Promises, Promises

After watching John Carter on Star Movies, I now desperately want to be in another planet, preferrably somewhere without politics or kingdoms fighting for full reign. But this is really because tomorrow's Monday and two days of rest and leisure will never be enough to provide a satisfying escape from stress.

Today, I tried to overcome myself and won. I woke up early to go to church, something I haven't done in months. In one of my previous posts, I made mention of a covenant that I broke some four years ago. I made that covenant in that church. And you know what people say about getting lost, you always have to go back where it all started.

I made a promise to God, you see. I prayed about this man I had been in love with since my geeky high school days. I told God that if only He could make this man love me back, I would love him for the rest of my life. You have to understand that at that moment, I have never been so sure about anything in my entire life. I frequented this place countless times, always praying for the same thing. After a year, God answered. It was a yes. What I thought was an impossibility, happened for real. Just like in the movies. And just as I had promised, I did my best to love this man in the best way I know how. He, in turn, learned to love me as much I loved him. I would like to write that we lived happily ever after.

However, he left. And when he did, I realized that I had allowed my life to revolve around him and us too much that I didn't know what to do with myself after he was gone. I felt as if something inside me died. I was mourning for someone who was still alive, but some five continents too far. I struggled to get used to his absence. I thought it was going to work. I wanted it to.

I guess subconsciously I was lonely. And I failed to recognize that. Or even dared admit. He was doing his best to keep in touch, but for me, it just wasn't enough. That had been my mistake. Nothing was ever enough for me. I was always looking for something I couldn't quite figure out, as if the world was always depriving me of something. So I broke my promise. And after that, nothing in my life was ever the same again. Even I wasn't quite the person I used to be.

I guess some people just grow apart, either by choice, circumstances or force. I don't know which one of these hit me. Perhaps all three. The bottomline is that I hurt him. Since then, I have never loved anybody else with all of me. Not with the same passion, intensity or naivety. He was my first love, after all. I guess that's the thing with first love, everybody else falls to being second best, even if you actually end up with them.

So do I regret what I did in the past? Yes and no. I wish I didn't have to hurt him. But I also wouldn't want to change a thing. I believe all those choices I made, even those that I'm not proud of, led me to this. All of them happened necessarily because I needed to be here, and he needed to be there. I needed to be who I now am and he needed to be who he is now.  Just as Eve had to bite that fruit. It may be her fault, but nothing else could have put the universe in motion. It had to be done.

I still take responsibility for what I did. My guilt is deeply rooted. It's like a heavy chain that I carry around my feet as I try to move forward. This is why I refuse to get married. I know it's never going to work out with anybody else.

Today, I started to make ammends. I told God that in exchange for the promise that  I dared break, I am choosing the path of least resistance. I wouldn't make a move. I would let him guide me. He could take me anywhere he wants me to be. If I am meant to be alone forever, so be it. I suck at making my own decisions, I know that now. This time, His will be done.

Dear Phantom, How Dare You Show Yourself To Me

A few weeks back, I wrote about this classmate of  mine who I have codenamed Phantom because of his annoying habit of randomly getting in and out of my grad school life. I let him occupy  this tiny space in my conscious mind because I thought he was gone. Forever. Today, I feel cheated.

You moron.

After class, I rushed out of the room to make an important call. I was walking towards the canteen area, with my phone pressed on my right ear, pissed that no one was answering. And then there you were. You were clutching a hamburger then you looked up. You know how someone looks at you and his eyes twinkle in recognition? That was it. That was how you looked at me. I didn't stop walking or dropped my phone upon realizing that it was indeed you. That movie-inspired bullshit doesn't really happen for real. I continued walking, but I was wide-eyed. It felt as if something just opened up inside me; just as you open a bottle of Coke and all the bubbles race to the surface and fizz. I suddenly felt so happy. My soul surely liked your presence. It must have recognized you from a previous lifetime.

You can cue the retarded smile at this point. I couldn't help it. I was reprimanding myself for being so junior high.But what the hell. I thought I was never going to see you. I was thinking that  this was enough. But as I was about to leave the campus, I saw you again. No, I sensed you. I was texting then somebody brushed past me. I knew it was you, but I had to look back to be sure. I was right. See? I can sense you now. You have managed to penetrate the walls I have built to ward off people like you. Today, we crossed paths three times. When I met up with a friend, she told me to ask for your name, should there be a fourth time. I said I'd rather not.

It was really good to see you. And to me that was enough. I don't even want to entertain the thought, the possibility. Like I said, enjoy the questions, bask in the uncertainty of it all. Attempting to go beyond this is like trying to capture the sunset in crescendo through your smartphone. You simply cannot. All its glory can't possibly be enclosed within the four corners of a photograph.

Just as you don't need to own everything you love.
 
 Thank you dear Phantom for being the rescue from a day that almost seems like all the other days. Thank you for breaking the humdrum of my otherwise boring life. See you in the next Saturdays.

Vertigo

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Writes Neruda, no less. I just feel like reciting this poem tonight, although I'm not exactly sad. As I try to figure out how I really feel tonight, I am reminded of a part in Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, wherein he tries to define vertigo. The dictionary defines it as a condition in which one feels dizzy or disoriented, especially when looking down from a great height. Or simply, the fear of falling. However, Kundera insisted that vertigo is somewhat more complex than that. He said it's actually the fear of wanting to fall.

To quote the Hedonist, "Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

This is best thing I could come up with in my desire to express how I feel tonight, although I wish to personalize. I do not have this longing to fall; intead, I feel this hunger to be lonely, to be sad, to bask in my solitude which I find delicious. I know it sounds un-poetic but the word must really be delicious. I do not like to betray my Muse.

I am, in a way, suffering from vertigo. I would love to take that fall. I am not afraid of tumbling down, breaking some bones or even dying. But I do fear this desire. It somehow tells me that maybe, I have gotten really crazy.

Beer Dreams

I'm craving for a bottle of ice-cold beer.

I better put this on my bucket list. Blog as the bitter aftertaste of premium beer slowly spreads across your palate. That would be a very satisfying moment. I can even visualize how I would shiver a little and shake my head both in disgust and sheer pleasure of it.

The truth is that I should be sleeping right now. I'm getting more and more sleep deprived each day and that could really turn me into an overstressed mental wreck. And please add to that how I manage to look like shit every single day. I haven't brushed my hair since summer and this has successfully given birth to a new breed of dandruff. I got two huge, drying zits on my left cheek and some whiteheads here and there. My body's been seriously reduced into a skeletal model. Worse, I don't care. Or better yet, I do not have the time and energy to give a rat's arse about how I look right now. I do not intend to attract men, anyway. That is one factor, although it's absolutely stupid. You just don't doll up for men who would eventually come out of their closets and admit they're gay. That is absurd.

I want to feel and be beautiful for myself. I want to stop thinking about other people for once and just do whatever the hell I want. I worry too much. Perhaps I really need to take a break...And not feel guilty about being unproductive. I have turned myself into a working machine; I am thisclose to drafting a syllabus or, hell, a whole curriculum on how I should be living my life right now. I am too occupied. I don't even have enough space for me, if you know what I'm talking about.

The people I work with often assume that this was brought about by the break-up I had two months ago (yes, the longest time I've been single in seven years!), but break-ups don't have that kind of depressing effect on me. And I do not mean to brag, because that's not something to be proud about. It's a curse. My curse after I dared break a covenant I made with God. But that's another story.

Again, I should be sleeping right now. Tomorrow may be Friday, but in my line of work, any day is just as good as Monday. Happy dreaming.

Drunken Nights

There's drunk driving, drunk dancing or singing, drunk texting... And then there's drunk blogging. And I did it first.

I'd probably be deleting this tomorrow morning, as soon as I sober up. But hell, Edgar Allan Poe created his best works while under the influence. So who am I to fight the urge?

I am not really drunk, just a little tispy. I have earned this tolerance of alcohol over the past years. Being intrapersonally intelligent, if I may add, helps control your tongue in the presence of liquor as well. I have definitely learned to shut the fuck up.

This reminds me of the many drinking sessions in the past in which my then boyfriends would suddenly tell me that I have had enough because I was already getting annoyingly and incontrollably talkative. I, in turn, would stupidly wonder how the hell they knew.

The thing about being drunk is really not about letting the moron in you shine, but having an excellent excuse to say what you want to say wherever and whenever you want it. Alcohol fogs the logic. It puts you in the perfect stance to voice out the thoughts that should have been in the brain recycle bin. It liberates.

Saying all of these while alcohol is swiftly taking over me is like deciding to cheat on my partner. It's like spilling somebody else's secrets. I really am not making sense here.

I would love to talk about love right now. Love seems to be an ideal topic in times like these, but I'd rather not, lest I be accused of being old-fashioned and too predictable. Let me just say that love, as proven by all the other drunks that have attempted to define it before me, always , always, looks more astonishing when lighted by uncorrupted honesty and unadulterated truth. In human terms, it is best expressed when one is unapologetically true to what he or she feels at any given moment. Such as when one is awfully drunk.

I am watching The Notebook right now. You know how some movies could make you believe you can marry Ryan Gosling...

I should get some sleep. Really, I should. But I do hope you had the initiative to ignore some words I might have misspelled along the way.

Dear Phantom

I should have asked for your name.

I thought about this as I made my way across the open court, crushing some dried leaves as I sluggishly walked on. My shoulders drooped and it felt as if my sling bag had suddenly weighed a million tons more. You were not there.

Part of me would like to give myself a good spanking for, would you believe, not doing anything about it when I had a chance and the other is still rolling its eyes in disappointment while asking, "Are you kidding me?"

When I decided not to get married, I realized that the root does not lie in my incapacity to love but in my inabilty to stay committed. Whenever I find myself in a long-term relationship, there would always come a point in which I would feel as if my life is about to be contained within the four walls of a box and thus the urge to wriggle out of my would-be cage would persist.

I've read once that in this world, females are born to be farmers. They plow the field, plant seeds and nurture them. They are the soil from which life is sowed and reaped. Males, on the other hand, are hunters. They must leave and brave the perils of the wild in order to provide. Such is their task.

That is the problem. In this life, I am the hunter. And what I have realized from experience is that when you assume the role of a hunter, the other person, as if by nature, automatically becomes a farmer. This shift, much to my disillusionment, becomes inevitable.

This leads me to think that, perhaps, what I need is another hunter. This sounds ideal. But then the skeptic in me would say that, knowing the person that I am, the setup might just lead to a clash of egos. I am better off alone, really.

I have been arguing with myself a lot lately. But as they say, it is not always about finding the answers, but learning to enjoy the questions.

So with this, I guess you would remain to be a question. Your name, your age, your job, everything. And I would enjoy spending the following Saturdays trying to imagine how you'd look without your square framed glasses or how that boyish grin of yours would always disarm me and how you have absolutely no idea about it. Expect me as well to replay the only conversation I had with you which lasted for about 40 seconds. Or that amusing moment when you were about to go out of the room then all of a sudden you turned around,  reminded me of a paper that needs to be submitted the following week and strode off. I stood there, dumbfounded. I went down the stairs with this retarded smile on my face, I tell you.

And then yesterday, I scanned the room hoping to find you. You were not there. I sank back at my chair, disappointed. I felt like a stupid adolescent in her mid-twenties. I listened to the two-hour lecture with your absence at the back of my head. You were gone, just like that. Just like when you strode off after reminding me of that paper.

Was I in love then? No, I don't think so. If I were, you would be virtually stalked by now. I just love the idea of you being a phantom. It somehow fulfills this desire to be deprived of something I think I would like to have. My thirst for challenge. The thrill of the chase. Whatever you would like to call it.

I am thinking now that perhaps I was right not to have asked for your name. Unmasking you would have diminished this desire altogether. Remember that there are some things that are meant to be admired only from afar.

I see us  aboard a train one of these days. And I am certain, you would be the man staring at me from the other side.

At Random

I lack sleep. And this is making me forgetful. Or more forgetful than I already am, to be exact. I have dark circles around my eyes and my weight is ever diminishing. I am unhealthy and I know that. My friends bug me to eat more than I can take every damn time and they never fail to remind me just how malnourished I look these days. They even went as far as turning my weight issues into their personal project: the operation make chang gain weight. I am so touched, really. 

Work eats up most of my time. Because of this, I consciously make time for things that would pluck me out of robot mode. I went to a bar with friends two nights ago and had the time of my life. A bartender tried to hit on me and I just had to mentally laugh. I just celebrated my first successful month as a single, unattached yet totally happy lady. Clearly, these people don't know what they're getting at. 

I would like to ramble some more but sleep is luring me to its den. Good night, folks!