Apocalypse No. 5
LISTEN: the most honest essay I've ever written, read out loud
Can you believe it’s been a year? I mean it’s definitely been a year. But also only six months. But also definitely four years.
Sometimes time just does its thing.
Free the Uglies is a reader-supported publication that experiments in interdisciplinary transmedia storytelling. Thank you for being here.
Last year I had the terribly good fortune of being accepted into the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, which is apparently the longest running writing fellowship in Asia? I was accepted as a fellow for Creative Nonfiction, which is a genre one might immediately associate with the personal essay. And although the personal essay does stand to be one of its most popular iterations, Creative Nonfiction is a newer and more fluid genre that encompasses more experimental work as well—but we’ll save that discussion for another time.
I was told my first submission read more like a prose-poem, and my second read like a monologue spliced against a scene—which it was, I was experimenting. The notes I consistently received were along the lines of, but what actually happened? Or, why insist on writing creative nonfiction instead of a poem, or a play? Words used to describe my writing included: misty, amorphous, euphoric to the point of inaccessibility.
I’d like to make clear that the panelists and my co-fellows were far from mean-spirited—in fact, they were incredibly sharp-eyed but fair-minded, critical but well-intentioned. I agreed with their criticism—these are hurdles I’ve always grappled with as a writer. So for my final submission, I wrestled with the questions they had left me with. How was I supposed to negotiate technicality and readability without sacrificing what I felt to be true?
The excerpt I read at the folio launch is only the first third of my essay. It was difficult to write and just as difficult to reread—even a year later. I’m not sure I’ll ever share the full piece. If you are somehow able to obtain a physical copy of the folio, then the full of it will be laid out there and that’s that. But I think I’ve decided this isn’t the kind of writing I’d like to do moving forward. I’m just not comfortable mining my personal life for art. It was an intriguing exercise, but a practice that ultimately proves unsustainable for me.
The theme of the fellowship’s folio was ekphrasis—a literary device in which a piece of visual art is described, commented on, and or responded to by the author. I chose The Volcano by Marcel Antonio.
Apocalypse No. 5
I don’t like to talk about what happened. There are more pressing truths than the details. There are truer ways to convey truth. Do you see what I’m getting at? Often the truth—not as you know it in your mind but as you sense it in your body—reads more like myth than fact. I’ve been told I tend to be misty; that I write like smoke and mirrors. I’ve been told I speak in too much aphorism and not nearly enough actuality. But the stories I tell are true. Cross my heart. I find myself incapable of telling anything less than. Would you hear what I have to say for a little bit? Are you willing to experience truth as I do, with me? I never meant to be vague—I only ever meant to be honest. I don’t like to talk about what happened, but let me try again. Despite these urgent circumstances, I would like to try to tell my stories better one more time—or rather, the ends of them. Would you let me tell you about the times the world as I’d known it and loved it and resented it had come to an end?
The earth groans, betraying a treacherous unsteadiness. The sky darkens. The animals scamper and hide. All the world is submerged in the heavy stillness that precedes cataclysm.
I’d like to tell you about how at four years old I thought the ash suffocating the sky was the end of it, but there was a volcano yet farther into the distance, threatening to cover the earth in fire. Or how at nineteen, as I was scratching the skin off my arms in a panic, I noticed the noose around my neck wore like a collar, and that the devil, with my leash in his hand, turned out to be more friend than foe. I have another story from when I was 25, where a disease swept across the world and everyone stayed inside. It was only then that I emerged from the handsome shell on my back, revealing my grotesque and un-beautiful form, causing others to reel back in horror. But I also have in my possession a story that is less tragedy and more redemption—about lovers that hold each other with tenderness in the midst of so much apocalypse.
A story is a threshold, and I can only cross it the way I know how. By deciding what is told and how it is told, I am carving out a path that scars the earth. To embark on a story, as either the teller of it or the listener, is to cross a threshold—on the other side of which is something new and unprecedented. I’m terrified, of course. But after all this time, I find that I can be braver still.
Suddenly an intruder approaches. Even in dire times like these, there is always at least one—approaching with their shield up and spear poised. I coil protectively around the trunk of Memory. My body twists deeper into the bark. They bang their spear on the shield, demanding I relinquish ownership—but as nice as it would be to be relieved of these stories, they are the first and last things that belong to me. As pleasant as forgetting might be, I’ve become the reluctant yet dutiful keeper of these stories. The intruder is as adamant as I am uncompromising.
Deep in the earth, there is rumbling. There is little time left. But instead of baring my fangs and unleashing venom, I ask—
Do you have time for a story?
It was easy to mistake the ash for clouds. It crowded the sky like a tightly packed bag of cotton balls, cleverly mimicking a cloudy day, effectively obscuring the truth of what it was—an eruption waiting to happen—no, an eruption already happening. But what the smoke concealed the ravens revealed: they circled and they cawed; they noisily warned of oncoming disaster. Farther into the distance, you see that it is already too late—that liquid fire is already spewing out of the earth and spilling onto your home. The earth can only contain so much anger. At one point, it must release its rage. Nevermind who gets caught in its wake.
In 1999, I almost set my house on fire. It was an old house, stuffed with decades of living—dusty carpets, faded wooden furniture, tarnished picture frames and cabinets stacked with paper documents. It was much too big—and much too flammable—for the kind of four-year-old that I was. Left to my own devices, I had one day found myself a matchbox with a few matchsticks left in it. It was in one of those drawers that usually insisted on staying closed (but on that day it had obliged me), and in one of those rooms that usually insisted on staying empty (but on that day I had intruded—much to its dismay.)
I had seen how they work on TV: it was how Popeye lit his pipe. It was how Grandma lit the candles at the several altars stationed around our too-big house. I had also watched Mom strike a matchstick against the matchbox’s sandy side, lighting the two pink-swirled candles on my baby sister’s birthday cake. It would be easy. Right?
And it was. It was dangerously easy. I drew the matchstick near the matchbox’s sandy side and stopped—I hovered for a moment, apprehensive, unable to see far enough into the potential consequences of playing with fire. But just as I would be known to do later in my life, I gave in to my split-second impulse and brusquely struck the side of the matchbox.
I could not have been prepared for the sudden heat, or the way the flame flared up towards my face as if hungry for a kiss. I snapped my hand back in terror, dropping the match. The matchstick, aflame, tumbled from my hand and towards the floor in excruciating half-speed. I suddenly felt as if I were underwater—suspended in time and holding my breath. The fear struck me as abruptly as the matchstick caught fire. The house. The house would burn down. This is why my Mom told me to keep away from matches. If the house burned down we would lose everything. People could die. The house. The house on fire.
It was the first time I understood what consequence meant—the first time I became painfully conscious of the fact that my curiosity had repercussions, and that it was capable of causing very real, physical danger–
Then the matchstick hit the ground.
Nothing combusted (to both my relief and disappointment), and in fact there was a pathetic lack of pyrotechnics. I hadn’t realized our wooden floors were actually faux-wood tiles, and they had indifferently snuffed out the meager matchstick-sized flame. No houses would burn down (again to my relief and disappointment). In the perverse, near-maniacal way children are capable of thinking in: a fire would have just been really fucking cool. Through the lens of that four-year-old’s 27-year-old counterpart—me, right now, writing this—the power must’ve felt nice. The yelling, the belting, the disfigured creatures that lived under the stairwell and came out at night—they all would have burned down with the house. It feels nice to entertain the thought that a moment of reckless courage spurred on by my burning curiosity could end a world just like that—could erase a world just like that. Meanwhile, it doesn’t feel as nice to confront the fact that that same great power—that matchstick, aflame—was snuffed out as quickly as it had been ignited.
It was an uneventful end of the world; as quiet and discreet as a matchstick going out against faux-wood tiles. But it was a foretelling of events that hid too far ahead into the future for me to perceive—it was the cotton-ball-smoke, not the eruption itself. The eruption was already happening, but from a time and place that was still yet to be. For now, I existed in a world where I could inflict what was inflicted upon me. I could hurt as much as I was hurt. And where my fire, however meager and matchstick-sized, could always burn and maim. It was a warning for the girl who possessed a curiosity so fiery and reckless, she would unwittingly commit arson. She would burn bridges, she would burn homes, and she would never escape unscathed.
I was going to upload a video recording of my reading at the launch, but when we watched the video back, the audio started warbling two minutes in. Santiago suggested we do an audio recording at home instead, and we ended up playing around with the text.
Our recording session began with me simply reading the text out loud, until the reading eventually evolved into something more akin to a dramatic monologue. This was a totally last minute idea and Santiago is still editing the audio track as I type this. It was tons of fun!—and so exciting to see how a work changes when you adapt it into a different medium. Let me know if you’d like to see more stuff like this.
Stay Free,
Apocalypse No. 5, one more time
Best listened to with earphones.
This is the kind of writing that I would love to read more of! I love it!