Happy Birthday Love

I think there are still many a people who would raise eyebrows when they find out that we used to date. Yeah, we're different like night and day....... yet, I believe we reflected and could see what was good in the other self. I will not deny that I loved you deeply. And while I'm no longer in love with you, I still love you. You are my friend. Thank you for that.

Happy Birthday.

a roomful, and yet so isolated....

Wine flowed like honey dripping from a split jar.... laughter rang amidst the music... My jaws ached from the smiles and yet that sweet joy couldn't creep into my eyes.

Because I didn't belong. I yearn for deep conversations... of true exchanges of heart. 

Where are you?

Some times it's the murkiest waters that reflect the most sublime beauty

I've retreated into a shell.

Unrecognizable. Layer upon layer, wrapping the shroud tightly across my my spirit, my fire.
Each spark quashed. Smoldering... or...?

It is not quiet I feel. Quiet is full. Rather, I feel nothing.

Subconscious?

We were at a new place, bodies touching. I could feel my skin tingling, wanting you. I turned by body into yours and you did not flinch. I longed for you to complete me. Ached. Really ached.

That was a dream I dreamt last night. Yet, it was vividly obvious who you were. And no, it's not that guy. It's you. Have I been subconsciously sexually attracted to you?

Or that I'm just lustful, seeing that I've been asexual for several months?

The essence, not the shell

When you get to know someone, all their physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in their energy, recognize the scent of their skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. Thats why you can't fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and your body but not your heart. And that's why when you really connect with a person's inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.


Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies.

Fitful dreams...

Too many coincidences.
Just last night, I dreamt of a conversation I had with a friend a year ago about his Dad.

"Do you miss him?"
"Yes."
"Even though you had an acrimonious relationship with him?"
"Well, it's not that I can't live without him. And, it's not that I needed him whilst he lived......
.... but I miss him....
.... every day. Every day I think about him.
Every day."
"Ah. You remember. It's a positive thing yes?"
"Yes. To remember him. Yes, that his memory lives on in me each day. Good and bad.
We are all everlasting to the day that someone forgets."

I woke up to a tear drenched pillow. And because it reminded me of my favorite poem by Dorothea Grossman I cast it aside as something from being emo these past few days.

And then this evening, as I berated a friend for not informing me of some cool gig playing, I was told that his friend's Dad passed away... I couldn't help but think back to the dream.

... how fleeting life is....
And how we are only but a sum of our moments, which surely and unmercifully fades with time...

My cross to bear

"We carry God in the fragile vessel of our humanity."

It's been almost two months since I heard this sentence at a homily from my parish priest, and it has stayed with me. Now at the weekend where the Feast of the Holy Cross coincides with the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the sentence rings and beats against my chest with nowhere to turn to.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the news of the September 11 attacks. I was drowning in martinis at m9. It was after dark and when my colleagues and friends reported via SMS that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, I snuffed and laughed that it was a hoax. I said that if what was reported was true, it was akin to war on the US. 

I was wrong... Text after text came. A second plane. The crumbling of the South Tower. I got home and saw the devastation... I was confounded by the scenes I saw before me on the telly. "It can't be real.... it can't be true..." I thought, knowing very well that I was in denial. I stayed in front of the television watching wreck after wreck.... I tried calling and texting every friend I knew there.... (Thankfully after many hours I received news they got out okay.)

I couldn't understand what I saw before me. I did not think it was an act of malice to other humans, an act of killing. I thought that airport control had made serious mistakes. I was wrong.... Very wrong.

What had happened was a conscious choice. By some people who believed what they did was a declaration of their faith, of what they believed God is...

I'm not here to assign blame or anything like that. Yet, I can't help but think of that sentence "We carry God in the vessel of our fragile humanity." It is true. Everything we do is a reflection of our lives and what we believe in... God, to each of us, and to one another is seen through our choices. When we make the right choices, the moral choices, the good choices, the unselfish choices, we experience God in kindness and love. When we don't make those choices.... well...

There is a catechism teaching that says God is the same yesterday, today and forever. That what changes is our understanding of Him. At the back of my mind, in the depths of my soul, I find it humbling, almost amusing that God invests Himself in us; we who are uncomprehending, weak, vulnerable and fragile... I find it unfathomable He deigns us enough to mirror this great gift called love. Yet that is what we are called to do... despite all the hurt we receive even when we love others. 

So here I am. Still muddled and befuddled, sorting out the madness of my life, my humanity. I am slowly losing understanding of how I fit into my faith, yet comforted that if I carry love in my heart and able to care, that it is enough.

It is my cross to bear.  

31 August 2011. The end.

I now know what divorcees go through.

To sign on the dotted line, the finality of it... It's bitter sweet. You might have known the end was around for a while... Heck, the thing might have been dead for some time and you have not cared one bit for it. Yet, when it's time to say goodbye, ensure there is nothing you can do to revive it, it is a fresh stab to the chest.

Goodbye. You have brought be countless happy moments and memories. You made me travel over 12,000 miles at a time, many times. You allowed me into a world that I never knew before.

But.... The questions is, what am I to do with these 376 bottles of wine??

Serendipity?

I have recently finished reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It took me two months. I carried it around to cafes, sipping coffee after coffee, smoking cigarette after cigarette, slowly savoring each word and line. I underlined those that spoke to me and often re-read them a few times before moving on to the other pages.

It scared me how I identified with so many of the passages written. It scared me that it spurred my wanderlust day after day, night after night as I drowned and got sucked in by his words.

Today I decided to re-read Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart as I barely remember anything of the novel having read it eons ago. And, at the the third page, I read this:

"Sumire was absolutely nuts about Kerouac... She carried a dog-eared copy of On the Road or Lonesome Traveler stuck in her coat pocket, thumbing through them every chance she got. Whenever she came across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory as if they were Holy Writ."

Serendipitous much?

"You're happy outside, emo inside..."

I love this description of me.

Don't look back

What's your road?

Sometimes I feel like we're nothing but passengers in this thing called life, powerless to do anything as it drags us along in its drudgery and senseless nightmare road. We crane our heads back, searching... searching for? Old memories or what it could have been?

Then quickly, I dispel this thought. We make our own paths. It may not seem so, but in small subtle ways we push and pull as we navigate through the madness of our lives. Yes, we forge our own roads when we stop craning back, looking and living in the past.

I shot this photo while returning home from an exhibition. As I turned out of the carpark, I noticed a group of four trishaw men. I could have eased out in front of them, but I didn't. Why? I don't know. But because I let them pass, I was able to take this photo when the opportunity presented itself to me at the traffic lights. The uncle on the right kept looking back, and in doing so he missed the lights turning green and his three companions stormed on ahead. He had to rush after them.

See, when we spend too much time looking back, we miss being present. We miss out on what's ahead.

Don't look back.

Memoria

Three years back, at this very same spot, I clicked my heels with joy. I received the a-ok that I would have more than ten years to live. It was my first brush with mortality and the sheer exhilaration of being alive was intense.

A wry smile touches my lips now. I wish I can feel the same way again. I don't. It isn't because I take life for granted. I guess deep in my heart the question of "what if" always threatens to surface and it is a question that scares the hell out of me. Don't be mistaken. I'm not frighten of dying (maybe the pain of death). After all, we are all dying. What I'm frighten of is that I'm not living. More so when time is short.

I once asked mom why old people get more impatient as they age. Her simple answer was "Because time is running out." Is this why I wear my heart so apparently for all to see? To tie myself in knots when I'm taken for granted after investing myself in others? Even when everyone tells me that I should not put all that effort in for anybody if they don't do so first. Do I do all that because I'm afraid if I don't, I won't ever get a chance to? That time will really run out all of a sudden and I didn't live, love and care.

It is a tough balance between living and hurting. I think back to the memory of that day when just the ability to breathe brought a smile and heady happiness with envy. I wish for such a simple joy but for now it is only a memory.