Letters From The Past: Tissue Paper Thoughts

12/31/03
dear bent,


i love the way you laugh when i tickle you,the way your forehead creases when you're thinking very hard,the way you puzzle over silly stuff like how a dog walks,the way your face is animated when you talk about your father, the way you talk when you're brushing your teeth, the way you smile when something pleases you, the way you worry about the scars of the pimples you popped, the weird way you have of looking at life, the way your shoulders heave when you sing a jakob dylan song, the poker-faced expression when i say something hurtful (which i don't mean...), the way you pour water in my glass, the way you don't seem to be in the least bit intimidated by a chess opponent,the way you make me laugh about a story i never thought could be funny ...i can go on, i guess until this space is filled with the testament of the things i love about you...pero isa ra may padulngan ani tanan akong giingon diba? that...I LOVE YOU. period (quoting my kid sis sandra).


the little drummer girl






02/03/04
dear bent,


"if wishes were horses, beggars would ride."


today, i feel that i am floating again in the sea of nameless events. the history of my pre- bent life will repeat itself. i will drift from day to day without compass. and i will become a Louis chasing the phantom that was the past. the past that would, in the future, seem perfect for all its painful and poignant moments.


time, i know, will blur the intensity of the pain that the memory of you carries. but you will be in my dreams. every man i meet will have a little of you in him because i cannot let you go completely.


see you in the next life when we are both cats...


i love you. i have enough of it to last me a long time.


the little drummer girl :-(






02/04/04
bent my precious,


(hehe, tama bang gawin kong journal tong email mo?)


i dreamt about you last night. today, i simply miss you. i get tempted to call you every few minutes. there's a storm raging in my mind. i fear that i might regret this decision. but if i do, and i look back on this in the future, i shall be consoled by the thought that i have acted according to the best of my capacity to understand my own strength and flaws.i admit this is not the strongest emotion i have ever felt...but this is the strongest attachment so far for someone real----or were you/ are you real? perhaps, i simply imagined the magic i felt during that brief time we had together. but really bent, it was a beautiful time for me...and i try to hold on to that feeling.

your friendship means a lot to me. and i hope this will over soon.
so we can hang out again, laugh about stuff, talk about the meaning of life, theorize about men and women and why they do what they do. 

basta, pray for me. sa akong struggle, without you. i wish you all the best---from the bowels of my being, with all the depth of my soul, walang stir, true, honest. when i am older and wiser, i'll 
think of you and remember how you have enriched my life. and malay mo, in a few weeks time, i'll find out if i am granted the little 
bent i secretly hope against hope for.


"every month is november for me. and i love you everyday."


the little drummer girl :)






02/05/04
bent my precious,


i watched mona lisa smile today. i loved it, i guess. but you know what, my heart missed a beat when i saw the trailer of cold mountain. god, jude law IS beautiful! maybe there's a god after all...naisip nako, how can someone be so beautiful? i wanted to throw away my vow, call you and invite you to watch it with me. but the moment simply passed.


i missed you. i miss you. my goal for this week is 91. wala lang. trip lang nako i-share.


sometimes, i feel so universal...di nako ma-explain. basta, i feel like i am the grand scheme that the supreme being designed, if one exists, and that all else that happen in everyday life is petty and worth not an ounce of pain, and conversely, happiness. ah, there i go...i'm babbling, again.


what have you been up to, lately? who are you doing? :) 
i'm sure you missed me too, so i don't have to ask about that...:)
la lang, just wanted to say hi. and that i'm on my way to yenz.


still here,
the little drummer girl






01/09/05
bi,

this was a note i wrote when you were in iligan for a tournament:


i am going through the longest days of my life. it's september and days should be shorter but they seem to stagnate, as if frozen in time...because you are not here. but i somehow catch myself smiling... i roll my eyes, remembering your joke about einstein's theory of relativity. i find myself shaking my head, looking at the things around me, imagining the weird perspective they would have aroused in that brilliant head of yours. unbelievable isn't it? how a person could amaze me at every turn, without effort...without guile. you dwarf every other memory of my past and the strongest outburst of emotions i have had seem puny and infantile...jakob dylan was right. "and all those times before i met you were like ice cream falling on these shoes of my world".  ice cream falling lang, transitory...what more can i say, lucky "little drummer girl that i am"?


smolhauz and me

The Path To A Lost Heart

continued...

i love them, yes. i have a steadfast belief that you will always have that connection with people whom you had lived with under one roof . and that you can always call upon that connection, invoke your memories together to relive that bond when your life hangs on the balance. so i procrastinate. i wait until i or they absolutely need to before i reconnect. what a lousy friend i am!

my daily life has been so infused with routine that for the first time in eleven years, i am back to the question, who am i?

i started at the fascinating reintroduction to cooking. i remember that i love Thai food, courtesy of myra who brought me to that Thai canteen in UP. i don't cook but i have always loved watching cooking shows. i fell in love with River Cottage Autumn hosted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (did i spell it right?).

i finished adrianna trigiani's book in one day. i learned to cry over a novel again.

i recollect life in Kalayaan and Sampaguita and the lifelong friends i have made there. i realize that i have held would-be friends at arms length because i was thinking they will never live up to the ones i already have, no matter that we rarely really sit down anymore to talk.

i realize that at the very bowels of my being, there is an equal measure of apathy and passion. and that from time to time, i alternate between the two and move in their spectrum.


so how to jump to the other end of the spectrum? i unearth my old letters long buried in the past.

i read as if i am a hitchhiking tourist with my right thumb up, negotiating a ride toward the land of my lost heart.


to be continued...

The Path To A Lost Heart

05/18/10
08:20am

today, i begin again. i renew my quest to find ME. it is strange though, to start writing again as if a whole five years worth of thoughts have not accumulated in my head. but is there really an accumulation? i feel superficial. i feel shallow because i seem to have lost my facility for words, or did i even have that facility? what i write appears to me to be a diminution of what i truly mean to say.

but i will press on as obstinately as i had once ignored these reverberations in my ears.

when i was a lot younger, i used to have difficulty throwing things away for fear that i might lose something of great value. i was forever suspecting that some piece of paper may hold a clue when i try to remember something in the past. so even my list of to-do's and to-buys as a teen-ager have survived to this day. well, some of them. but still.

at that time, my books were the greatest of my earthly possessions.

one loss was irreplaceable because i had the notion that my personality was stamped on each book once it has been read by me. losing one was tantamount to losing a part of me and buying a replacement does not eradicate the loss.

 i used to never tire of writing thank you notes, birthday letters, good luck wishes to those who matter to me.

 

 i have since travelled so far from what i consider to be the best version of myself. things used to mean so much. how have they become so empty now? i mean i still love to read but a lot of my favorite novels have now been torn or split apart by my three little rascals. and i didn't even feel a pang.  my first dvd of Interview with the Vampire was never returned to me,  yet i lost interest in getting it back. four of my greatest friends now have their kids and even a simple text message is such a task. i love them,yes...TO BE CONTINUED...

Contemplations Of A Silent Dweller

It is my tragic fate to have been born a dweller. A lot of us go through so many things in common and yet it happened to be my curious luck to be someone who literally doubles over when something of consequence strikes.


I could not say that I lived a sheltered life as a kid although I was born a Catholic in a rather provincial community where everyone knows everyone else and where it was capital sin not to greet your neighbor good evening when meeting them in the street at dusk. In fact, you could say I was always running amuck with my friends and was breaking the rules as soon as they were established.

Yet nothing prepared me for the onslaught of ideas I was confronted with as I was coming of age. In college, I vowed to go to church every Sunday. I also read every night the Lord of Pardon booklet my mother gave me. It was supposed to protect me from danger. And yes, I did feel protected. That is, until one day, a girl wearing short shorts walked into my Philo I class and stood in front of us, looking excited about sharing something. She announced that her boyfriend gave her a present and she wanted to show it to us. She said it was an authentic little crystal ball which you could determine by striking with your fingernails or with a little metal stick. It would give a thin and high-pitched ring unlike fake ones that emit a hollow sound. She was cupping it with both hands so we could not see it. She asked to pass it around to everyone in class and to cup it with both hands like she did to make sure not to drop it. I was sitting at the back of the room that day so I was one of the last students to have the privilege of seeing it. From the start, I noticed everyone's giggles and whispers after getting a glimpse. I could hardly wait my turn. No sooner did my seatmate pass the "precious crystal" to me from her cupped hands than I realized we've been had. There was no crystal. Nothing! My seatmate said in a hushed voice, "What a sicko!" I thought to myself, if this was her brand of joke, it was far from funny. After the last of us "saw" it, she dismissed the class, teary-eyed in thanking us for having witnessed something really meaningful in her life.


When next we met, there was none of the hoopla of the first day in class. She seemed normal and proceeded to give us our syllabus. Our lesson for the day was the three kinds of concepts: fictitious, abstract, and empirical. An example of a fictitious concept is the unicorn. It is purely imaginary and does not exist. The concept of number, circle, infinity- these are examples of abstract ideas. Their extensions could not be found in the world but which we find useful in formal sciences like Mathematics, Geometry, and Logic. Empirical ideas are those that could be perceived by any of our five senses, like a chair, which we can see and touch, the existence of which we can prove or disprove. She then asked us, "So can I ask you one thing before you sleep tonight? Could you ponder whether for you, God is a fictitious, abstract, or empirical concept?"


This style was becoming routine to us when one day, a weird looking guy barged into the room and left us dumbfounded after claiming with such gusto, "my heart is merging with an infinite entity in the cosmos!" She showed up late but demanded to know whether we have read about Logical Positivism which posits that statements whose truth or falsity could not be proved are considered meaningless and devoid of cognitive content.


At one time, she told us a story about eating in a diner in the school's Shopping Center. It was packed with people in all walks of life. There was a group of nuns, a rugged looking guy, a mother with her kid, and a number of students...She was in line to order her food. When it was her turn, she asked in a not so small voice, "Manong, parang ang sarap ng itlog mo, pabili nga, yang malaki." The nuns looked her way, in an admonitory stare, as if to say there was a kid present and how dare her speak like that. The rugged guy laughed and said to himself (but in a voice everyone could hear),"yan ang gusto ko, mahilig sa malaking itlog!" Some giggled but others took no notice as if it was the most regular talk. At the end of the story,as usual, she asked if we had finished reading, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Language Games. She reminded us that the most common words in everyday conversations could spell a world of difference to different people, depending on the language games or forms of life they were raised in.


It was such that everyday, I came to look forward to the next tactic she would employ to get the point across. For the first time, in what I felt like a long grueling battle for academic survival, I was enjoying college.


So just like that, I had my world turned upside down... And I was never happier. I dropped Speech Communication altogether and took up Philosophy even without any intention of pursuing Law School, which to the majority of the student population was the only known reason for anyone to take it.


During this period, one could say that the rate of my learning was becoming inversely proportional to the rate my faith was dropping on a daily basis.


I saw my most cherished beliefs shatter into pieces like broken glass. I must have looked like a New Yorker staring incredulously at the ruins of the Twin Towers. I kept asking, “Where is that girl who once said, God I belong here, upon entering the chapel? Where is that girl whose heart overflows with emotion at singing, My hope is in you Lord!?" And Philo 172 (Philosophy of Religion) was much too neutral, nay, even atheistic in its leaning to have led me to a rediscovery of my belief.


There was, of course, Anne Rice. Interview, Lestat,Queen, Tale, and finally, Memnoch. Did I not reach a point of no return when Lestat bid us adieu in the fifth installment of The Vampire Chronicles? Do you know what anguish means when you're the one feeling it?


Vainly, I struggled with maniacal fervor to find my lost faith again. As Lestat would say, I was like a man who loses an arm or a leg and keeps insisting that he still feels pain where the arm or leg used to be. It was a self-righteous stage of denial I did not right away admit to myself, for did I not read the bible every night? Indeed, it came to a point where I would shudder at the sight of the cover of Interview with the Vampire. Work of the devil, I convinced myself. 

It was a long time before I came to terms with what I had become. It would not have come about had I not recollected this "moment of truth" as a child, my own personal "Age of Enlightenment".


When I was a kid, I used to sit on a make-shift hammock tied to a small tree in our yard. One twilight, as I suddenly looked up the fading sky, it dawned on me how small I was against the vastness of the world. Just a dot on a strip of land. I realized that I could die right then and there and the birds would go on flying in the horizon, making the sunset all the more magical and enchanting. I could just die and the world would continue to turn on its axis as if an Allena never once breathed its air. Of course, I could not have expected that the nameless despair I felt at that precise moment, the unfathomable grief that welled up in me would eventually shape the way I see the world because, by God, I was only nine years old!


So you see, I had an early propensity for non-belief. I had a vision of eternal abyss. To my consternation, it comforted me immensely- the knowledge that I did not lose a part of myself but that I had rediscovered it.


Just when it seemed impossible, there came a renewed vigor in my daily life. I pored through my readings like I did with To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. I had committed to heart the arguments for and against the existence of God, the meaning of knowledge, the principles of ethics and morality and so on.


It was my burning ambition to write my thoughts on these things in a novel much like Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. But I realized at once that you could not read Dostoevsky and still think you could write something of substance. So I am left to dwell on these thoughts...unable to fully expound on them, unable to abandon them. I am here, vacillating between the two lives I live.


The unexamined life is not worth living, says Socrates. Be that as it may, I could not bring the point home enough how utterly pathetic that I continue to occupy myself with ideas so passe. I could not move because these are the forces that drive me and it is only at home that these thoughts could be brought forward with the true confidence that I will be understood. The smallest pleasantries are such a burden that I willingly succumb to silence. In the outside world, I have no other choice but shut up. I feel outraged that these should still affect me to a paralyzing extent. In an era when people have long moved on to practical matters, and I guess,rightly so, I'm still groping and stumbling around the edges in the fabric of life.


A classmate I had reunited with in a previous company once told me, "so dinibdib mo talaga sya?!" In the UK, there is an expression for my answer. Spot on!

The Accidental Mother

The Thursday before last, I consented to Smolhauz being absent from school since it was raining and their exams ended the day before. I was planning to meet his teacher then as was requested of me. According to our househelp’s reports, Smolhauz was sent home earlier than the rest of the kids because he apparently ran delightedly outside the classroom and played in the rain with wanton disregard of his teacher's pleas. Unfortunately, the rain did not let up for  two straight days — the weather only worsened, with news of a thunderstorm. So, immediately the following Monday, I went to meet Teacher Maricel. I was already trying to compose myself because I couldn't seem to wipe the smile off my face. For some reason, I found it really funny that I would be summoned to my four-year old son's school for his mischiefs. Tales of devilry as children from my elders played in my head and I remember these stories of misadventures with fondness.

His teacher told me that my good son was unable to finish two of his exams because he lost all interest in them and instead amused himself by running in the rain. When asked why he would not finish his tests, he simply said he was already tired. Teacher Maricel asked me for help so that he understands his mistake and so that he won’t do it again. She confessed that in her frustration, she had to employ tactics such as telling him frightening things that happen to unruly children. (I had to suppress a smile.) I told her that we at home are able to get him going just by promising a reward with each star that he gets from his teacher. Understanding glimmered in her eyes and she said she can now make sense of his dismay one day when she told him he would not get a star. I then asked if my son is able to cope with the learning pace of their class. She said he has good comprehension skills but quickly loses interest after a certain point. And what that certain point was? I soon found out. He apparently becomes disinterested about any topic introduced after their lunchbreak. At this, I was already laughing inside my head. She said that there was even one time when she had to give him a juice drink because his water smelled of "kanal". That did it. I laughed so hard and so long I was already crying. I literally shed tears! I can imagine what his teachers (Teacher Audrey was there to listen to our talk) must have thought of me. I definitely did not mean any disrespect. Quite the contrary is true. (I have only admiration for their ability to carry on with their tasks, no matter how daunting.) I simply thought it was hilarious that he would know what a "kanal" is and how it smells considering we very rarely go out of the house and the times I allow him to play outside with other kids in the compound are very few and far between. He learned to play Counterstrike and basic DOTA at the age of three so he is definitely a homebody and what others would call a kid that lives a very sheltered life.

This incident yet again provoked fears that I might be tragically inept to be a Mom. I feel that I am not serious and deliberate enough. Unlike many of my friends who have become mothers themselves, I seem to be the only one freestyling motherhood. From their stories,it seemed like they have hard and fast rules about disciplining their kids. No giving in. No sleeping beyond the pre-set bedtime. No eating in the bedroom. No TV or YouTube and computer games (if it were my son) during exams or schooldays. No talking back. Doing the homework before going to bed, etc,etc.

In my defense, though, I think that my sons are growing up healthy (in mind and body) and free-spirited. There is no sense of tyranny in the house so that the younger ones respect their older brother only because he is older and not because being older equates to always being right. And Bengt and I are definitely not above this rule. Inputs about running the house are acknowledged and deliberated upon,no matter who it comes from. Love, loyalty,respect. In the end, for us,it all boils down to these values.

At last, seeing my thoughts in written form, I feel a whole lot better. I may not be that bad after all. Maybe even far from it.

*Title borrowed from Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist

A Trip Upon Your Magic Swirlin' Ship

I always hear about our life flashing before our eyes when we die. But this happens to me daily. I didn't always notice it until one day while sitting on the bed, I became acutely aware that I am actually "here, now". I could extend my limbs and marvel that they are mine. And it seemed as if the very sands of time were slipping before my fingers and that I could grasp them but only barely. In my mind I was humming the song by Hootie and the Blowfish. "Now only lasts one second,one second..." Images of my little tragedies and triumphs passed in front of me. I was transported to that old house in front of the school. Ah, how I loved playing in the school yard and hitting bats with our slippers until my father dragged us home at twilight. I can vividly see myself lying in the roofless part of our terrace with my aunt while it rained and lightning danced across the sky. Oh, the fun I had... even the hiding we usually got for breaking house rules was adventure in itself.

Then there was high school, my coming of age. And college, what a turning point it was! Along came the life-altering event that was Bengt and the absolute lifeblood of my existence: Smolhauz, Nearthelake, and Silentdwelling. Truly... I have achieved that only surviving drive in me, that is, being able to say like Nelson Moss in Sweet November, "...this is it. Life will never be better or sweeter than this..."

And yet how funny that I could look back and still feel a certain distance from all of it. It happens all the time. I start with realizing that I am a living, breathing thing...but that it could all end any minute, that life is so beautiful yet such a joke to someone like me who doesn't bank on The Great Perhaps. I could die right now and yet the world would certainly go on. How utterly preposterous that this is true of anyone whether we like it or not!