Another Lip Rehearsal
Part I of my Valentine's series
This piece first came out in Bad Romance, a zine published in 2019 by Gantala Press, a Filipina feminist press I had the honor of volunteering for when I was in college. I encourage you to buy a digital copy of the zine and support their incredible work here.
About Gantala Press
Founded in 2015 in Metro Manila, GANTALA PRESS is an independent, non-profit, volunteer-run Filipina feminist press that centers women’s stories and issues in our projects (publications, small press fairs, discussions and workshops) and in our participation in people’s movements. We believe in the potential of feminist publishing as a social practice and in solidarity work with women artists and collectives as vital political action.
Gantala Press always donates part of our earnings to projects that support the dispossessed and other victims of state violence. All our sales go to publishing projects for long-silenced communities in the margins.
It is the most mundane of names that I find myself covertly mouthing in the middle of the day like a prayer for safe travel, a spell to keep my bare shoulders warm when I enter air-conditioned establishments. Michael. I know at least five other Michaels in my life, and perhaps another five famous ones—two-syllabled to my three-syllabled Mi-ka-el, sharp-cornered and brisk like rapid-flowing water. Nomenclature itself reveals his propensity for quiet distinction. How all at once his name suggests the everyday and the unusual, the extraordinary in the mundane. How he has made my every day anything but mundane. I move now through the city with this name dancing on my lips like the afterglow of a kiss, with this person invisibly tethered, always, to me in promise, regardless of distance.
I think, this might be it—as though never before has the declaration been prompted by another name. As though I have never mapped out my life alongside another I used to call a lover. As though I were fifteen again, still developing basic romantic fluency in the face of a person I hold so much love for that it has left me absolutely speechless.
At a little over twenty years, the muscles of my mouth have memorized the phonation of countless names. Countless beloveds. My body is no stranger to the elevated heart rate and the humiliating warmth of the face. The teal and tangerine of domesticity and the windchill of falling out. I have eaten breakfast in their apartments wearing borrowed, oversized shirts, discussed the kind of shelves we would want in our bedroom. I have dotted I love yous with their names. These same names, I have unlearned from my tongue, shredded through my teeth. I have mourned this unlearning. To say such names these days is much like slipping into old, outgrown shoes, dusty, uncomfortable, with a faint familiarity that will remain a memory.
Now this name: at a little over three months, I am still feeling my way through the bluntness of his consonants, the pools of his vowels, as though he were a cove I have visited, once, before, one I am relearning now in this life. What was once a name opaque in its strangeness, its impossibility, now coats my lips in fresh water. But I could never, I imagine, know him enough, the way every act of speech is a renewal, the way every visit to the same beach reveals new shells in the sand. Michael, the antithesis to inertia.
Never has become this terrifying, powerful word constantly escaping my lips: I have never loved like this. I have never been this terrified. Have I never, really? Can I tell? Does it matter? To whom or what do I compare, and why?
I graph blueprints of past relationships in my attempt to reveal trends and patterns, hoping to understand Michael’s place in this history he is now inevitably part of. Why, perhaps, I had swiftly fallen for his laughter that first date, overflowing between sips of coffee. Why I had become so much braver, too, in such a short period of time, that I am coming to recognize someone new, yet someone I have always been. Several explanations arose in my inspection but they still ring with insufficiency, still compel me to look elsewhere, or to stop looking altogether. Can I reduce the entire relationship, its tendrils and late night drives, its eurekas and shared meals, to a series to logical arguments? Can I tell? Does it matter?
Regardless of whom I have loved and how many times before, the fact is: Michael has become, presently, my every day. Every dawn has since been the daily reminder that existence is proceeding about my day with this other person in mind. That somewhere, as I pack my lunch, Michael is checking his pockets for his car keys, his hair still damp from a shower. I think, I hope traffic’s not too bad today, as I wait for my elevator. When I read for class, I might catch a line that will remind me of him. He might reply an hour later, amused, and fill me in about a meeting he had just come from. Beyond these horizons, I cannot say. And perhaps it is best that I cannot. I cannot tell whether someday my tongue will stumble over the edges of this name, too, in forget and disuse, or it will have danced to its rhythm so much that even a blink, in the morning, facing his still sleeping face, carries its vibrations. I was not able to predict the outcomes then, and I would not be able to do so now either. There is no method of plotting such earthquakes, but I will always prepare a chair for his arrival nonetheless. Greet him when I open the door to let him in. Slip the word stay in every uttering of his name. Revel in every sliver of sunlight, every chime of his voice when he calls me to say the tea is ready, when he assures me he’s still awake when we’re watching TV in the dark, our legs warm from their tangling. I can do nothing but allow my mouth this practice in tenderness, every day, without finality. Good night, Michael. Come over, Michael. Take care, Michael. I love you, Michael. Falling asleep to my lips pursed to call out his name as I am dreaming.
I think, I want this to be it—so the practiced name, the whispered prayer, safe travels. Always against summer heat and September rain. Always against futility. Despite futility.
I feel quite shy about how smitten (and young!) I sound in this, but it is nice to revisit old work and see how much I’ve changed, and what has stayed the same. Written in 2018, three months since we started dating, this essay is the first of two Valentine’s posts I’m sending out this weekend. The other, written this past week, comes out tomorrow.
Wow….what a Valentine gift !! What a wonderful read; what a gift for all who get to read this gift to Mi’ka’el 🥰 thank you for sharing your word talents 🙏 you and Michael are gift in our lives ❤️