The key to happiness is to eliminate [insert word]

Sometimes I wonder what the past meant for us to be reincarnated like this--traveling in parallel paths, hoping for intersection. There is no need for fences or walls now that we exist on the same plane. I suppose we were destined to seek comfort in the periphery. Did it take centuries to learn how to live apart, disciplined and unable to remember what it is to curve, to lean over--to touch the small of someone's back? This constant attempt to search for you is like an old habit of loss. I probably lost you so many times: to someone, to something somewhere. So many times, that sometimes, I don't even remember what it was like to find you.

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Struggling to defend..love.

It is exhausting to defend..love. Struggling all the time--to explain it, to believe in it, and to find it, is truly a chore. Deceptive love..how will people know that it's real if our hearts are capable of "loving" again. and again. Repairing itself to accommodate someone else, regardless of doubt, pain, or misery. As if our hearts can take that much loss! But it IS real! How do I explain it? It is strange to meet these agnostic lovers.

And what of our love? A battling of individuals trying to remember and forget the most. A love independent of ideal qualities, ever changing, strangely beautiful? It is a terrifying thing, this love of ours, precisely because it seems rare. We bounce back and forth between i-don't-want-to-lose-you and I-have-already-lost-you-because-you-love-me. Am I just idealizing things between us? I should stop playing witness to the world. It shouldn't matter to me--what they think, I mean. KNOWING should be enough for me, right? I have to admit that sometimes it isn't.

It's must be this distance...this innate longing to be together...it highlights just how far apart we are right now.

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The stars are out tonight.

The stars are out tonight.

We are drawn to turn our gazes upward--to look at brightness, somehow defiant at the heavens looking down at our mediocrity. Answers constellate themselves, depending on what we want to see. Trace-the-dots. How often we mistake their combined form for another, only because we don't know where to look or what to see! They seem to be grateful for the distance from our questioning gaze, wise to avoid questions that are answered by experience. We were born from stardust after all.

They continue to burn, oblivious to the answers we've assigned to them. And we continue to gaze at their enduring death, yearning to burn through life like the glorious moment of a rebellious falling star. Maybe it's the pursuit that matters--the blaze of light across the dark sky. A Shooting Star! A Falling Star. (Close our eyes, make a wish.) We are changed by the desire for something beyond THIS. Something MORE than this.

Maybe because the stars burn so so bright, we're meant to witness only their dying, lest we perish in their terrible beauty. Incapable of surviving such brilliance, they tell us--THIS, should be enough...for now.

Relieved, they are glad for our silence. Enough for tonight. We pry our eyes away with difficulty. They are just stars after all. And we just hope for meaning in such tragic deaths.

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The Other 1

The train doors open and close at every stop. People come in, just for a moment, until they disappear on their way. No traces are usually left behind. Neither wet footprints nor perfume withstand the crowds.

However, on the PATH Train to JSQ today, smudged blood colors the floor as I step inside. Dark leather shoes settle above it, as ordinarily as if it were kitchen tiles. A homeless person calls out for mercy, "We can all become homeless. Please feed me." But people avert their gaze, in a weak attempt to feign blindness. But we all heard him. Passing through the aisle, his arm brushes against my shoulder. I am too busy looking at the stained floor. Finally, the train doors open. People rush out. The color red smudges every shoe.

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Coney Island

Last Saturday, J, M, and I decided to take the E train to its last stop. It's interesting how the sea calls us still. And even if it wasn't the best beach to go to, we couldn't wait to be near the water's edge.

Plus points:
Soft-serve banana ice-cream
Man in orange briefs showing off his BALLS
Old Woman in a BRA
EXTRA white people

We have an instinct to deny our landlocked state and acknowledge the mariners that that we are. Like turtles born on land, we know that we must seek “the pounding of the waves,” the pulsing of collective memory. Not exempted from the mixing of blood and water in our veins, the sea is part of us. And though we risk the assuring concreteness of land, time and time again, we realize the need to thread through the unknown and surrender our gravity. Only then do we experience reconciliation between what we are and what we'll never completely be. And so finally we return to shore, ready to hold up our own weight, if only to wait and be called home again.

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The Function of Art 1

On the 1 train to 51st Street, a man armed with charcoal and a small notebook entered one day. Swirls of color stained his arms with tattoos that must have meant something to him. To her they whispered, "We cannot be contained."

Glancing around, he waited for something to speak--mysterious eyes, a shy smile, a strand of hair waiting to be brushed away. In their seeming ordinariness, he knew that each one still had a story to tell; each face, a fleeting testament to one's odysseys. But his eyes finally rested on her. He recognized her even if he'd never known her. And so with a strange sense of urgency, he simplified her life with lines of black and white, illuminating her soul with shaded depths of gray.

When he was satisfied, he flipped his notebook. A collection of strangers flash by. She wasn't his first. Stepping out, he hides a smile, proud to carry with him a testament to each one's secret desire--"Please see beyond me."

Recordar: To remember, from the Latin re-cordis, to pass back through the heart.

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Rationalize!

I ABHOR Omission!
Why? I would do the same.

Why?

It will just sour the talking!
You're talking about good things and then you're going to mix in those other people for no good reason?
How would that go, "Oh, by the way, I hung out with so-and-so"

But isn't honesty always first. What else is there, without honesty.

Peace?
How do you rescue that--hanging out with so-and-so?
To rescue it you have to say, "she's actually interesting"

I guess.

Which makes it even more weird!
The other option is "wala lang"
---Which is WORSE because you'll think he's being secretive!

Fine.
Rational, but not helpful.

So no exit talking about pointless meetings
So just omit!
Omission is the key to healthy relationshipssss.

What a lovely way to live.

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On Loss and Recycling

I've learned to accept that we need to adjust, that making decisions is also part of growth and survival. I've come to live with the dying of one part of me that belongs to the past and the resurrection of the parts that have transcended the pain.

In a way, there's the struggle to survive in spite of always feeling a helpless sense of loss. I simply comfort myself with the promise of a future. Its urgency of salvation, this need to recycle--evaporating the past as I move on, if only to return changed, falling joyfully to the depths below.

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Counting down

Communicating from a distance is a tough love affair.

I am pretty sure that the risks that I'm taking now is well worth it. No regrets. There's the future to look forward to...besides the struggle to preserve my present. But the dull-ache in my chest is not something that I hope to get used to.. I just know that I'd be so much happier with him being around. My own, personal, uplifter.

7 months to go...

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