Musings on Marriage between Millennials
Before marriage, I had a romanticized Rilkean notion that I could live with my demons and make art that way.
Then, I married Jose.
Jose and I met in 2018, both of us dancing with the demons of previous long-term relationships that brought us to La Union. We are of the generation, after all, that survived the plague of toxic love and invented the therapy speak that armors us against narcissistic codependence. We authored the genre of confessional social media, raised our own red flags, and simultaneously became the mob behind Cancel Culture. Before marriage, I thought it was so romantic to hold “everything that frightens us,” because “in its deepest essence, [it is] something helpless that wants our love.” Now everyone is on a healing journey and a trauma-informed approach to being millennial. Sober at that. It was certainly fun while it lasted!
Like an ex-lover himself, I have since put away Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and shelved my favorite emo songs into a playlist called “2009.” I am no longer that, after all; a young poet or a rocker (!). No longer naive, mistaking tragic flaws for epic dragons and princesses — “waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.” I have a body of work and the body of a woman. Fairytales are now for my son at bedtime; marriage and myth-making, as the greater quests during this chapter of my life, require a practice of becoming. I’ve drawn the Queen of Pentacles from the deck and donned her.
In becoming, I’ve returned to old stories, too. One, in particular, has engulfed me: Doña Jerónima by Nick Joaquin.
First, a writer that has called our demons out in plain-sight, named them in his depictions of Manila and its barrios. Second, a myth-maker of women in the lineage of Eve, like the unclean pig hounded by legions, chronicling in medieval form. Third, the mention of tableware in the river, washed by nymphs after dinner.
The short story, which won first place at the 1965 Don Carlos Palanca Award, retells the oral tradition behind the enchantress that lives in a cave along the Pasig River. Its antagonist is the fictional 17th-century Archbishop and Governor-General of Manila, formerly the lover of the woman, who has tracked him down to behold him to his vows from their teenage affair. His lamentations, made holy, declare Doña Jerónima’s passions a fever of sin, an arrested adolescence, and beauty that damn her, “who needed more than youth’s season or life’s term to learn the prizing of the body, not as a minute to possess, in the rush of time, but as a being to love, in the light of eternity.”
In the retelling, as in the oral tradition,
I thought “the body… as a being to love, in the light of eternity,” was the most important thing I’d read in the past year. I thought it encapsulated much of why we stand in awe of stoneware glazed after a firing, or my own reflection at the start of the day. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of my own body as a being on its own, existing in the infinite kiln, undergoing its own transformation amidst the elements.
I like that, and I sit with it lately.
Jose talks about much more than just demons in this short documentary. The demons aren’t even the point at all. But I always find something in what he says or does to feed the imagination. In a sense, sometimes my imagination is the clay and his emotions are what shape them into form. I myself never sit at the wheel, but there is a marriage in our process.
