Today, I have fallen out of love with my boyfriend (I have--nay, I had!--a boyfriend apparently.XD) of almost six months. Err.

The fire just went kaput, and the remaining scintillating glitter of passion has been washed away by the Pacific Ocean.

Now he has ascended to my skybowl of dead stars, turning first into a supernova then a white dwarf then a black hole, sucking itself and everything else around it. Black holes are warp tunnels to other universes--according to String Theory anyway--and at the opposite end of this tunnel is a white hole where everything that'd been sucked are vomited into this other dimension. He'd appear a brilliant star a lightyear's distance away from another planet, where there resides a despondent, vicious, romantic girl, a parallel version of myself in another universe. Then he'd flare up and fall across the sky like a smitten firefly, fall in love with this girl, turn her into a woman, who'd tear his heart into bits of throbbing bloody gelatin and fling him up in her own skybowl of deadstars. He's a dodgeball, to put.XP

I don't watch horror movies. The closest thing that could ever get me into watching horripilating flicks is watching the wry cartoon The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. I have the wild imagination of an eight-year-old. I can tolerate watching horror movies but it's my lurid post-overimaginative tendencies that drive me mental at night. Even writing my paper about zombies and vampires took me three days to recoil and resume sleeping with my window curtains open.

I sleep with the lights on. I am afraid of the dark. I am afraid of ghosts. I am afraid of the bogeyman. I am afraid of the cookie monster. I am afraid of the claws crouching beneath my bed. I am afraid of the trapped white specter hiding in my closet. I am afraid of nonexistent apparitions that would reflect on my mirror. I am afraid of palpable apparitions that would not reflect on my mirror. I am afraid because I believe in ghosts. I have seen them floating on the roadside. I have heard them hissing by my sleep. Say, I might have a third eye... and a third ear for that matter.XP Or maybe I'm just schizophrenic.XP

Recently, my room has become a dense cloud of cigarette smoke. I seldom open my two giant windows or draw the curtains open. The overpaid housemaid who'd just ran away had the pretext of sensing ghosts in and out of the house--possessing the trees outside, manifesting in my room, in the living room, in the kitchen, everywhere, except in Sister C's room. Let's call the housemaid Manang-nanggal.

Manang-nanggal is short, dark, emaciated, and mortifyingly wrinkly--her skin resembles raisin-skins sewn together. She's the superstitious provincial type of a withered old woman, constantly grumbling to herself and spitting nicotine-phlegm at the sink. She smokes Marlboro Menthols, a brand she adopted from me. She slept on the giraffe-patterned couch at the living room with a dagger underneath her pillow for self-protection. She lacerated our couch by her sleep and stitched the cuts out the next morning. She cut an apotropaic cross (+) on the window screen beside the couch, accusing my eight-year-old brat nephew to have incised the straight lines. She believes there are behemoth black birds the size of humans perched asleep on the mango and avocado trees outside our apartment. She erected wooden crosses on the ground beside these trees, which apparently stand towering and swaying eerily from each of my second floor windows. She's the epitome of the bizarre, a living Sadako that had stepped out of the television screen of our dreadful imaginations. She speaks in Bisaya and can understand only a handful of Tagalog words, and all throughout her short stay in this house, she was incommunicado, an outcast, a mystery, an idiotic crone who unplugged the refrigerator at night and caused puddles of water the next morning, all in the cretinistic effort to save electricity.

Now that she's gone and a replacement has yet to be found, the imperial role of a dishwasher and palengkera of the household has been bestowed upon me, my royal sister delegating the woven basket to my right hand and the dishwashing sponge on the other. It was my first time to go to the wet market today. My alarmingly crude "marketing" skills left me buying rotting cuts of chicken, decaying bananas, and broken eggs, among other things.

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