The Strangeness of Absence

It isn't that I refuse to feel. It's not that. I don't resist it. I believe I am ready to welcome it, wholeheartedly, like rain after summer. I am ready to welcome it gladly. Every day I wake up and rush to the front door wishing that it would dust its feet on the mat outside and knock, finally, after so long. I want to. I long to. I am mad for it. I am mad like the torrential fire that ravages the forest.

Or so I'd like to think. Maybe I'm not as mad as I think I am. Maybe I am only as mad as the soft dying glow of the spent bonfire. The heart, perhaps, burns only like solid ice. A chunk of cold ice---only frostbite, mistaken for flame. Perhaps, perhaps. I've forgotten already.

This is youth. I see it gallop like a wild horse, away. The rushing river has reached the lake. On the horizon I see the sun as it bids goodbye, leaving this sky for another's. There was something lost; but it came too quietly, this passing. I hardly even noticed it leave. Had everything come abruptly the pain perhaps would've been too unbearable, but the feeling wanes like the aftermath of a storm in the last few hours of its life. I only remember, and what I remember I pine for, but perhaps it's too late. 

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.

Because I Entertain These Thoughts

Sometimes, I feel like I'm standing still and everything's changing way too faster than I want. 

You'd think that this is contradictory to my previous journal entry which said that I'm okay with the changes. But this is not meant to serve as a recantation of what I've written. On the contrary, I stand by it -- I am happy with those life changes. But I refer to other changes this time. The changes of life in general, of everything surrounding me, of a generation passing by, waving goodbye, as new things come and eventually overtake me. 

Am I moving too slowly? Am I too cautious? Why is it that I feel like I'm not doing enough to effect changes in my life? I feel utterly lacking. I feel like I'm letting life pass me by as I blindly trudge on, complacently reassured by the new things I'm seemingly adding to my life, only to realize that these so-called life-changing decisions are but minuscule additions to my existence, or to the entire transformation of life? 



Is it the unavoidable quarter-life crisis? Then again, I've always been existential. Right now, I just feel like I should do more, squeeze myself dry of everything I can do. I want to be something, and I want to affirm myself of my worth. There is a pressing need to establish myself and prove to myself that I am deserving of something.

I am standing at a crossroad, thinking that I should do all of these, while also convinced that nothing is important in the end. I am perpetually discouraged by the futility of existence and this hinders me from achieving what should be done. I want to be so many things at the same time I am being stretched and spread to thinly, and I become confused of what I really should be doing. 

I envy single-minded people. I know I can be like that but it will perhaps take me tremendous effort to be like that. I am scared of failures and to dedicate one's life in the pursuit of a single endeavor is a scary idea. What if I fail? What if I never make it to the top? It is a scary proposition. And I know I should block out negative thoughts but paranoia is this monstrous parasite attached at the back of my head, whispering that I won't be able to make it, and really, trying is pointless.

Am I doomed?

Perhaps. 

Two Years

Traveling along the same route I have grown familiar with two years ago, I asked myself -- while the van trudged on the asphalt road -- if two years had really been that long. 2008 was like another lifetime altogether -- a lifetime built on escaping from a heartbreak that threatened to lead me to the brink of utter self-destruction. Two years ago was founded on vignettes of airports,  hallways, jeepney rides, trolleys, nights inside a room alone, reading by myself, silence at six AM waiting for no one, tricycle rides at nine AM, provincial lights, laughing as an ache rent one's heart, uncertainties, facades, waiting for messages that never came, longing for greetings that never arrived, failures, frustrations, a sad return, and more goodbyes.

Two years ago I promised myself it will be you, always, forever. Two years ago in the darkness of the night I told myself that this was what I wanted. That was two years ago -- two years ago when I foolishly believed that faith indeed moved mountains, that someone heard my pleas. I say foolish now because I know that there is no one out there dispensing favors for miserable mortals. There is no salvation apart from the one that we ourselves craft for ourselves. And I had to learn that lesson the hard way. 

From one heartache to another I hopped. And along the way I discovered that somewhere along the way I lost heart. Or maybe, just maybe, I grew up. Maybe disillusionment is truly an unavoidable circumstance. You earn your pragmatism with every experience you gain. 

Only the sheltered will live in their candy clouds and rainbow castles -- never harboring shattered dreams in their heart. But I refused to be sheltered. I still refuse to be. Two years ago I might have believed that there is happiness awaiting in the end of it all, you waiting at the corner of this madness, ready to take my offer, willing to hold my outstretched hand. I was a fool. But you see, I've learned. Pain somehow does that -- force you to learn the lessons of self-preservation. I snapped along the way. I got fed up. I snapped. All the drama -- enough. Yes, I think that was what I said: ENOUGH. I didn't deserve this. I was my own hero, I was my own messiah, I am my own martyr. I am the dashing prince out to rescue myself from my dragons, I do not need to save anyone but myself. In the end, I had the power.

Who would have imagined that who I am now is starkly different from who I was two years ago? Maybe not on the outside, but I know that deep inside me, there are avenues and paths in my heart that have become cul-de-sacs. 

And who would have imagined that, two years after all the hurt, all the dreams I've now given up will come back to me?

What's So Wrong With Being Happy? Kudos To Those Who See Through The Sickness.

"Floating in this cosmic jacuzzi
we are like frogs oblivious to the
water starting to boil.
No one flinches, we all float face down."

- "Warning", Incubus

Sturm und Drang

Do not – I repeat, do not – tell me that it is my fault. There’s a speck of dust in my eye, I’m not crying – it’s just a speck of dust – this speck of dust called history, called memories you blew my way, I can’t seem to wipe it, I’m trying, it’s stuck, I don’t want to let go. I am ancient like that, a living fossil, stubborn and unmoving, time is the tide that washes me away fragment by fragment, soul and body, defeated but proud but defeated still, clinging to the fabric slowly unweaving, all that was is gone, and you go and I stay and I say goodbye standing atop a hill waving for you to come back but you disappear like a thread in the eye of a needle, you’ve moved on, they’ve moved on, everyone has moved on. The wind has blown, the ship has set, the ocean becomes blue beyond the curve of the horizon where a sunset turns the world aflame. The earth turns. The universe expands, and stretches into the nether-regions but I am here at the middle waiting for everything to collapse and come rushing back to where it once were, in my arms where we will all find the calm after this storm.