Back in business

Not that I have already fixed everything that needed fixing, but taking that hiatus was more difficult and mentally taxing than to just simply write my thoughts down meandering, unclear, or senselessly rambling they may be.  I finally ended a 10-month relationship. I am back to being single, officially back on a prowl, technically ready to do the deadly courtship dance, but I’ll let this exercise of the species pass for now. I badly need rest, I suppose. Physically, I am battered by a deluge of work that kept coming and that I have no will to say no. Mentally, I have completely run dry of any creative sap, barren. Emotionally, I am drained, but oddly, at peace with my self. I hope to begin writing soon, I mean writing at length, with much contemplation and hopefully this time, more reckless abandon.

Photo credit

What am I doing eating egg sandwiches alone in my room on a Friday night (when I am supposed to be partying, seizing life by its neck)

I boiled four eggs until I was certain they were hard enough that green copper compounds started to appear on the crust of the yolk in one of the eggs that burst; then I dunked them in cold water, peeled them, crushed them one by one using a fork, added in several spoonfuls of mayonnaise, and sprinkled a pinch of rock salt. I cut and folded the ingredients until the consistency of the coarse paste approached that of shit.

These special egg sandwiches were for my younger sister. Just after I cut the last loaf bread wedge, placed a liberal amount on it the shit-like egg sandwich spread I made, she texted me that she was on her way to attend her friend’s party. I said I’d wait, wanting to share to her the sandwiches I lovingly prepared for us; I just could not bring myself to say they’re made especially for her. I waited but eventually got tired of waiting, and alone, silently ate the sandwiches I made.

That evening, it was so quiet inside our room as if all the noise created by the world outside was barred by the concrete walls from reaching me. It was almost unbearably tranquil, punctuated only by the sound of spasmodic tubercular coughing I made. I waited for an hour until I could not anymore contain my hunger and my unvented angst then I began eating the bland-tasting sandwiches one by one, drowning the aftertaste with a liter of iced tea. Out of nowhere leitmotifs of my empty life flashed before me like how those Christian manuals distributed when I was in high school described it would be when the time comes for a Christian to meet God on the final judgment.

I felt like crying, nearly, but I held it back just in time to keep the entire scene from slipping into an unforgivable melodrama. I hate scenes that consider action more salient than characterization, but I gathered I have been placing too much emphasis on the characterization of an obviously uninteresting actor. Although the scene warranted melodrama, I was conscientious enough to retain a semblance of elegance and necessary good taste.

I guess I shall never be able to completely free myself from this biting emptiness. Sadness it was not, this I am quite certain of, only a seething hollowness that pays me unannounced visits whenever I wallow in my carefully-guarded solitude.

I am not particularly religious, neither am I spiritual as those people who see themselves as byproducts of modernity are more wont to choose to describe themselves. Being ‘spiritual’ is definitely more fashionable than being ‘religious’. The subtle differences in meaning between the two words blurred by overuse and compounded by my lack of interest in their nuances led me to irresponsibly mistake one for the other. But I am certain I am neither.

I get scared sometimes that while the entire world is going on its way like a hyperactive insomniac, endlessly turning like the rusty blades of the old fan in my room, I am being left stranded in my room making beautiful egg sandwiches for my sister who’s not coming.

I’ve been asking myself whether the decision to teach at the university in a small town in the province is going to be good for my soul. Now I am less sure of my answer. At 24, when I am supposed to be exploring the limits of the world and my soul, I catch myself standing, immobile on the same road. I attempted to console myself that at least I am happy doing something I am good at, but there are times when a consolation won’t suffice.

The object of being in this precarious stage of a person’s life, his 20-something phase, is not settling for comfortable and numbing happiness. It is going through that perilous journey, that although will leave me battle scarred, will someday lend me that easy, confident smile signifying a journey well-taken and difficult roads traversed.

This time, everything seems to be on a halt. Probably this explains the gnawing feeling of void.

I’ve been meaning to write a lengthy letter addressed to myself. But I keep on finding excuses to put it off, postponing it in as many times as the thought of writing surfaces because I have nothing much of substance to tell my tired self. If I were to write it, however, it would have to be a complaint letter written with all the bitterest sarcasm I can rally to use against myself.

And so, while I was eating those tasteless sandwiches and drinking that insipid iced tea, I arrived at a decision to give myself until the end of this year to finally conclude this overdue hiatus.

For the hiatus

I was absent for six days, and the five nights and six days felt almost like forever. I knew I badly needed rest from all the repeating and redundant pastiches of the academic life, and rest I got it. I felt readier, more poised this time to re-conquer the world.

Aside from another year added to my life (I just turned 24, but interestingly, my mind is telling me that I ought to think more like my age for once), I have a more even tan this time. How I regretted not having burned my skin even more. I want to be as dark as charcoal.

Thank to those who kept on reading and shared their thoughts here.

Gradually, then suddenly

This was Ernest Hemingway’s response when he was asked how man falls into the stupor of his mortality.

It is not so late in the evening, roughly 10 minutes to eleven, when the urge to device a plan for a perfect crime forces itself on my brain. I have no right to refuse; the only option I have is to succumb and to agree with whatever the mastermind of this crime directed me to do; I am a mere accomplice, after all.

I take a cup of brewed coffee, open the first chapter of part three of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and start to scribble the plan while simultaneously following the train of thoughts of the criminal who refuses to think of himself as a criminal, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the novel’s protagonist. I had a hiatus of several weeks in reading the rest of the novel after the feeling of weariness got the better of me. Now I’m back.

I start to write and to think about the next thoughts that come gushing from between my ears. The humidity in the atmosphere does not help; neither does the heat of this early March evening. The instant coffee solution, whose taste and supposed aroma I have a hard time distinguishing from an expensive brew from a high end coffee shop in Glorietta, hardly alleviates the wringing pain in my head. I might need another five cups in order to bring me back to my senses, which can also mean heart arrhythmia, or worse, a full blown myocardial infarction (I sound like a learned man in physiology and human anatomy. I’m far from being one).

I find my self suddenly standing up, opening the valve of the liquefied petroleum gas tank an arm length away from where I am seated, and lighting a cigarette stick. I am about to pull the rubber tube connecting the stove and the gas tank when a message alarm from my mobile brings me back to the now that I am beginning to forget to have existed. My idea of real time has been totally mixed up with the virtual-ness of the now that has existed even before the present came to life but a now that is already finished in the future.

It is a message sent by my mother asking about the health of his son who is living a solitary life in Manila. She has this way of saying her prayers for me through her messages that have gnawing effect in me. Mama thinks I am doing very well, that I am getting closer to my dreams each day. I’ve never told her how hard it is, that the errors I made are mounting.

I am unable to remember the perfect crime I originally devised per order of the mastermind whom I am yet to meet. Sleep is starting to assert it jurisdiction on me. I suspect sleep is the mastermind, although I am yet to gather enough evidence. For now what I only have are circumstantial evidence that implicate sleep based on the modus operandi that have been replicated more than fifty per cent of the time.

The death of Semyon Zharovitch Marmeladov after being run over by two horses with a carriage in front of Raskolnikov almost brought me to tears. How could life be so useless, so meaningless, so irrelevant, and so immaterial? If this is what life means, if this is where life is heading to, if this is all there is to life, then there is no use writing these thoughts, no use opening the valve of the LPG tank, no use lighting the cigarette, no use reading Dostoevsky, no use ending one’s life even.

The banality of life wears me.

I then rather fall in to the stupor of my mortality – in Hemingway’s words – gradually, then suddenly.