NOTES: 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. (We will deny it, but there will be evidence.)
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.” 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.”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!
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.”
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.
Then, in musing about marriage, and musing about being millennials, just as much as musing on marriage between millennials he and I, I figure, what is time? What is the time we have? And in what time do we count?
Marrying in our 30s, Jos and I have said that we had lost some time. But we quickly take it back, knowing that had we met earlier, we would have let our demons marry instead of ourselves as we are becoming now. In another life, he tells me, we have lots of children. Lots and lots of children. And we pause whenever we think about that, knowing it is true, and knowing that version of ourselves have our love; we have theirs, all of theirs with their children’s as well.
Eternity can hold all our existences, after all, but we each only have our bodies, as beings. To love in the light, the flash of light we are alive, the spark of our lifetimes.
I sit with that, too.
In becoming, I’ve returned to old timelines, I guess. Only to release them, I first think, but that’s therapy speak. That’s Western. That’s some narrative logic of needing to resolve, tie together loose threads — disregarding our innate craft to weave, in tapestry or adornment; our inherent contradictions that allow us to colonize ourselves.
I return to old timelines because they, too, are stories. Remember when we were writing on leaves or bark? That’s a very old timeline, but that’s our timeline nonetheless. Remember when our words and our records were on organic material, pieces of the earth? We wrote our debts and agreements in bodies of the land, which we held, in the same light and hour of existence, without the need for them to exist beyond our time because, if it was important, memory would serve as our witness. People would retell it. Family would recount, and repeat. Our bodies are organic materials, in which our genes tell histories, too.
Jose talks about much more than just demons in this short documentary. The demons aren’t even the point at all. But sometimes, if we name them, call them out, mythologize them, we can see our excuses and distractions in plain sight.
I myself never sit at the wheel, but there is a marriage in our process. Not quite a linear transfer of words or emotion to clay or sculpture, but our own oral, tactile family tradition.
