We Glimmer

We were excited for July because of a shallow, artful reason. Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" was coming up on the calendar. Whenever I show I. the the picture, I tell him that this is what happens when we embrace and love, we glimmer bright as gold, we burn like fire revealing the truth.

The real one is Vienna and our poster-calendar by the door is an aid to our playful imagination in bridging the problem of proximity and the problem of fare money. Activated and powered by freshly-ground, pressed barako coffee in a rainy Sunday spent with family, my memory jogs back to February. The association game is on. The sky's gray but it didn't rain. We had a nice drive to Tagaytay. At the restaurant's reception, we stand before a Klimt-looking painting. I recall the feeling that while we will never be rich as Croesus, or rich at all, once in a while we allow ourselves to feel all golden. Here we glow and glimmer as in a Klimt painting.

I had one of the most delicious meals of my life that day. We started with a mushroom cappuccino, along with salads, farm-to-table, with foie gras. For mains, we had medium-rare mayura steak and rack of lamb, fruit sorbets in between, panna cotta and souffle for dessert. And for all of it, we had each other, celebrating six years of marriage with a honeymoon that persists.

We stayed the night in Tagaytay, in a bed and breakfast about 20 minutes away from the restaurant. There was a swing in the playground, where we spent the afternoon pushing against the cool wind.. Right before sunset, I had a chance to run around the Tagaytay-Mendez area. I was, after all, training for an upcoming 32k long run. Some of the roads were uphill, some of them nice and quiet, and I tried to avoid the busy main roads. The altitude was relatively higher, and my lungs enjoyed the rich oxygen from trees and late-afternoon mountain air. On the way back, I hit a road on a residential area with a stray dogs and I got a lot of heavy barking. I got chased by one too. I kept thinking how dogs can smell fear. I kept running along with a thankfulness in my mind, and that our fears, the loneliness that will constantly haunt us, evaporates little by little in beads of sweat, the salt in my skin masking the smell of fear, if not diluting it all. That evening, we diluted it some more with Russian Standard Vodka and apple juice before sleeping in a king-size bed.

When we woke up in the morning, we swam in the cold pool. I.'s lips were turning purple from the cold, so we let him warm up a little, as he insisted on swimming some more. The Tagaytay breeze was still powerful against the sun. It felt all good, because we probably really glowed, our truths burning us up inside.