begun 6 February 2009
finished 9 February 2009, 12.21 p.m.
J,
Waiting today in that gloomy green hallway running up to low washed out white ceiling to be called by the physician, only to be told later on that I need to be checked by yet another doctor after two weeks of persistent pain, I dreaded being alone in waiting rooms even more, being alone everywhere.
The second doctor I saw today suggested I bring a companion along if I would undergo the procedure he was recommending. Actually, it was written on the paper he handed me, “Bring a companion.” “Do I really have to?” I asked, “Because I have no one to bring,” I continued in my head.
His soft voice and welcoming smile did little to calm my nerves. I was on the edge of my seat, whimpering in fear because I’m awfully scared of hospitals and being there on my own, choking back tears and biting into trembling lips.
Going alone is bad enough. Leaving alone, especially after being told you are sick, without a warm hand to comfort you or a ready shoulder to cry on to, is dispiriting in a way only callous neglect can be. I sat at the lobby weeping silently, this is how it will always be.
When did we start feeling incurably alone? When did we retreat to solitude and grasped it was where we belong? How did we come to be trapped in the hours that are unbearably ours and ours alone? I remember watching that beloved film lying to next someone, feeling the hours that separate us, the hours that would for always separate me.
I falter at every attempt to write. My core is bloated with all the things I long to tell you, of everything I desire to understand, but like my bloated insides belching the words come in spurts and spasms, hardly ever fully or freely.
Are we back to being 17, doubtful of what we previously believed and were told to be a praiseworthy gift? We merely lacked the discipline of good students, we argued. Do we, still?
It all started with loving books, you’re right. I devoured words as early as I was five, with hardbound tales for children and nothing nearly as astute or notable as your early literature of Hugo, Shakespeare and Poe. I was self-educated on Archie comics, Sweet Valley High, Chicken Soup for the Soul. I borrowed my elders’ Sheldon, Steel and McNaught, whose covers said they were inappropriate for my age, but from whose graphic adult content I was never disallowed.
I preferred to read whatever book I could get my hands on during recess, while in class, on the way home. I certainly was the only one in a class of 50 who enjoyed making book reports.
It was in sophomore year when I saw a classmate reading a book about vampires. I was instantly fascinated and borrowed the novel entitled The Vampire Lestat, about a frivolous, rock-star vampire who indulges on his immortality. I couldn’t go back to the books I read before that momentous point; I wouldn’t touch them. I could only imagine the heat of New Orleans, the murkiness of its dark swamp, the ghosts that hid behind the columns and walls of its rundown mansions, the tantalizing prospect of never-ending tragedy.
I feasted on Anne Rice’s vampires and witches. I fell in love with Louis, my fragile Louis who courted death but found it to be nothing. Love doomed them; redemption eluded them. Everyone was alone in mortality and eternity – an idea that irrevocably stirred restlessness in me.
No one shared the same overwhelming affinity to this fiction until I met you – we were 17. We weren’t always together, were we? We may have drifted apart in the course of four years in college. Yet somehow we found each other over the years.
Acing our creative writing course on sex and writing was vindication. It reaffirmed our fragile desire of really being born to write. How telling was it of our sexuality, our fears at 18? You wrote: “He said he loved me. But love had nothing to do with what took place during and after our affair. Saul was neither shallow nor deep. He was just a man.” We all have our Sauls.
I wrote again. A deluge of words flowed from my mind and filled the screen. I wrote my non-fiction and journalistic essays. Receiving encouraging words and praise along the way convinced me that I will write forever.
I described you as lost. Were you offended? You were out of reach, out of sync. But you were somewhere.
He did not support my writing nor appreciated it. I fell for him because he was an artist. “UP boy,” I used to call him. I remember one Sunday long ago, I dropped by the office to get copies of my first published newspaper articles (about Ballet Philippines and a sport that was supposed to be a bigger hit than badminton but didn’t quite take off) on my way to see him. My name was on print, imagine, and I wanted to show him. I handed him the paper immediately – imagine my name on print! He gave it a brief glance and put it aside. I was a young, barely-out-of-high-school teen when I fell for him. I thought we had so many things in common, but I started to grow up and he stayed the him I knew when we first met. Being taken for granted marked most of the five years we were together, a recurring theme in my subsequent relationships. Is that inescapable?
It was amid the cool water, azure sky and glistening sand of Palawan that I met him, a photographer, writer, geek. He found my old blog, read my stories and said, “I want more,” quoting Claudia which sent unsettling shivers down my spine for aside from you and me I didn’t know anyone who could. His skin gave off an intoxicating subtle fruity scent. He was the one I would have married at the drop of a hat, I told you. But I didn’t have the balls to leave a rocky relationship. I consoled myself quite stupidly with the cliché that if it’s for you, you’ll still get it in the end. What moron would promote such passivity? I waited for another chance years later. I only had one and I passed up on it.
Darkness descended since and never quite lifted. We breathed Murakami, found solace in his world of alienation, melancholia and self-destruction. We could have lived there. We would have belonged.
A concerned friend told me recently to stay away from my dark books until I get well. The only thing the four doctors I’ve seen agreed on is stress likely triggered my physical ailments and continues to exacerbate them. No, my books don’t stress me out but they do reinforce the sadness – nothing that getting up every day doesn’t accomplish as well. My friend added, don’t let it get to you too much. But, as I told another friend, I only experience a pureness of feeling in the company of my dark books. I identified with Rice’s inherently tragic immortals, Murakami’s despairing isolation, Gaiman’s brooding Dreamworld, Eugenides’ virgin suicides, Marquez’s compounded solitude. Their words shake me to the core – as yours do.
People remark about how I only write sad stories here. Try writing about happy moments, they say. I can’t, for the life of me. I can’t immortalize joy; I can’t even make it last for real.
In the two years I was in a relationship, I couldn’t write one word. It was far from having a dose of daily bliss, but it was something that distracted me from grave contemplation. Loneliness lingers while, as you phrased, loving, connecting, reconnecting and gathering memories with someone, not just after.
We were overly incompatible. I convinced myself it would work because we were too different from each other. It only bred frustration. There was too much uncomfortable silence and immense disconnection between two people in the same room. I’d wait out the end, I said. But I already started on a different road and the end was the ugliest I’ve seen.
After three years I picked up where I left off – I wrote again. And I write still.
He came by accident and left wreckage in his wake. But I was on a high for a time. I convinced myself, again, it would be worth it. Did I tell you that he read to me? On a warm, lazy afternoon out of town, he asked to see the book I was reading, Rice’s Memnoch the Devil. He read to me how the devil recounted the Creation. Lend it to me, he said. He shared with me his music and vices in moments I knew wouldn’t last. I had to escape him. Escape wasn’t the answer, I knew that, but I couldn’t stay in the same room, hear the same sounds, breathe the same air.
I didn’t escape completely. Someone followed. He asked me to take a chance. I don’t regret that I did because we make each other happy in spite of the evident complications. No matter how happy we are or how much we try, 15 years of history set us apart. It will end too, however. He, too, will leave. Everyone does.
I wish I could say the happiness compensates for the pain. It may but what it can’t outweigh is the hope you lost, the belief that words are said with sincerity and truth. I wish I could take the high road and see the good in the world in spite of experiencing over and over that no matter how much you love, how much of yourself you give, it’s not enough to be loved back. It’s never enough not to be left.
I can’t comprehend where people so desolate, deprived and pained draw hope from, or why they bother to. What I know is each time I allow myself to hope even a little it burns me. Perhaps I am a pessimist by choice, only because I know first hand that the alternative is much more cruel. It’s brave to take chances but, for a change, it would be nice to have someone take a chance with you. When you’re sitting on the edge of a bridge with someone who promised you’d jump together, it would be nice to know for certain you wouldn’t fall into the cold water alone. I don’t know how to swim after all.
How long have we fantasized of running away? How many nights did we try to escape, how many sunrises did we not want to face on our own? I don’t seek to run away from loneliness; it’s in me. If I run away, I run off with it.
I am lost. And you perfectly know that.
All the things I sought out to do – be in graduate school, write professionally or creatively – have become pointless. And failing in them is making me more hopeless. I go through the motions each day feeling emptier and emptier. What is it like to have someone, something to live for, do you remember?
Accumulated history and baggage have grown unbearable. I long to run away from everything. I have to know I can let go.
I would not dare fancy the idea that anyone would notice my absence and go through the trouble of looking for me. That’s why I want to run away, I guess. Being gone or staying would make no difference to the rest of the world. I will, at best, be a casualty of memory.
What does it truly feel to be gone? I long to know if it would make a difference, in me especially.
We never talked regularly when you were still living here, nor did we write each other frequently after you left for NYC. But why do you know me, why do you get me? Is it because we were born just a day apart?
Know that I am grateful. You are the only one who made me feel I am here because you understand – and I never had to ask.
I have to go now. You know why.
S
You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.
-- Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
finished 9 February 2009, 12.21 p.m.
J,
Waiting today in that gloomy green hallway running up to low washed out white ceiling to be called by the physician, only to be told later on that I need to be checked by yet another doctor after two weeks of persistent pain, I dreaded being alone in waiting rooms even more, being alone everywhere.
The second doctor I saw today suggested I bring a companion along if I would undergo the procedure he was recommending. Actually, it was written on the paper he handed me, “Bring a companion.” “Do I really have to?” I asked, “Because I have no one to bring,” I continued in my head.
His soft voice and welcoming smile did little to calm my nerves. I was on the edge of my seat, whimpering in fear because I’m awfully scared of hospitals and being there on my own, choking back tears and biting into trembling lips.
Going alone is bad enough. Leaving alone, especially after being told you are sick, without a warm hand to comfort you or a ready shoulder to cry on to, is dispiriting in a way only callous neglect can be. I sat at the lobby weeping silently, this is how it will always be.
When did we start feeling incurably alone? When did we retreat to solitude and grasped it was where we belong? How did we come to be trapped in the hours that are unbearably ours and ours alone? I remember watching that beloved film lying to next someone, feeling the hours that separate us, the hours that would for always separate me.
I falter at every attempt to write. My core is bloated with all the things I long to tell you, of everything I desire to understand, but like my bloated insides belching the words come in spurts and spasms, hardly ever fully or freely.
Are we back to being 17, doubtful of what we previously believed and were told to be a praiseworthy gift? We merely lacked the discipline of good students, we argued. Do we, still?
It all started with loving books, you’re right. I devoured words as early as I was five, with hardbound tales for children and nothing nearly as astute or notable as your early literature of Hugo, Shakespeare and Poe. I was self-educated on Archie comics, Sweet Valley High, Chicken Soup for the Soul. I borrowed my elders’ Sheldon, Steel and McNaught, whose covers said they were inappropriate for my age, but from whose graphic adult content I was never disallowed.
I preferred to read whatever book I could get my hands on during recess, while in class, on the way home. I certainly was the only one in a class of 50 who enjoyed making book reports.
It was in sophomore year when I saw a classmate reading a book about vampires. I was instantly fascinated and borrowed the novel entitled The Vampire Lestat, about a frivolous, rock-star vampire who indulges on his immortality. I couldn’t go back to the books I read before that momentous point; I wouldn’t touch them. I could only imagine the heat of New Orleans, the murkiness of its dark swamp, the ghosts that hid behind the columns and walls of its rundown mansions, the tantalizing prospect of never-ending tragedy.
I feasted on Anne Rice’s vampires and witches. I fell in love with Louis, my fragile Louis who courted death but found it to be nothing. Love doomed them; redemption eluded them. Everyone was alone in mortality and eternity – an idea that irrevocably stirred restlessness in me.
No one shared the same overwhelming affinity to this fiction until I met you – we were 17. We weren’t always together, were we? We may have drifted apart in the course of four years in college. Yet somehow we found each other over the years.
Acing our creative writing course on sex and writing was vindication. It reaffirmed our fragile desire of really being born to write. How telling was it of our sexuality, our fears at 18? You wrote: “He said he loved me. But love had nothing to do with what took place during and after our affair. Saul was neither shallow nor deep. He was just a man.” We all have our Sauls.
I wrote again. A deluge of words flowed from my mind and filled the screen. I wrote my non-fiction and journalistic essays. Receiving encouraging words and praise along the way convinced me that I will write forever.
I described you as lost. Were you offended? You were out of reach, out of sync. But you were somewhere.
He did not support my writing nor appreciated it. I fell for him because he was an artist. “UP boy,” I used to call him. I remember one Sunday long ago, I dropped by the office to get copies of my first published newspaper articles (about Ballet Philippines and a sport that was supposed to be a bigger hit than badminton but didn’t quite take off) on my way to see him. My name was on print, imagine, and I wanted to show him. I handed him the paper immediately – imagine my name on print! He gave it a brief glance and put it aside. I was a young, barely-out-of-high-school teen when I fell for him. I thought we had so many things in common, but I started to grow up and he stayed the him I knew when we first met. Being taken for granted marked most of the five years we were together, a recurring theme in my subsequent relationships. Is that inescapable?
It was amid the cool water, azure sky and glistening sand of Palawan that I met him, a photographer, writer, geek. He found my old blog, read my stories and said, “I want more,” quoting Claudia which sent unsettling shivers down my spine for aside from you and me I didn’t know anyone who could. His skin gave off an intoxicating subtle fruity scent. He was the one I would have married at the drop of a hat, I told you. But I didn’t have the balls to leave a rocky relationship. I consoled myself quite stupidly with the cliché that if it’s for you, you’ll still get it in the end. What moron would promote such passivity? I waited for another chance years later. I only had one and I passed up on it.
Darkness descended since and never quite lifted. We breathed Murakami, found solace in his world of alienation, melancholia and self-destruction. We could have lived there. We would have belonged.
A concerned friend told me recently to stay away from my dark books until I get well. The only thing the four doctors I’ve seen agreed on is stress likely triggered my physical ailments and continues to exacerbate them. No, my books don’t stress me out but they do reinforce the sadness – nothing that getting up every day doesn’t accomplish as well. My friend added, don’t let it get to you too much. But, as I told another friend, I only experience a pureness of feeling in the company of my dark books. I identified with Rice’s inherently tragic immortals, Murakami’s despairing isolation, Gaiman’s brooding Dreamworld, Eugenides’ virgin suicides, Marquez’s compounded solitude. Their words shake me to the core – as yours do.
People remark about how I only write sad stories here. Try writing about happy moments, they say. I can’t, for the life of me. I can’t immortalize joy; I can’t even make it last for real.
In the two years I was in a relationship, I couldn’t write one word. It was far from having a dose of daily bliss, but it was something that distracted me from grave contemplation. Loneliness lingers while, as you phrased, loving, connecting, reconnecting and gathering memories with someone, not just after.
We were overly incompatible. I convinced myself it would work because we were too different from each other. It only bred frustration. There was too much uncomfortable silence and immense disconnection between two people in the same room. I’d wait out the end, I said. But I already started on a different road and the end was the ugliest I’ve seen.
After three years I picked up where I left off – I wrote again. And I write still.
He came by accident and left wreckage in his wake. But I was on a high for a time. I convinced myself, again, it would be worth it. Did I tell you that he read to me? On a warm, lazy afternoon out of town, he asked to see the book I was reading, Rice’s Memnoch the Devil. He read to me how the devil recounted the Creation. Lend it to me, he said. He shared with me his music and vices in moments I knew wouldn’t last. I had to escape him. Escape wasn’t the answer, I knew that, but I couldn’t stay in the same room, hear the same sounds, breathe the same air.
I didn’t escape completely. Someone followed. He asked me to take a chance. I don’t regret that I did because we make each other happy in spite of the evident complications. No matter how happy we are or how much we try, 15 years of history set us apart. It will end too, however. He, too, will leave. Everyone does.
I wish I could say the happiness compensates for the pain. It may but what it can’t outweigh is the hope you lost, the belief that words are said with sincerity and truth. I wish I could take the high road and see the good in the world in spite of experiencing over and over that no matter how much you love, how much of yourself you give, it’s not enough to be loved back. It’s never enough not to be left.
I can’t comprehend where people so desolate, deprived and pained draw hope from, or why they bother to. What I know is each time I allow myself to hope even a little it burns me. Perhaps I am a pessimist by choice, only because I know first hand that the alternative is much more cruel. It’s brave to take chances but, for a change, it would be nice to have someone take a chance with you. When you’re sitting on the edge of a bridge with someone who promised you’d jump together, it would be nice to know for certain you wouldn’t fall into the cold water alone. I don’t know how to swim after all.
How long have we fantasized of running away? How many nights did we try to escape, how many sunrises did we not want to face on our own? I don’t seek to run away from loneliness; it’s in me. If I run away, I run off with it.
I am lost. And you perfectly know that.
All the things I sought out to do – be in graduate school, write professionally or creatively – have become pointless. And failing in them is making me more hopeless. I go through the motions each day feeling emptier and emptier. What is it like to have someone, something to live for, do you remember?
Accumulated history and baggage have grown unbearable. I long to run away from everything. I have to know I can let go.
I would not dare fancy the idea that anyone would notice my absence and go through the trouble of looking for me. That’s why I want to run away, I guess. Being gone or staying would make no difference to the rest of the world. I will, at best, be a casualty of memory.
What does it truly feel to be gone? I long to know if it would make a difference, in me especially.
We never talked regularly when you were still living here, nor did we write each other frequently after you left for NYC. But why do you know me, why do you get me? Is it because we were born just a day apart?
Know that I am grateful. You are the only one who made me feel I am here because you understand – and I never had to ask.
I have to go now. You know why.
S
You don’t have to stay anywhere forever.
-- Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
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