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.

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)