I live on a little subdivision on the outskirts of the city. Our house is located among a row of commercial establishments with a muddied river across from it. This wasn’t the case back then. The commercial boom in Cagayan de Oro has affected its neighboring towns by way of commercializing its main streets. Our past neighbors either sold their lands to local businesses, started their own businesses, or were part of the government’s demolition project. These days, everything that transpires here is transactional— people come and go only to buy or sell merchandise. We have no real neighbors. By closing time, the people in our street would go back to their respective homes and by night-time, my family remains as the solitary figures in a seemingly-deserted place.
—
The gnawing loneliness in my bones takes me back to a scene in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour, a film that takes place in a lonely city of drifters set on a backdrop of abandoned landscapes in 1990s Taipei. With Taipei in the midst of a crescendo of a commercial boom, the film focuses on who the city leaves behind, solitary figures drifting and adrift on empty compounds and for sale apartments. At some point in the film, three people have occupied the same empty apartment but they each still led their own lonesome lives.
There was a woman and then there was a wailing girl. This loneliness takes me to a long shot nearing the end of the film where a woman takes a five-minute long walk towards a park. When she finally sat herself down on the benches, she erupts into a rapturous cry, holding a cigarette as some form of pacifier, until her cries peter down and the screen fades to black.
None of the scenes in Vive L’Amour offer anything conclusive; instead, it unfurls like poetry. We know that despite the flurry of people drifting in and out of these liminal spaces, the days are doomed to repeat themselves— occurring outside of the film, we expect the woman to go on with her usual routine of eating, drinking, working, bawling, and senseless fucking with strangers caught during chance encounters.
If there is any semblance of a community in the setting of this film, it is but a congregation of lonely people, trying to access themselves through others but to no avail of satiation; lonely people interact as lonely people do. In the span of the 90 minutes or so of the film, none of the characters speak to each other. They merely loom around each other’s backdrops, fuck, sleep in the same bed, or happen again onto each other by chance. No words exchanged, at the root of these encounters are faces and expressions filled with longing.
—
When I started therapy a few months back, I was advised to do strenuous physical activities to release any pent-up energy I have for the day. Apparently, when one remains immobile for a long time, the body’s energy starts to gnaw and turn against oneself. Begging for release, the unused energy would direct itself to the body, manifesting as symptoms like anxiety, irritability, or delirious boredom. This became the onset of my walking routine. On top of three to five times a week of 45 minutes of heavy exercise, I added walking to my daily routine for the sake of my mental health.
Unbeknownst to me, this became the impetus of a sort of writing poetics associated with walking. When I take my daily walks, I am mostly in conversation with others through myself. I began writing epistolary essays, conversing with people I have loved or continue to love as renewed versions of myself each time I take my walks. The stark difference of who I was and who I am reveal themselves in the form of this one-sided address.
—
I met V at a national writer’s workshop sometime this year as co-fellows. As a fellow walker, he was naturally curious about my walking process in relation to my writing practice. In the workshop, I shared with him that I always take the same route, seeking safety in the familiarity of the place to prevent myself from falling prey to any danger on unfamiliar routes. “Each walk is like arriving in a familiar place as a stranger,” I told him. It was only recently when I realized that my writing process is deeply tied to my feelings of loneliness after our exchanges about his walking process.
—
V once embarked on a long walk some few years back, spanning 35,000 steps, for no definite reason. Though during his long walk, he found himself entering a liminal space as he meditates on his past and present and how these two things had coalesced into a New Self-Becoming.
I found his work to be the most interesting creative-critical essay there was during the workshop. After reading his essay, I became fixated on the idea of walking as repenting, a sentiment that was directly related to his past, which also echoes Mary Oliver’s words in my mind:
You do not have to be good.
Mary Oliver, The Wild Geese
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
—
Our conversations had led me to meditate more on my walking process aside from the obvious aspect of appeasing my therapist and improving my mental health. Apparently, there was a sort of ritual and process in doing what I do, I’m just yet to flesh them out. In turn, this little essay about my recent fixation with (sub)urban loneliness became the impetus of my meditations on walking and the ways I try to sate this loneliness while searching for a community.
Bon pour brûler 