I fancy I'd write you letters. In long hand, like some distant lovers do in the old times. I fancy you'd keep it tucked in your weathered wallet, the creases permanent from the many times you have folded and unfolded it. I fancy you'd read it in bus stops, aboard the subway on your way to work, on midnights when sleep would not come.

But really, I fancy I'd write you letters, only so I can end it:



At your service,
or
At your disposal,

nothing invested nothing gained

You have joined the fleet of the ephemeral, and I have decided not to think of you. Save for the brief moments in the wake of delayed buses, the interval between thought and sleep when I see your face across me like an apparition; a dream.

All day I am a dead man walking, in this plastic suburbia where nothing means anything anymore. Where people knock and run, before I could even open the door. 

I make out from the void of nights that follow, a truth: everything is passing. But while there is a calmness in a still heart, a still heart is also a symptom to dying.

Why is it, I wonder, that I am drawn by the fleeting? Seduced by the enigmatic pull of anything that stays, if only to leave a little later. Seemingly pleased to the brim by momentary elation. And yet with one eye constantly open, fearing the shadows in the alley, the skeletons in the closet, the dreams tucked away in boxes, the vale of bottomless truths waiting to jump in and cut off this temporary, right down in the middle, where it seems to hurt the most.

But is it really too grave a crime to find life in the passing?

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.   

You nonexistent ghost of ideals: Toru, Romeo, Ren and Ted, all rolled into one that never came. Never will.

I am reminded by how close you are to the real thing. When out of longing, I trod your timeline like I would a bad dream. But here we are, farther than we were before we knew each other's existence.

I'd say I wish I'd never met you but I can't. Because truth is, I wish I'd known you more.

I’m calling dibs on the word apathy. Like how you once did with qualms. Qualms in bold letters. Qualms in italics. Qualms over the line, while faith lies under.

You have since moved on. Never looked back (or wrote, or called). I pried your drawers open, dug through your trash, read your letters and  turned your room upside down. Just so I could inherit qualms instead of being so certain.   

But now I’m apathy. No bold letters, no italics, no underline; just plain old feigned apathy.

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.

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. 

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.

it's discontent that lugs sleep away at night

It is easier to discover our soulmates in the guise of strangers.


It is easier when any attempt of the soul to connect is rejected by the obvious: distance. It is easier to abandon whatever physical pining one has amassed over the years of isolation this way. Also, this makes it easier not to get disappointed.

i fancy someone would come and say, “i found you.”

In this primordial game of hide and seek, I’ll be the one hiding. Anticipating the hints of hushed movements – tiptoes, a long inhale, detained exhale.

I fancy you’d come as a surprise. Just when I least expect you to. Just when I’m about to give up and put myself out there.

On bad days, like this one, I fear that you will not come. I fear that time will catch me behind a tree waiting for you when you do not in fact exist. Then I fancy that I do not give a damn.  But I always secretly do.