Thank you for appearing to me in my dream. You look beautiful! The whole dream was lit in the romance I have come to see in places and people I miss. I am in an old Spanish style house in an unknown Philippine province. I am putting clothes away in a cabinet. The capiz shell windows glow in the sun. It is high noon but cool indoors. I hear a tricycle pull up outside, bags being loaded. I go out and there you are, about to get on that tricycle.
“I’m going back to Manila,” you say. “Come with me.”
I shake my head. “Not right now.”
I really want to, but I decide not to. I still have things to do. I don’t think too hard about it.
So I watch you go off on that tricycle kicking up sepia dust on that bright sunny day. I’m filled with joy having caught a glimpse of your otherworldly beauty. I feel the loss of having chosen to stay behind.
I woke up crying and realizing the impact of another dream I had, about a month before you died. I didn’t give much importance to it at the time. I blogged about it, but didn’t name you, or let you know it was you. I was embarrassed. It revealed more than I was willing to share.
In the dream I was walking along a beach with you. There are two guys with us. I don’t recognize any of them in my lexicon of real life guys, but in this dream world we are hanging out with them. You throw off your clothes and jump in the water. The guys follow quickly. I fumble with the buttons on my white shirt. It is taking me so long to undress. I woke before I am able to join you skinny dipping.
I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t see that dream as a premonition. I felt remorse for being too late, regret for moments I let pass because of some stupid reason or another, a crippling awkwardness about things. A little over a month after my dream, you slipped into a coma and died.
The last social media post on your timeline was a picture of the last beach you were on. Your kids brought your ashes to that same beach. You had gone skinny dipping for good.
One of these days I will be able to join you in the ocean or ride away on a tricycle. Maybe I’ll catch you the next time you come around. As the sky goes dark tonight, I am reminded that pain is not the enemy. It merely points the way to the wound. Before we tend to it, we have to understand what the injury is. We have to allow ourselves to experience it. Then we can take steps toward healing and transformation.
Everything is a gift.
Love,
Excerpt from Coming and Going by Regina Abuyuan:
I suppose a lot of fallen beings now miss The Garden’s heavenly Fruits. And I’ll tell you why:
In that place exists Complete Bliss. A Fruit—any Fruit—plucked from its enchanted trees, and savored garden-fresh is guaranteed to bring you to the Ultimate of your Being—no matter what level of Be-ing you might be at the moment. This is an experience many seek, for both enlightenment and pleasure, and it is because of this service that many bitter beings—those denied access and who sulk salivating hungrily at the Gates—call it The Cosmic Brothel.
Yes, dear friends. In The Garden one could find the Supreme Fuck, and reach the mind-shaking, soul-stirring Orgasm that could fire up your neurons swifter than Hermes on speed and expand your consciousness faster and greater than Zephyrus could ever impress with his smoke-rings.
In The Garden, Orgasms are made into Legends. That rumor about Osiris and Isis making out in The Nile and a crocodile biting off Osiris’ Venerable Dick? It occurred Right Here, when he won Isis (then a plump, ripe, rare Fruit-Woman specimen, in bloom only for every dozen millennia) in a game of dice, and chose to hump his prize in the Stream of Mother’s Milk where a gameful lizard nipped at his member. Strengthened by the milk, Isis was blessed with the awareness to search for the still-throbbing penis while Osiris howled in unholy pain. You all know that the search proved futile, but since then every being was aware of who wore the proverbial pants in the family.
Isis was one of the few fruits to achieve Deity-status, which she probably earned by impressing upon everyone that the heat that possessed her loins equaled only the determination to find her mate’s penis. There’s nothing like a single-minded, driven woman, and she got her due reward! They never found the real organ, but being the cosmic beings they were, they discovered alternative ways to get it on, and always, in the warm creaminess of the Stream, which, in their more affectionate moments, they called their “mother”. It is because of this, perhaps, that some have thought Isis and Osiris sister and brother.
