. Understanding is ours to be sought and found.
09 September 2007
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on September 9th, 2007 @ 01:04:10 am, using 504 words, 133 views
My little refuge…
…where I’m surrounded by multiplicity. Multiple movie posters, a claustrophobic moving about behind a counter; a strange sort of being… a mindless going back and forth… in multiple black aprons that manage to never once graze one another; multiple overlapping voices I can never distinguish. Untraceable sounds like people devoid of accents; multiple chairs in their black and white starkness; multiple cups I’ve gone through in multiple afternoons; multiple little clear spoons I use to stir and then rest on multiple saucers; multiple words I count myself lucky to know; multiple pages I insist on filling with gibberish for I gibber in writing. I’m trying my feet at multiplicity, at going against my usual choices and my usual self, at trying to be what I haven’t been thus far, before a complete switch is effected, at being both the one I’ve always been and this new person I’d like to become at the same time. The noises in this place, the electronic spewing of paper by the cash register, the dragging of chairs, those voices I merely deduce to be voices… they’re all a beautiful quietness to me. I don’t know what ‘Águas de Março’ is about but it is playing and it contributes to that quietness. Everything I don’t know adds its 2¢ because it fuses easily with everything else… no questions asked. It adds layers to the silence. It mingles effortlessly. It disappears in the crowd. It has no power of individuality. It’s the extra who’s just glad to be there. My eyes find the poster for Babel and I wonder about the extras of my life. How many people I haven’t met and will never meet. I wonder what their stories are. What chapters they’re in. How many characters they’re juggling. Multiplicity. That couple twenty feet away. That’s a whole other story, a whole other galaxy. Those two people whose voices are muffled by the time they reach me. Twenty feet… Twenty paces I know I won’t bother to take in favor of being an ant. I also wonder how many people I have defied fate in meeting. Sadly a smaller but still significant number, a number to take pride in… The black and white starkness of the chairs gives me a raised eyebrow look and leads me to wonder… rubs its truth in. Couldn’t everything be black and white? Simpler? Am I actively choosing here? If I’m not, how would I rate as a chooser? And if I am, how are my choices stacking up?
(July 30, 2007)
That’s what you want, Gussie. Not what Henry wants. You chose it. Henry chose something else a long time ago.
He didn’t choose it. It just happened.
That’s the way we choose, Gussie. We let it happen.
(Violets are blue)
01 August 2007
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on August 1st, 2007 @ 08:49:06 pm, using 21 words, 468 views
That seemed like such an inconsequential moment - so momentous in hindsight. Everything about it has meaning now. The time according to Tom. The story of the world as it began according to us.
Every new connection made, starts the clock again, back at midnight or wherever in that wall-bound merry-go-round, the feeling of an awakening rests. Midnight, with its two hands in perfect parallelism, in hermetical closeness seems like a better place than most, a fitting metaphor. Our actual midnight took 10 minutes to establish itself. Things take time - this is not a movie we’re in. Ten minutes for a virtual hand to be extended and then shaken. The space between an introduction and a recognition. It feels like we were shaking more than virtual hands. So much more. Shaking each other’s very worlds.
I feel… in the midst of blossoming.
I feel… gently guided towards the change I’ve been aiming for.
I feel your wise hand pressing firmly yet tenderly against my back.
I feel this new white musk-scented air fill up my lungs and I’m changed by it with every breath.
I feel softer, more pliable.
These past months I’ve felt…
…overwhelmed, rewarded, “amplified and brightened to a gleaming state,” disappointed, stretched, justified, hurt, taught, excited, revamped, silly, weird, complicated, frustrated, enriched, misunderstood, enthralled, blunt, confused, clear-headed, sharp, sharpened, lost, alone, found, relieved, giggly, small, free, intertwined, encouraged, protected, discouraged, firmly yet tenderly pushed, listened to, vulnerable, understood, SEEN. Born into something better… a place, a time, a feeling, a life… who’s to say? Just something. Just better.
Partners, we are. Partners in this criminal act of revolutionizing a like-minded soul and making everything better. Just better.
Then, now and always (no matter what)
Iwyiml
24 July 2007
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on July 24th, 2007 @ 05:45:29 pm, using 267 words, 797 views
A heart is a scary muscle - the way it’s able to withstand beatings and heal faster than we ever would’ve guessed. But as with everything, there are long term effects. It hardens, the little muscle that could. It tricks you into closing doors and opening windows, thus limiting your options as to where to move next and at the same time giving you an ampler view to behold. The wider the view, of course, the more details you have on hand to nitpick. The more tempted you are to find fault. The more you understand, too. Let’s bear in mind that finding fault is not necessarily a bad thing. If the faults are there, why shouldn’t they be found? Everything is what it is… among other things. Everything bad is connected to something good, however distantly and vice-versa.
Shame is, among other things, evidence of a conscience.
Love is, among other things, a blindfold.
The flu is, among other things, a reason to rest when you wouldn’t otherwise.
A movie is, among other things, something that fastens you to a seat and keeps you from your life.
A hardened heart is, among other things, something that will eventually melt. And how good it is to melt…
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
(Hamlet)
Everything seems so close together. All the good and bad things in the world. Everything. I feel it in myself, even. And in us.
(Grand Canyon)
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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