Self-Portrait of City Boy as Exile

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By Alton Melvar M Dapanas: 

You wake up to a dream and this time, you are in a bed where you lost your virginity, all the stains of youth, to a closeted boy, a childhood playmate, whose name you choose not to remember. 

But you wish you would have been a colony of ants, or a skein of yellow-bellied sunbirds, negotiating slumber in the moist branches, remnants of rain drops from leaves dripping in their feathers. You wish you would have been little wings of flight, the god-spell flutter of their hearts, all the while living in the tried and tested ways of living, some rituals of disposal: the wet quietude of early September, steam of tuna in coconut milk soup, a lingering squeeze in the arm of an old friend, the call to prayer at dawn of a nearby mosque. 

You think about the escape from previous lives, an essential task to save the self from the city that swarmed on your banishment. Outside your apartment back in college, a man sells colorful balloons to a boy who keeps on clutching his mother’s bosom, a sleepless student nurse in white is on the way to hospital duty, and there, at the cul-de-sac sidewalk, an alley of stalls of street food like caked pig’s blood and unhatched duck embryo. Outside your favorite second hand bookstore, the pharmacy you frequent, a parking lot where you jog, a notorious inn. This was your city and its attendant histories.

But here in this sun-rinsed island town, in your room, by the window, staring at the empty bird cage hanging by a topiary, an absence of breeze, just still air, still life. 

You are asked to live in the now, dear grief-torn heart. 

You are asked to purge the parts you no longer need, to shed the skin you have outgrown. 

You are told the storm is over.  

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Alton Melvar M Dapanas (them/they) is assistant creative nonfiction editor of London-based Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel and Iowa-based Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine, as well as an editorial reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine. They identify as pansexual, nonbinary, and polyamorous. Living off-the-grid since 2019, they have been based in Siargao Island in the Philippine South, in between the Pacific Ocean and a mountain range.