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.

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)