Save for far-fetched plans of escape conjured in the wee moments before sleep, nothing significant ever happens in this stepford-y suburbia. Sometimes, I catch glimpses of people slaving away in meager jobs they’ve been both stuck and contented in for years and I think to myself “this will not be me,” but I find small comfort from this intent to digress.

It is achingly honest to own up to the cliché: I have lost myself. Just yesterday, when I read through Random Muses and Nostalgia, I asked myself: what has become of her? When did I lose her? And how? And why?

But too often, I feel too sedated, too resigned to look for answers. And so I resort to think of things that are more practical (practical - something I vowed never to be during my days of staying hungry and staying foolish): finding a job that will pay the bills. 

some fragments, way overdue

of a love letter to the only place I'll ever love.

• Every dark corner; every rat-infested room, every peculiar scent I've long given up on knowing more about.
• Love. And all it's perils - including, but not limited to: drinking in midafternoons, lying in the middle of the road and rolling down hills completely sober, skipping philosophy classes to drink, reading Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and de Botton's Essays in Love umpteen times and everytime, misreading every line as a direct quotation from your own existential love life (or lack thereof).
• Coming home to a broken mirror with a note that says: I'm sorry, the mirror was fragile; just like me. - Chase
• Snow in the guise of kapok, foretelling the arrival of summer. Foreshadowing goodbyes.
• Poking my face between the pages of Sexing the Cherry in his presence, after he's trekked the Kanluran road to my apartment, to help me apply the feminist and marxist approach on the subversion of roles of de Botton's lovelorn characters. Darn it, he so smart.
• Hoard of extra mattresses, awaiting, often hoping for, the fleet of surprise guests (welcomed or otherwise).
• Closing down Faustina's, the muffled sounds of violin, five cups of cheap coffee after, "to love someone out of compassion means not really to love."

lately, all I've done is write you letters I've nowhere to send.

They say it’s always greener on this side of the universe. They forgot to tell you about the beast that kills dreams living under the fake grass. They didn’t tell you anything about hanging out inside your closet for silence, to muffle your cries between the clothes you have folded and refolded countless times for lack of better things to do. No, nobody said anything about the hollowness in your chest, like a scene from Death Becomes Her, except more real, and less funny. Like something has been ripped apart from your body. Your heart, was it? Your soul? Something. And you always feel like talking to someone, but there is often no one to talk to. And when there is, you find that the voice inside you had shrunk to the size of your heartbeat: close to nothing.

The second you locate the specific emotion amongst the terrible medley of melancholy, you find that none of your fingertips can feel and you wonder whether this is the only consolation of sadness: the chill in the wind that turns you numb.   

not again

An entire day and a few more hours away from closing the first month of this god-forsaken year, and already I can hear The Weepies singing. Not, in any way, a glorified chorus congratulatory of my achievements: having read 5 books, having gone this long without squandering money on clothes or on fattening myself, and having the audacity to reach the end of January alive. But monotonous – a first-rate mimic of an elegy.

After a series of years to which Not Your Year is my deathless anthem, it’s finally getting on my nerves. And if I find it in me to be bold, I just might do something about it.

a shot at subtlety

I mask you in metaphors, hoping to muster enough courage to read between the lines and flee. 


But even without the figures of speech, literally, I know the rhythmic beats that whip me bloodless. Even with feigned understanding, I catch the drift of the waves in your verses. I know from the waning sound of footsteps that you are attempting what I could not do: run away. 


But I am delusional, and my ears are plugged with dreams. 


And in the stillness of the flash between thought and sleep, I open you like a worn out paperback. I follow the lines with the point of my finger, pretending I could read you (at once dreading the worst: I can’t). Pretending I could continue pretending. But like you, I am masked in metaphors. And in the stillness of the flash between thought and sleep, I can only muster enough courage to confess: I am a phony.

When Mookie talks of trains that moan of phantom hunger, I think of you.

But do not be mistaken, for you are not that train. You are the train expressly slipping through unseen tracks. Eluding so fast, preventing me a sight. What I catch, if I catch any, are the howls. The sound of all that rifles through and does not stay. And in the nights of sleepless anticipation, and the mornings after of defeat, I hear your howls again. Only fainter. Only signaling remoteness. 


And alone in the platform that binds us, I fear that I have once again missed the train. 

I’m sorry I snapped.

No, I’m not allergic to your affections. It just feels wrong to be given something I cannot return. It feels awfully lot like stealing. I’m sorry. Years of friendship, down the drain just so I can save face and tell the world I didn’t let you hang in there. That I didn’t graze your healing scar just because I couldn’t stand to lose you.

This is my saving grace. I sacrificed you for you. 

gloom is on loop today

It feels infinite, this heartache.

But I'll brave through this night like I will the next 364 nights. Goodnight.