brown sugar no 3
It’s snowed in Paris today, but I think you knew that.
Walking out of the metro, I see tiny flakes falling from the sky, turning every surface they land on into a frosted colony. Seeing snow will always make my heart jump high up, before it descends back in place and lands somewhere between awe and melancholy. It’s beautiful, yes, but it is also one of the many reminders of how far I am from home. That maybe I wasn’t meant to be here. It’s cold, too, but don’t worry, I’m dressed properly. I even have gloves on. I’ve learned.
You remember our first Christmas in Paris? You gave me a pomme d’amour, a Japanese tea set, and a copy of Warsan Shire’s ‘Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth’. I’m reading that book today. In a poem inside it she asks, is everything you love foreign? or are you foreign to everything you love?
Sometimes I feel like an open wound walking around the city.
What does the cold bring with it? In the beginning, it is a welcome respite from the August heatwaves. And then, the long nights. The scratchy pullovers. What about warm wine, more whisky than cinnamon? What about glass windows sweating from the inside, rotting the panes? What about the tall guy at church who looked like you?
Did you know that people who die from the cold don’t even feel death coming? Hypothermia numbs you, clouds your brain, seizes your heart, and lulls you into that comfortable eternal sleep.
You might be wondering what I’m doing outside, braving this weather. Well, Mister, I am walking to the dentist. Doctora Arguelles, a discreet Filipina practicing in a dental clinic in Château Rouge. Do you remember her? She is such a tita, a total auntie, in all the good ways and the bad. She never picks up the phone, and calls you back when you’re in the shower or counting change in the bakery. Bugs you everytime for employee discounts in Balenciaga. She is a chasm, swings from being completely aloof to overly intrusive.
But oh how she cares for you. Speaks to you in a soft soothing voice, a sing-song Tagalog in a European midwinter, and with the lightest hand, patches every cavity, fixes every ache. The same light hand that waved off the fees years ago, when I first walked into her clinic, and she learned I didn’t have any family here. That I was completely alone.
The smell of suncreen in winter is peculiar. But I still put it on. Because, well, Rihanna says so.
I wasn’t completely alone. I had you. But she didn’t know that.
The thing about open wounds is that, well, you aren’t ignoring it. You’re healing; the fresh air can get to it. It’s honest, writes Warsan Shire. Extremely relatable because, well: We all have wounds.
I wonder if she knows, looking at the tombstones that are my teeth. All the morning coffee cigarettes, honey stars, the anxious gritting. All the tears I’ve swallowed, all the kisses stolen, barks quieted, all the times I’ve had to bite my tongue. I wonder if she could tell.
I know you like it when I call you mister.
front teeth stained from the fluoride in the water back home, writes Warsan Shire in a poem called Maymuun’s Mouth. Less relatable. Not everyone has tap water laced with fluoride growing up. At least we didn’t. Or so I thought.
“You have slight discoloration,” Doctora Arguelles tells me, frowning into the darkness of my mouth.
“You like sweets?” Nope.
“Coke?” The drink? Nope.
“Where are you from in the Philippines?” Parañaque.
“Ah, close enough to Cavite.” That’s where I grew up, Doc.
“Bah voilà,” she says, a child finding the piece to her puzzle. “Flouride Nation.”
A consolation: Snow seems just as foreign to Parisians as it is to me.
Another consolation: Maybe the time that we had was the time that we had. And us tugging for more would just result to our mutual mutilation.
“Kaya pa sana ‘to, kaso napabayaan na,” my dentist says. No translation I muster hurts exactly the same way it does in Tagalog, but let me try: “I could have saved this, but you ignored it for too long and now it’s too late.” I know she’s talking about a tooth, but I feel it somewhere else, in my gut. I shudder.
Did you know that people who have died in the cold are often found naked? Their frozen corpses in a state of undress. Scientists think that in the extreme confusion caused by advanced hypothermia, the victims believe they are actually dying from heat, and start to take off their clothes. Paradoxical undressing, they call it. Isn’t that weird?
Am I allowed to miss you?
Back in the dentist chair, a single fat tear rolls down my cheek.
“Does it hurt? Do you need more anesthesia?” She doesn’t know the pain comes from a well deep within me, one I am afraid to tinker with. To approach it now is to perish. None of your syringes would work there, Doctora. Let’s carry on.
for men who are also wolves, sings Warsan Shire by way of Beyoncé.
Maybe it’s not weird at all. Passed a certain treshold, the human body registers heat and cold in the same way. They just burn.
In the commute home, I read. But when a man starts singing Gypsy Kings in the metro, you close your book and you listen. So I did.
Volare —— ooooh —— Cantare ———oooooOOOooh
A man wearing a suit beside me stands up, clicks his tongue before walking angrily to the other side of the tram. In front of me is a tough looking teenager, skin tattooed and pierced to obedience. He dances, in the same way you do sometimes when we’re alone in the house. (Or that one time in a club in Manila.) I listen, humming slightly.
In Questions for Miriam, Warsan Shire asks, Did you tell people that songs weren’t the same as a warm body, a soft mouth?
I got my smile back, Mister, and even with French insurance, it was still very expensive. And still very worth it.
Not everyone is okay with living like an open wound, claims Warsan Shire. There are some people who’ll feel uncomfortable around you. Some will even point and laugh. But we all have wounds.
Maybe to live with an open wound is to enter a brightly lit train with an old guitar and sing the song you’re meant to sing. Amidst the tongue-clicks and the eye-rolls, you sing, until a young punk dances or a shy Asian boy with glasses discreetly taps his finger to your beat. He smiles at you from under his mask. Like a flower closing in, the wound heals, slowly, eating itself into oblivion, until all that’s left is a scar.
And who knows, maybe my insurance covers laser removal.
Photo by Colin Savercool @colinsavercool