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A Spiritually Enlightening Online Magazine ISSN# 1708-3265
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Dream-walkingby Alegria Imperial I was browsing used books on a table a dealer had set up in the cafeteria of a media office I worked at years ago, when a co-worker suddenly leaped in front of me and thrust into my hand a travel brochure. "I'll fly there one day for sure," she said and left me loosely leafing through the brochure, a map which had unfolded dangling in my hands. Flat on paper, Manhattan looks closest to an uncurled tongue—quite plain. Yet greedy eyes like mine all those years—I longed for its mythic heights and scoured for patches, where I could make a landfall. I searched on the map for an address a friend had scrawled on a postcard, years after she left—the date was by then a decade past—my forefinger lingering on Broadway by Astor Place. But the tiny prints seemed to crawl away as I read the street names—Bowery, Lafayette, Cooper Square. Unlike my co-worker, I knew for certain I could never get to New York. But I kept the map often chanting those name places, smudging it as I slid on my forefinger up and down avenues or crossed streets from the East River to the Hudson. Was I dreaming or invoking reality? Fifteen years later, on my first spring walk on Broadway by Astor Place, I would shiver, but the cold did not seem to seep in; it oozed from fear that if I stumbled, I would wake up, clutching the old map. But the wind whooshed, peeling off my unbuttoned jacket—I shuddered because it was spring after all. The wind blew from skyscraper tips that had snipped the sky into strips, sweeping Broadway as it stretched and slackened, rising and falling in a hundred brisk steps; I took the fork to Fifth Avenue.
At Fifth Avenue, more than chilled I was dazed by the light that crisscrossed in spears. Slanting, these splashed on glass and steel, and people's faces. Blinded, I kept crossing to the shaded side. As I floated on, I was lifted by degrees wherever I walked into and out—the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Library, Saks, Tiffany's, and the Castle at Central Park. Yet is was not the sights but the light pouring like water, rushing in streams that sustained me. Light coats the city in silver during the day, and streaks it purple when it withdraws. Nights rise instead of fall in Manhattan; the sky only darkens thinly, pulsing in reflected neon lights. Strolling home one evening on Lafayette St., I glimpsed the moon as if caught by tines in between two skyscrapers—full cheeks as if blown, haloed like a god. I whooped as if I saw the moon the first time. Long after I left New York, I wondered why light and not all else had cast in me a spell until I visited my university. Walking in the corridor, I remembered how I would stand there, leaning on those massive frames to bask in the light. It fell like silent water onto the courtyard slanting from edges of the roof deck. No wonder the palm trees, ferns, birds of paradise and frangipanis have spawned into a forest as light daily waters them, I used to think. Shaded on three sides, it always felt like halfway into the hour. Morning does not rise on that courtyard, but it blows in as pink vapour. Noon is hardly stark white, always somewhat pale gold. The sun does not set there, it withdraws instead, stealing away as a lover would and leaving a bluish twilight—the hue perhaps of the beloved's prayers. Noon had peaked at the time of my visit. As I gazed at the courtyard like I used to during period breaks, my breathing snagged. I wanted to whoop like I did when I caught that moon in Manhattan as I had recognized the oblique light cascading from the roof, swarming on the ferns. It mimicked how light falls on the rose bushes, the white daisies and pink hydrangeas in a corner of the courtyard where I live here in Vancouver, the spot where children flock at midday skittering like birds, trailing droplets of sunshine—their laughter as if bells, impelling me to skip to the corridor and watch them get doused in the light.
A seeker of truth and peace after tangled pathways, I have also found a voice in my search. A retired journalist, I have since focused on poetry and fiction. I launched my first book in Manila before migrating to Vancouver last year and recently received two honourable mentions for poetry. |
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