Gutierrez Mangansakan II
Pillars and beams shifting with the weight of time and weather, my body feels like a house of years gone by. I rise from sleep and sense its quiet negotiations with pain. My right knee and ankles, familiar hinges of a bipedal locomotion marked by wide and energetic strides, now audibly protest as though the rust has finally reached their cores. These aches, once occasional visitors, have now taken up residence like squatters claiming space that do not belong to them. I no longer move as one continuous gesture but in calculated increments, like a child relearning the rituals of motion. When I stand, I instinctively reach for the kamagong stick that steadies me, a prop once wielded by Perry Dizon in my film Salome, now claimed by the body that directed it.
What an absurd and sobering inheritance. I made films to capture the fragility of other people, but years later, those same films ended up giving me the tools I need just to get by.
The weight of the stick in my hand reminds me of the stories I have told, the ones I carry, and now, the story of this body, which insists on being listened to with closer attention.
For most of my life, I have regarded my body with distant affection, the way one might regard an ancestral home whose foundations are assumed to hold forever simply because they have always been there. I did not imagine its inevitable decline. Towering at six foot two, I reached for the skies, mistook youth for permanence, believing in the reckless magic of invincibility. I fed my body with little thought. The fatty cuts of meat shared with friends and family. The sweet desserts that provided the instant sugar rush. The bottles of Red Horse emptied in the name of celebration, escape, or simply habit. My body absorbed everything, without any sign that it might crack under the weight of my choices. A vessel that bent without breaking, a house whose walls and columns did not echo with the sorrow or exhaustion I piled upon it.
Most often, I hear khutba on Friday prayers discuss the duality of our existence—how we are both badan and nyawa. The body is fleeting, tied to the world and its hungers, while the soul endures beyond the limits of life. In these sermons, the nyawa is always the priority. Charity, piety, and good deeds are urged so we might earn a place in the Afterlife. The badan, by contrast, needs only to be kept clean and healthy. Vanity is frowned upon because, in the end, every body returns to the Maker when its appointed time arrives.
Whenever my cousins hear that I’m on a diet, they never miss the chance to tease me. Kan kan ka den mun, ka matay tanu a di tanu den makakan. We only get this one lifetime to eat. Once we die, there’s no more eating.
But three years ago, when surgeons removed my gall bladder—an organ that had quietly performed its function for nearly five decades—something shifted in the way I saw myself. I remember waking up after the procedure, skin taped, incisions mildly aching, and still felt disoriented. It was not simply the loss of a body part. Something bigger clicked into place: the idea that certainty is just an illusion. Lying there, I realized what I’d missed for years. That the body is not simply a place we inhabit, but a place where the map is constantly being redrawn by circumstances beyond our control.
Despite an appendectomy more than twenty years earlier, the gall bladder operation was the first time I saw the body as something with limits. Not a permanent home for all my wild hopes, but as a fragile estate with boundaries, vulnerabilities, and an expiration written into its very nature. Like a filmmaker who has always known how to orchestrate a scene, I suddenly found myself in a narrative I could not direct.
And yet, the body goes on, even when the mind falters. Mine does that sometimes—not in huge, dramatic ways, but in quiet, unsettling ones. My bipolar disorder, diagnosed fifteen years ago, sometimes lures me into these foggy places where memory beats to its own strange tune. Memory, for me, has always been both compass and anchor. It holds my grandmother’s stories, the landscapes of Pagalungan, the faces of my cats buried in clay pots whose roots intertwine with my grief. It holds the dialogues of characters I have written, the shades of my mother’s lipsticks, and the picture of a boy trying to figure himself out in the tiny apartment on Don Abelardo Street.
Memory shapes who I am, building the walls and hallways inside me. Lately, though, I feel some of those rooms going quiet, like someone’s packing up and leaving without asking. Not the core memories, not yet—but enough to throw me off. I’ll be talking and suddenly lose my place, like a door that’s always been open just slams shut.
So what am I supposed to do with a body that’s starting to turn on me? How do you keep moving in a world that expects you to be sharp and tireless, when the body you live in keeps changing the rules?
Virginia Woolf teaches us that the body shapes the very texture of consciousness, its illnesses and injuries capable of reframing our most intimate truths. I get that. Sometimes I feel like the old gas lamp from my childhood, glowing with borrowed wisdom, but always flickering with my own confusion. Maybe that’s what aging is. You learn, slowly, to live in a body that keeps rearranging itself. You start to see its hallways not as traps, but as rooms that change shape. Pain isn’t just some enemy to fight. It teaches you things. And limits don’t always mean you’ve lost. Sometimes they just mean it’s time to look in a new direction.
I think of the weight I carry now –literally, the pounds I’ve gained in the last five years, and figuratively, the burdens of a midlife crisis that arrived not as a storm but as a gradual dimming of certain stars. During the COVID-19 lockdown, anxiety became a second appetite. While the world contracted, my body expanded, absorbing every fear, every doubt, every question I was too ashamed to say aloud. Have I done enough with my life? What have my choices amounted to? What becomes of a filmmaker who can no longer trust his own eyes?
Because my eyes, too, have begun retreating from me. The letters blur, the world softens at the edges. A filmmaker losing his vision is like a storyteller losing the thread of a narrative mid-sentence. It brings a consternation I had not prepared for. Every time I reach for my glasses, a small grief stirs. It is one so mundane that it almost feels embarrassing to confess, yet so profound that it tugs at the heart with each passing day.
I realize now that my entire life has been about gazing, framing, witnessing. Cinema, for me, has never been merely an art but a way of being. To lose clarity in my sight is to confront the possibility that the world may one day recede into a haze, the way memories sometimes do. And so I hold onto the light with the desperation of someone who knows how easily it can be extinguished.
Still, I am here. Still, I walk.
I walk with the kamagong stick, which steadies my faltering architecture. Each step is fragile, but also stubborn. I refuse to surrender to decline. The body may weaken, but the desire to move and continue remains.
There is a kind of gentleness in the way I move now, almost like a quiet dance. I’ve started tuning in to my joints, listening to them creak and pop, just like listening to an old house settle after dark. Each crack is a reminder that something is shifting, each ache is an invitation to pay attention.
Melissa Febos reminds me that healing is not the absence of hurt but the integration of it into the self. My pains, then, are not signs of failure but carvings that make the architecture of my body uniquely mine.
The irony is not lost on me. As the body falters, the mind often achieves a sharper clarity. It’s more like an old house that’s sheltered me through every chapter, every messy, beautiful moment. It’s the same body that lugged me through all-nighters, festivals, film screenings, wild trips to the ends of the earth. The arms that scooped up my cats, the heart that soaked in every loss and every burst of joy. It’s carried me through so many worlds, both real and imagined, always sticking by me. Now, as it tires, it just wants a little kindness, a bit of patience.
Pain, in its strange way, has brought me back to myself. Mortality used to feel like gossip, something whispered in another room. I do not fear it as much as I once did. Now, I have come to terms with it. It sits beside me, quiet and steady. I feel it in the stiffness of my limbs, in the absence of an organ, in the blurring of text, but I also feel life more acutely because of it.
And so I walk, slowly but with intention. Stick in hand, breath steady, eyes searching not for what is fading, but for what remains. The architecture may crack, but the light still leaks through.