Some days are dreams you can't wait to wake up from. Days like this, it seems the only way to wake up is to sleep.

All want is to sleep. I want to sleep for a week, not talk to anyone, just shut my eyes and shut the world off for a week. I want to shut down. Complete silence. No questions. No voices both real and imagined telling me what I already know (1) I'm irresponsible (2) I have no idea where I'm going (3) I'm disappointing (4) the voices are right.

And worst of all - (5) I'm  unhappy. Not sad, just not happy.

homecoming

I am most awake, when the world is most asleep, at 2am. So here I am. 4 years later. Where did the time go?

Here, I last was 23. A version of myself some days I don't recognize. In two weeks, I will be 27. In a year, I will be married. Where did the time go?

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,

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. 

What pisses me indefinitely is that of late, I have lost all semblance of pride and/or self-importance. Walled myself instead, with insecurities. Almost always willing to beg my way into being a part of your life. Feeling as if I wouldn’t buy my way in just by being myself, or just by waiting. I disgust even myself.

And yet as soon as I am willing to walk away from both you and this ridiculous version of myself, you say something that brings me unimaginable tingling. I then hurry back to you, and for something so irritatingly simple, like ‘hi.’ 

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. 

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.