By Kwaknit Nagpainit

The door shut itself quietly and outside the thin linen of light that fell on the ground folded itself up and disappeared. A dog sniffed at me from below and must have sensed an old, familiar smell. It was thick with weight, the stray must have said it to the night.

        Flung open with its arms in, the gate seemed all too set to shoo out any uninvited guest. A contradiction in terms. Uninvited but a guest. A houseguest so destined but other than the house.

        It was the space that accommodated all comings and goings, between the two arms of the gate, bosom-bound, that revealed the coarse, callus skin of the untended asphalt, jaundiced by the slack, lackluster silence of the night lamps. That was where I was headed to from the shut door, and the path was so dark if only I had a way of knowing whether my steps have really moved me anywhere at all. How do we measure distance in a hollow? Between two points of light, who knows what winding thoroughfares were there to pass through in the dark.

        Bye was the first light. From there is that yellow road outside the gate, the second light. So two lights now and a distance to gauge. Between them are one curious sniffing-dog and myself and all the sluggishness of my feet.

        Bye, she said it in a way at once hostile and tender, with as much luster as in a new razorblade. There really wasn't much difference at all. Hearing her over the early morning newscasts on radio or here, in this door, which was sometimes only half-shut so we could talk for a while, with too much ballet and brevity, and then part. One voice that pierces the flesh, darts through the blood, and sears through the marrow like a rush of murderous acid. Reborn as a listener, but rendered dumb and mad by the swirling potency of a voice that came close to being indiscernible.

        Bye, that was finality made audible. A post-script replete with messages than the main text of a missive. A voice speaks a word and how a dead twig clutters on the ground. Whatever it is that made it give up its last hold on a branch. What last life held it in its last few moments? What green memories did it bring along on its way kerplunk on the jaundiced earth.

        Now there was this dog that found his crowd of strays a distance from the gate. He sniffed at them one by one and knew that was home for him.