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.

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.   

wake up to the sound of your fleeting heart

I’ve been having the strangest dreams of late. I’ve been dreaming that I was home, and everyone was throwing me a despedida. Twasn’t at all that strange if I dreamt of it but once; however, it has been 6 days in a row today.

Sometimes, I wake completely at a loss, wondering where I am and whose bed I am sleeping in. And then the truth registers: I am no longer home.  

Absolution

Was organizing my documents at the office today, and found this collecting cobwebs in one of the folders months after Given Grace's death:

You will fall in love. Almost inevitably, as the heat of summer gives way to monsoon. He will not be tall, dark and handsome, like you were made to believe. But you will love him anyway – he who you shall never meet.

You will bleed, and be happy you did. A stain of pride in white sheets on your wedding night. You will bleed – that, which in a parallel universe, that which is true, you never did out of love.

You will cry, almost indefinitely. Moved by the bundle of flesh from your own blood and tissue, pale and burgundy, on your arms. You will call her Grace, too – she, who you shall never bear.

In the confines of these pages, torn and taped together in anger and regret, is your life – that which you shall never wake up to live as you lie in a dream under dirt and soil thrown at you after a bullet through the back.

for Given Grace.

Gosh, what I'd do if I accidentally liked a tagged photo of you from a year ago? Die seems to me like the best answer.

I'm blushing just from thinking about it. And I haven't blushed (if not from heat) in a while, so it's almost new, you see.

I should seriously stop stalking you.

'Cause if this isn't grazing a healing scar, it's almost like making new ones.

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.

April playlist - happy tunes. Steering clear of sad songs, which means I have to skip every other item in my ipod 'til I've got nothing else to listen to but your silence. Growing increasingly violent like the waves of days past.

Mid-April will be hectic. Got to get my shit together and move on with life. Work will be great aid to forgetting, and so will new projects here and there - if I ever get started, that is. I need to read, write, eat, sleep, among a lot of other things, yes. 

Ah, fuck this. I'm listening to The Perishers on the way to work.

Finding a way around the blocked sites in the office is not helping me with my daily outputs. Today, I spent an entire afternoon combing through “Ringo Have a Banana” supposedly only in search of Alex’ name. Found out too late that instead of extinguishing this impossibly huge fire made of invisible fuel, I am obligingly throwing myself in. Sacrificing myself to the gods in the form of a roasted pig.

The other day, Nicole traveled to my station (highly likely being that we’re only two seats away) and we hung out at Alex’ flickr for the entire day. Moping around, dreaming of Manhattan, Brooklyn, New York, New York! Mocking other people’s lives as rubbish (being that they do not work the normal 8-hour shift), while mourning our own minuscule existences because we are not artistes and we do not have weekend backyard barbecues and Friday night gigs, and because we do not drink beer from the can and we do not have rents to pay on a monthly basis or a New York flat for that matter, because we cannot play around our cameras long enough to take good shots of roaming ducks and cabins in the outskirts of Washington, because we do not go to Copenhagen or New Mexico for the weekend and take vintage grainy photographs of each other with a backdrop of ashes – the reflection of our ghostly dreams. I am hopeless.

And yet, there is hope in hopelessness: the promise of years yet to arrive (albeit being fashionably late). One day; someday. That’s my adage. And tonight, I’ll say it to myself over and over like a mantra ‘til I succumb to sleep and dream some more.

new word people

portamentoed noun

1. a combination of shock and terror upon a ghastly sight.
2. a startling appearance of a terrifying outside factor: a picture, a ghost, a hideous creature, a mirror.
3. a bothersome state/phase after a disturbing spectacle. 

History:

The other night, Nicole downloaded The Drums’ Portamento album and it came with a pdf file which she opened in haste. Behold is the album cover, fullscreened, in HD! Scared the shit out of her. She didn’t work in the mornings after, the image of Johnny’s red eyes, the cross hanging on a sinister wallpapered wall, the eerie feel of southern devotees creeping into her head every single time. Needless to say, she was badly portamentoed!   

Now, go and spread the word. Pun intended.

Will turn 22 in a few days. I'm broke. I'm sad. And they just blocked 9gag at work.

Which should I do first:

• read (still on the 11th page of The Castle)
• write (and get published)
• draw (finish artworks)
• play the piano (without having to go back to classes)
• live

The problem with getting back on track, I realized, is where to start when there isn't a track to get back to.