Minutes from now

Instead of wasting my time waiting for my pdf reader installer (or whatever it’s called) to finish downloading and before I continue writing my paper on the ancient Kingdom of Ayutthaya, I might as well leave some thoughts here.

I’ll be spending the rest of my night later evaluating essays on the history of several ancient Southeast Asian kingdoms, writing about them, drafting a proposal for a paper on modern Vietnam, and reading a sampling of poems I will discuss with my students tomorrow. It’s a bit frustrating sometimes when I feel that I am not and cannot maximize my potentials in doing any of my endeavors because there simply isn’t enough time. I hope there’d more time for sleep, more time to read, more time to be quiet, more time to slow down, more time to do things necessary for a functioning human to live normally, but as is apparent, time is too expensive, too short, to elusive, too fleeting.

I am thankful the download time for this file takes 18 minutes; had it not been for the slow internet connection, I would not have found this time to write here, check my facebook, and forget about the tons of papers I’m going to face minutes from now.

Six minutes to go.

Five minutes… (these dots are calming)

Four minutes… (‘dots’ sounds a lot better than ellipsis).

Three minutes…

Two minutes… (this is starting to get boring).

One minute…

.

 

 

A night on the roof deck

It was like the last time, we both ended up spending time on the roof deck, only this time we did not swim because the air was too cold, the water even colder. Instead we sat on a quiet corner and talked about how small we were compared to the tall buildings surrounding us, what lives those people in those lighted boxes live, where we’re heading.

Finding peace in the middle of the city, feeling the unusually cool breeze coming from EDSA, sitting next to the person dearest to me were more than what I could ask for that night.

It took the person I love most to make me realize how low I’ve dipped. And the realization came too late.

I already lost the person forever.

For long I have been convincing myself that going through change is a slow, walk-in-the-park process, where I take my time and I change like the seasons, in an almost natural pace.

But permanent and meaningful changes occur like a revolution. I will not afford losing the people I love in the future because I simply can’t. It’s sad to be left. My young and profligate self dies today.

This post is a manifesto, a declaration that from today on, I’ll value my words and stop creating lies to cover the lies I’ve concocted previously.

It’s painful to realize that a relationship is not all about love. It is about a careful and intricate admixture of commitment, patience, humility, and honesty. In the future, when I fall in love, I’ll fall with all these virtues. But while it is painful, it proved painfully effective in making me understand its true value.

I was given a chance to sincerely love, but I fucked the chance because I thought to love is the only thing that is required of me. I regret my naivete, my selfishness, my being an asshole.

January 9, 2012

I have not seen you only for a week now, but it felt like a lifetime has already passed. It was as if I was back to where I was before I met you. No, even worse. Multiply that misery and loneliness by a hundred and have it squared, no, cubed, no, multiply it by infinity. And it would still feel a lot worse. Nobody told me it would be this hard. I thought I would survive it unscathed, but I was proved wrong. I thought I would move on quickly, but it was something I was not prepared and will never be prepared. I have finally arrived at this point in my life where I have fallen so deeply, escaping from it is unthinkable. For the first time in my life I have been crazy in love. I’d go mad thinking about a future spent alone or with somebody else and not you.

You gave me so many reasons to be happy. In a year of us together, I knew I was the happiest man in the world. There was no day that passed without me being thankful to God that He has given me somebody so beautiful I’d find myself at awe looking at you and your gentle face, breathing lightly while you sleep in my arm every night. You have made me a man so complete I dared not ask for more lest God takes you away from me.

Ours was so beautiful. So beautiful I thought something like ours could exist only in fiction. But exist it did. I dared sneak more and He unabashedly took you away. Your absence and silence jolted me. They killed me. Seeing you drift so quickly was too painful to bear. All my intellectualizing and liberal shit meant nothing when you went away. They are mere abstractions. Your absence is concrete, experiential; the pain I felt when you left me was not surreal. It was so real.

All of a sudden tomorrow did not look as inviting; the future did not anymore hold its promises; life became a bore. These past days, I’d drag myself to work, not finish my meal, and the city looked all the grayer and sadder. It was like running toward nowhere. I lost all the desire to run or walk. Because where I am now is nowhere.

And this paradox brought by love, hadn’t I reminded myself not to be smitten, is consuming me.

Rational thinking has deserted me completely. I cannot give you a logical reason why you should consider coming back to me and give me a chance. The memories we made being together for a year, pity for a wretched man; I cannot think of any decent reason, Babe. But I remain hopeful.  You may have lost your faith in me, lost hope that what we had could still be brought back, but I know that love’s still there. It’s the only thing my dear life holds on to now.

To you

I brought this to myself. I can never be sorrier.

I just miss you. In the whole universe.

 

Today*

We begin thinking about the future more, incessantly, when the present becomes shaky, that not even the certainty of the past can ensure that what will be tomorrow is the same as how yesterday’s tomorrow became moments ago.

I knew it was meant to be forever because I was hoping and praying for it to last that long or at least until the time my brain is still capable of processing perceptions, the beautiful feeling of love being one of them. But, we humans are too untrustworthy when it comes to our relationships, or maybe it’s just I. We humans are fickle when it comes to intimacy, or maybe it’s just I. How funny the word fickle sounds. I love the sound of capricious or vacillating, but I ended using “fickle”. It’s a linguistic mystery how this un-serious-sounding word is able to contain meanings far bigger than it, far blacker than it, or maybe it’s just I who has problems with clarity and telling the truth.

Today I did what I usually do minus that “inner happiness” that carries me or I carry, whichever way, around when my day begins to be unforgiving. My happiness hung onto something as wobbly as somebody else’s heart (and smile) which I never regretted. Now I am holding it in my hand not knowing what to do with it.

I am forcing myself not to believe that true happiness can only reside in the “narrowly escaping”, “hanging by the thread”, but it appears to me that it does. We humans are tragic beings because we are wired to seek happiness somewhere else, or maybe it’s just I.

http://everypersoninnewyork.blogspot.com

And for this, the happiest man in the world is somebody who knows with certainty that tomorrow, which will not truly come, will be his last. I know that my tomorrow will be followed by another tomorrow, and of course, another tomorrow. And I woe that it will certainly be just me, by myself.

I have not been alone for a long time, and it proves challenging to relearn it. I have totally believed in forever that I have completely forgotten how it is to be in solitude once again. Though I am not an old dog so I’ll definitely learn new tricks.

*My apologies for the turgidity of this prose.

Bukas

I have neglected this site for a month. And it’s bareness is telling. I’ll be posting something, soon. Tomorrow.

 

On laughing

I’m in the first semester of my second year in grad school. I do not  know whether this is doing me any good or I am ending up more confused than when I entered. I know that I am going somewhere, I should; I do not know, though, whether this somewhere is a place I want to be in hereupon. At so many points in the classes I am taking this semester  I would catch myself participating in esoteric discussions about topics I am clueless or talking about concerns of very little significance in my life. I even had moments in complete trance where I talked at length in class but had no idea what the words that come out from my mouth meant.

It’s funny.

I guess my then-unrealized sense of humor is now put into very good use these days. When people feel lost, they gather themselves together by laughing out loud at the cruel world before them. I just lost my compass, but I could only laugh at everything.

I am happier nowadays.

On the changes happening

None of us, not even the most free-living of souls, would want to remain in this sorry state for good, would not want to be domesticated and be sort of pinned down to the ground. Novelty can be fatiguing at certain points. We all want to go back to a place where there is a sense of order in things, where we all feel secure and warm and feel and see the beauty behind waking up the following day and the days that follow in the same bed next to the same person.

I spent the entire morning today in front of the tube, aimlessly switching channels to recuperate from the onslaught of the previous week. I attempted to deaden my mind’s incessant worryings about the approaching week through the nefariously deadening programs on cable TV. I found the Chinese comedy shows hilariously incomprehensible, Arirang interestingly odd, the Indian soap operas alluringly ostentatious, and the American game and talk shows exasperatingly stupid.

At lunch time, instead of going to the nearest McDonald branch, I put on my aging trainers and pumped iron until around two. Feeling bored doing the routines I’ve been doing for the past two weeks, I ran back home to GA under the glaring 2pm sun.

I phoned him to check if he was already awake, but it turned out he’s still lingering in his bed recovering from last night’s outing with his friends. So I took a quick shower, went to his place, and forced him out of it. I accompanied him to the nearest supermarket to do the grocery, buy some Christmas decors, and back to his place to give his cupboards some semblance of order.

Then we heard mass.

These past months I came to realize that the entire process of domestication, the giving in to the quotidian, is not that bad after all. We all have to eventually succumb to the predictable and the known because only in this way can we give ourselves a break from the aches of the punishing what-will-bes.

An old photo

Thanks to Facebook and its subscribers who almost instinctively upload pictures unearthed from their files or old family albums and tag everyone in the picture, I am happily reminded of how malnourished-looking I was when I was very young, how my older sister was much taller than I and darker-skinned, how my younger brother was so fat and cute, and, most importantly, how straight my hair was. It was shiny and straight then, now it’s nothing but frizzy and thick and can only be controlled by having it shaved too close to the scalp.

This picture was taken during a birthday party of my second cousin, the kid in blue shirt at the center of the picture. My sister and I always looked forward to his birthday because it meant balloons, spaghetti floating in sweet ketchup sauce, and lots of sweets and toys given away. Images of that party, far removed from my memory until now, is very vivid I can almost taste the fruit salad, pancit, and lechong baboy; hear the laughter of children my age and the conversations of adults; feel my childhood that passed me by so fleetingly.

And see the piercing look of my sister if she finds out this impertinence–my posting here of this horrifying reminder of a past best kept hidden in memory.