A Quantum Life

“There’s a lot of stuff you have the right to blame me for, but you can’t believe I chose any of this. We’re both cursed to see stuff that nobody should be allowed to see, but we’re still responsible for our own mistakes. I still don’t regret anything." - Charlie Jane Anders, "Six Months, Three Days"

It feels surreal when you see all these people in photos on Facebook or Multiply or whatever social networking site you own or used to own, and then you remember where they fit in the holes of your self: people you've met once, you've hung out with, you've loved, you've desired, you've slept with, you've kissed in a car outside a funeral, you've held hands under the stars, you've lived a fantasy of vagrancy with, you've cried over, you've laughed with, you've hated to the core of your entire spirit, you've stopped talking one afternoon because of a small word they said and which they didn't mean, you've talked over the phone for hours way back in high school for the most trivial things...

It feels odd, to see your history in the multitude of faces that let you know how far you've gone and how far you'd go, or how close you're capable of wanting to be to another person as if their very existence meant that you would continue to exist. You are a particle weaving in space with other particles, moving faster than the speed of light and covering all emptiness, ensuring all possibilities are exhausted.

How amusing that you've poured yourself into the funnel of the present, but in another world perhaps, in another universe, you could've ended up with that person you held hands with in a blue car one humid Friday evening, or the last face you could've seen was the wide-eyed driver of a ten-wheeler truck who almost hit you when you were a stupid Grade Six student crossing the street with nary a care in the world. You could've died that August while it was raining and you were bleeding alone under the torrential rain, or you could've become a famous writer by 20 like what you promised a college friend while waiting for the sun to rise at Manila Bay one summer night.

Yet what was and what could've been mean nothing to what is and what should be, the present that feels right, the only picture that you'd rather keep looking at: on that bed, holding hands, saying goodnight, in some two-star hotel somewhere in the city, smiling at each other while thinking this is what should last, this is the only thing that should be. This is where the story ends.

Luminous

"I would like to sleep

with you, to enter

your sleep as its smooth dark wave

slides over my head."

- "Variations of the Word Sleep", by Margaret Atwood

I want to touch you in your hidden places. When you are sleeping, I will secretly crawl in your dream and whisper behind you. I want to walk my fingers on your skin and feel the landscapes of your iridescent body, to feel your legs and hands entwined with mine in this lazy Sunday morning. 


I want to wake up everyday and see you looking at me that way you look at me when you think I'm not looking, and then I'll stare at you, and you'll ask, "What?" and I'll say, "nothing" and then smile, the hours melting into fluid desire that fills the vessels of our souls to the brim. We are overflowing. Today is illuminated with everything that is plenty.

The Fairy Child

"Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea. For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail--" -- from "Babbitt", by Sinclair Lewis

You always want to be the one who leaves because you think it's much better that you disappear before the other even realizes that you weren't worth it from the start. Your lovers' cabinets are never filled with your clothes; your belongings are always stashed in some luggage somewhere, under their beds perhaps, or their closets under the stairs, just in case you wake up one morning and that familiar feeling sinks in again, telling you it's time -- yes it's time to go. It's time to walk away, or maybe run, never look back, catch the next bus to the next train to the next plane to the next man whom you will say you love with all your heart, like a line from a movie you've watched too many times already.

So many beds and so many couches, so many bathtubs and towels, so many coffee pots and stoves -- you leave a trail of you, the scent and song and soul, but you, you only take yourself. Every time you walk outside a house and a life, there is only a fresh start, a clean slate, a new beginning waiting to welcome you back. No pasts, no pains, no tears, nothing but a smile, a laugh, a blind acceptance that this is your fate. You can only keep the charade for so long, and before they can see through you, you know you must go and leave, take away all the imperfect in you and carry the burden alone, to preserve that perfect picture in your lovers' heads: the you who always knew when to kiss them and embrace them, the you who always had the right things to say, the you who was forever new and interesting.

Because staying necessitates a revelation, you choose to leave instead. For even in silence, just by staying, one eventually divulges the flaws, the chips, and cracks -- all those things that weary the soul. A dream is beautiful because it is exactly ideal; reality is only a dark, depressing room. You are the dream. You are the ideal. You are the desire which haunts them, the one who got away, the one who will be remembered even when you have long gone. You will be the one who will haunt your lovers until the end, your smell and touch and kisses wafting forever in their memory, a tragedy that echoes in the cave of their lives when they sleep beside their wives.

You are only a mist that comes a little while and vanishes -- but yet you leave such a beautiful rainbow every time.

Melancholy Vagabond

I'm currently at a hotel somewhere in Pampanga for the first stop-over of the anti-cervical cancer cycling tour I'm covering for work. Sitting by the foot of the bed, typing like crazy is my accounts officer-slash-friend. The television is on, and showing right this very moment is a Vin Diesel action flick that neither of us is watching. The window to my right frames an afternoon sky where the wind makes the trees wave slowly.

Awhile ago, while taking a bath, I thought about how hotel rooms radiate a certain sadness. I thought how, for a moment, you take temporary residence in a strange, unfamiliar place and try to feel at home inside a room where many have settled in as well. Before you came in, these strange people also found comfort within the four corners you now familiarize yourself with. And like these people, you will have to leave this room, along with traces of yourself, and after you another person will check in and leave his or her own memories inside this room as well.

Call it a metaphor for how I see relationships. Maybe that's the thing why I find hotel rooms bittersweet: it's because of the memories each of these spaces left with me -- of lovers found and lovers lost, a meeting and a parting, kisses and then goodbyes.

People are like rooms, their hearts are beds you bury yourself in -- only to wake up one day and discover that you are no longer welcome, or you were never welcome to begin with. You are only a transient in these rooms, but you hope that maybe, just maybe, one of those rooms will be home.

But they are not your home: the only home you have is your own heart.

(But it doesn't mean you can't steal the toiletries inside the hotel bathroom as souvenirs)