Self-Portrait as Recluse
by Alton Melvar M. Dapanas
i. Aimlessly switch from Amazon Prime to Netflix to HBO Go as you shift your weight on the couch. Something to distract me, you say to yourself, too loudly. So loud that you feel embarrassed like a kid caught with a broken vase. But you’re alone, you’ve always been. Grab the remaining half-bottle of Heineken from the case. Ants are now feasting over crumbs of pizza and smear of catsup. This disarray, this tiny chaos is what you hate. Restore a semblance of order, type in “FoodPanda, grocery, 6pm” in your Google Keep Notes.
ii. In a 2020 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, Filipino psychologists found out that 25% of Filipinos had “moderate-to-severe anxiety, one-seventh reported moderate-to-severe stress levels and one-sixth reported moderate-to-severe depression.” WHO Philippines, in an infographic, advises people like you “to talk to a mental health professional or someone you trust.” As of August last year, Manila-based National Center for Mental Health noted an alarming spike of suicide-related calls in their hotline.
iii. Growing up in a culture that celebrates collectivism and pakikisama, social harmony, a part of you is thankful. You despised the noise, the crowds. A journalist from a TV network that the fascist government has shut down insists on using “physical distancing” over “social distancing.” You do not agree with her. You’ve been distant to people even as a kid. “Do you want to live as a monje?” your outgoing half-Spaniard grandfather would ask.
But the bourgeois in you hates that the nearest 7-Eleven now closes at 9 pm. Some of your favorite restaurants have closed for months, too; a few for good. You mostly dine alone. You want to disappear.
iv. In Tsurezuregusa, or Essays in Idleness, late 13th century Japanese Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō pondered, “There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract you.” You love the ruminative quality of thought embedded in classical East Asian writings—haibun (poem-in-prose), zuihitsu (essay), kikobun(travelogue), and nikki (diary). They like looking inward unlike your countrymen, extroverted, too-hospitable nationalists.
You wish someone will quote Kenkō in the submissions to journals you edit and read for. Our previous issue thematically discussed this, you remind the others in the masthead via Slack. Deep down, you’re a closeted escapist, you detest being reminded of what’s actually happening, Pisces-style derangement.
v. You stink of cigarette, sweat, beer, cum. The last shower you had was almost two days ago but there’s no drive to do it. It’s a long weekend. No one can smell you anyway, no nudes to send. In your search history, naked photos of porn star Michael Swayze in action.
vi. In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick problematized the I-persona’s aloneness in highbrow literary prose. In fiction, it’s “truth-speaking,” citing Dostoyevsky and Beckett, but in nonfiction, such is taken as an “artifice [that] is unacceptable” and “foolishly self-dramatizing.” Gornick then mentioned European memoirists who have perfected solving “this intractable writing problem”: Beryl Markham, Marguerite Duras, W.G. Sebald.
vii. Inside the fridge are almost empty jars of pickled spices and relishes, cartons of almond milk, a bunch of fruits and vegetables you forgot to eat or cook, blocks of tofu. I used to be the home-maker type, you thought. Some are turning almost brown but you have plans: banana for banana bread, vine spinach for a smoothie, grapes with soy yogurt for popsicles, sweet potato for fries.
This is not because you’re a miser. This is because you have a hard time letting go, rotten fruit or not.
viii. Canadian poet-academic Alison Calder defines “deep mapping” as a special form of “vertical travel [and place-based] writing” which involves “autobiography… archeology, folklore, reportage, climate” and questions the binaries of the historical/contemporary, the political/poetic, the factual/fictional, the discursive/sensual. Unlike picturesque and romantic travel/place writing, this scientific travel/place writing emphasizes verticality, starts with the surface and ultimately uncovers what’s beneath it.
ix. Wearing face masks meant anonymity, blending in, being able to disappear in a crowd. But it is the island life you missed—particularly being unknown even without a mask. “Do not appear if you do not want to disappear,” goes one of Foucault’s most quoted lines. You want to disappear.
x. Instead of more concrete measures, the national government mandated wearing of face shields on top of masks. CNN Philippines headlines give you migraine. The national economy is at its worst since 1947. “The world’s longest and strictest lockdown,” wrote The Telegraph.
You stopped listening to the daily briefings over local TV from the mayor of your home city. You applaud his policies but you don’t need his reminders.
xi. In an e-numan (electronic + inuman, drinking session) with high school friends, everyone looked different. The extroverted ones, you’ve observed, tend to be openly distressed, giving off loud SOS vibe. The introverts like you were built for prolonged isolation.
In a Zoom meeting, your boss would commend you for productivity, tripling your previous best performance. Nobody knows you were on a manic episode last week, not even you.
In a Facebook marketplace, you exchanged three kilos of rice for a can of Spam, the little things that matter.
xii. Over Viber, you send a therapy meme to your shrink. He replies that he’s worried about you, asks if you thought about committing to the institution for a few weeks. You dread his incessant “How do you feel today?” queries. You loathe questions you don’t have answers to. You crave certainty, the known.
xiii. Twenty One Pilots’ “Level of Concern” has been on repeat on Spotify. Sing the part where Tyler Joseph repeatedly says, “Tell me we’re alright, tell me we’re okay.” In your SMS inbox, three unread messages from two ex-friends and your father. Ex-friends had no idea you’ve cut them off. You call your father tonight, a first since 2018.
xiv. At least five submissions calling for literary response to the current events are in your newsfeed, as if more poetry can solve it all. (“But they help us make sense,” a poet-friend would tell you.) A poet you idolize critiqued anthologies with natural and human-made disasters as impetus: “There is something amiss in collective action when all that comes out of it is more poetry.” Decline the insistent invitations. Do not romanticize this kind of catharsis.
xv. But you failed in the not romanticizing part. You wrote a flash nonfiction triptych—or is it a prose poem suite?—about meeting a Tinder date who lives in the other side of the city. Separated by a police checkpoint and a bridge as if it was the 38th parallel, recount the scene as if it is from a Korean drama, savoring in it, even settling for the crumbs that memory allowed for the taking.
The next week, decide not to see him again. Romance in this economy, to you, seems impractical.
xvi. You miss the view of the city you’re in, its panorama, the skyline during the blue hour right outside your window. When Joan Didion wrote in Blue Nights, “I had been alone in the apartment,” you felt that. Now draw the dusty curtains after a little sneeze, and let the remaining light of sunset in.
Alton Melvar M. Dapanas (them/they) is assistant creative nonfiction editor of London-based Panorama: The Journal of Place & Travel (formerly Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel) and Iowa-based Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine, as well as an editorial reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine. Their recent works, delineating poetry and the essay, have appeared in or forthcoming from Elsewhere: A Journal of Place (Germany), Sine Theta (China), The Babel Tower Notice Board (England), Voice & Verse Poetry (Hong Kong), Epoch Press (Scotland), Stellium Literary (Minnesota), Reliquiae Journal of Nature, Landscape, and Mythology (Wales), among others. They’ll be part of two forthcoming anthologies—of diasporic queer desire and of trans liberation. Using the penname F Alex San Juan, they have been recently published in Impossible Archetype: A Journal of LGBTQ+ Poetry (Ireland). They identify as pansexual, nonbinary, and polyamorous. A native of Metro Cagayan de Oro in the southern Philippines, they are currently living off-the-grid between the ocean and a mountain range.
