Your absence does not make me unhappy.

I know you will come back to me, and I to you. And the naked eye will be hard-pressed to tell where your spirit ends and mine begins.

For now, let me say I miss you, and the things which remind me of you. How you always say things with certainty… never doubtful, never confused. How you go deeper into a thought with a deliberation that a tracker would envy. How you cared for me, in the subtle ways that only I understood, and how for a rare moment in my life, someone saw something profound in me, enough to say, “Well, there you are.”

And here I still am.

I miss you. I still wait for you to come back home.

Love is tragic
Love is bold
You will always do what you are told

Love is hard
Love is strong
You will never say that you were wrong

I dont know when I got bitter
Love is surely better when it’s gone

Because you wanted more
More than I could give
More than I could handle
And a life that I can’t live

You wanted more
More than I could bear
More than I could offer
And a love that isn’t there…

Love is color
Love is love
Love is never saying you’re too proud

Love is trusting
Love is honest
Love is not a hand that holds you down

I dont know when I got bitter
Love is surely better when it’s gone
Because you wanted more
More than I could handle
And a life that I can’t live

You wanted more
More than I could bear
More than I could offer
And a love that isn’t there

I gotta pick me up when I am down
I gotta get my feet back on the ground
I gotta pick me up when I am down

Tonic

You Wanted More

There’s a school of thought primarily espoused by the Buddhist philosophy which emphasizes putting one’s focus on attention on the here and now.  This is what is called as “mindfulness”, which is described as:

Bishop et al. (2004:232) regard psychological “mindfulness”, broadly conceptualized, as “a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is”.

I think this is my present state of mind, a reason why I haven’t been blogging for some time.  Due to circumstances in my life, both work and personal, I have been mostly living in the present, or as that popular U2 song goes, it’s like being “stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it.”

Self-reflection can get stressful sometimes, particularly when one is stuck at a decision impasse.  Having a ton of things to do, hanging at the back of your mind, also contributes to the halt in the reflection process.  I don’t want to dwell on my problems.  I want to be here and now, focusing on what needs to be done and making the right moves.

Dwelling on recent events in my life only served to make me depressed and anxious.  Mindfulness served to heighten my focus and kill any emotional resonance (both good and bad).  When the emotions were too strong to take, I escaped to a form of mindlessness… of clearing my mind from all static and keeping it blank.  This is probably why I have been sleepy all the time.  Sleep is a form of escape and mindlessness.  It allows me to confront my hurts in a way that does not involve dwelling on the pain.

Whether or not this is a psychologically healthy way of dealing with heavy emotions remains to be seen, but for now, this is how I cope.

———————-

A good friend reminded me of something which I am taking to heart nowadays.  It’s always good to be grateful. Even in the midst of all the problems, heartaches, and work-stress, one must always take the time out to see something beautiful and wonderful, and just be thankful for it.

In a way, it just opens one up to receive the bigger blessings in life, and for the true desires of one’s heart.

For me, it’s just a good way of being happy and choosing to be happy in spite of everything that gets me down.

I am thankful for this, no matter how brief, that I got to write just for myself again.  I am thankful for food on the table, and a little money in my pocket.  I am thankful that I get to make my parents happy.  I am thankful for great weather, great friends, and a little time out for small distractions.  I am thankful for good health.

Tomorrow is another day facing the grindstone.

But I face it with a smile on my face, a song in my heart, and a fallen star in my pocket.

Law school and the rest of its rainy days are over now.  The war has ended.  The parties have reached stalemate and peace has been achieved.  Despite the rubble of the aftermath remaining in the battlefield, I look back and see the relationship at its best.  It’s like finding the rose-colored glasses I’ve tossed away and putting them on again.  The glass has suffered from cracks, but it still works.  Putting them on again, the  good feelings return and you see why the  love remained despite all the battles fought.

It feels good to be vindicated.  It feels better to be loved.

I am a creature of physics, bound by the path of least resistance.  Time and time again, I choose comfort over challenge; the familiar over the uncertain; the tried and tested over the novel and radical.  Often, I am forced into hardship by necessity, not by decision.  But you…

You are a sub-atomic particle, a product of quantum mechanics.

You choose to defy the law of physics by opting to leave the home and people who make it home, on the pretext of leaving your comfort zone.  You seek out the strange in lieu of the conventional.  You yearn for the unchartered over the mapped. You’ve chosen hardship to replace your creature comforts.

You’re like the free flowing electron in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, whose position or momentum in non-zero amplitude could not be determined with absolute precision.  The more the world tries to compress you within a specific electromagnetic packet, the more indefinite your wave becomes.  You must maintain momentum and avoid fixation, otherwise you fall into nothingness.

It is in your nature to revolve around neutrons, driven by what the scientists call the Coulomb force of attraction.  Others who are more philosophically inclined, however, are wont to call this “love.”

I suppose you have found the nucleus that will comprise the center of your universe.  It must be why you are leaping the orbit of everything you have known, propelled by a force greater than your own gravity, with a dream that together with your beloved nucleus, atoms will be formed.  And with this atom, you will create molecules.  And with this molecule, a universe is conceived.

You are leaving home to follow after someone who has become your home.

I understand you better now.  You want to test your limits and build your dreams.  And for that, I admire you.  You have found the courage that I am struggling to discover within myself, bound as I am by the physical laws of inertia.  Thus, to see the world, I will live vicariously through your lens and pray that your full-frame sensor will adequately preserve the defining moment.

This is why, I think, I am writing this epilogue.  Milestone occasions must be preserved with photographs and words.  Your passing from the orbit I traverse is one such milestone, in the sense that I am once more losing a good friend and soul-brother to the Northern Americas.  (I shall blame Canada for this loss, specifically the French-speaking parts of Manitoba.  Inevitably, this means I have to blame the French again.  Cheese-eating surrender monkeys.)

So here it is: a toast to the times which have been, the times which could be, and lamentably, the times that couldn’t.  Here’s to the one last cup of coffee brewed in Roadhouse and Brewberry.  Here’s to the sun rising over the CMU Campus, and setting over the Mactan Bridge.  Here’s to the fried chicken from Malaybalay, and the Coke Sakto of Danao.  Here’s to pushing a stalled car in Maria Cristina, and falling into a muddy ricefield in Musuan.  Here’s to short arguments about whether the interior designer of Missy Bon Bon is a woman or a gay man, and to long online debates on the merits and demerits of a Noynoy Aquino presidency.

Here’s to shooting the Sinulog as a team.  Here’s to getting abducted in Jolo.  Here’s to seeing my ancestral home in Bantayan Island.

Here’s a drink to our Stations of the Cross project.  Here’s a toast to our dream photography business.  Here’s to the women we love, and the families we are building.  Here’s to our hopes and dreams, and to friends who can grow separately without growing apart.

A stifled wind rises from the South, promising that soon, the welcome rain would fall, and with it the end of power outages, water rationing, and the proverbial “Earth Hour”.  It is the good weather that we watch for with bated breaths, a refreshing wetness that packs dust unto our roads and comfort into our balmy homes.  However, the rain saddens me because its arrival signals the departure of a very good friend.

And yet it brings joy with the promise that this is merely an epilogue.  A promise that the story has not yet ended.  A hint that there will be more to come.

Godspeed my brother.

Ouch.  I guess I deserve that.

The first man is leaving his home to go follow his wife who lives abroad.  A few weeks before he leaves, his childhood home burned down.

The second man just lost his girlfriend due to a very tragic break-up.  He’s moved out of his parent’s house and now makes a bid for independence.

The third man just recently entered his first formal relationship.  He is slowly becoming the main breadwinner of his family, so it will be awhile before he leaves his ancestral home.

Three lives living variations of the same theme:  love, relationships and family.  Perhaps, penultimately, this is a theme of home.

One man loses his home and chases after the woman who is his home.

One man loses his woman and leaves his home in order to chase after the woman he lost.

One man finds his woman and fights for his home.

Two stories about loss.  One story about discovery and not letting go.

I am the third man.  The first two are dear friends whom I consider my surrogate brothers.

I can’t help but think of myself.  I ought to be happy for myself and where my life is headed, and I am.  But it’s a happiness marred by grief for my friends’ losses.  The loss of a home.  The loss of a woman.

I can’t help but think about our lives, where they parallel each other and where they diverge.  I also think about the friend I am losing due to distance, while not far away, I think about the friend that I am losing to the demons he is fighting in his head.

Three men, walking one road, coming to a tri-pronged fork in the path.  Each must walk his own way now.

And this is the irony:  I am no longer lonely.

But why do I still feel so alone?

I jumped off a high peak, knowing that there would be no safety nets waiting for me underneath.

Just as I was about to leap, I felt a big weight clamber up my back, attach itself upon my shoulder blades, and push me down forward, hurtling speedily towards the depths.

I fought, I scrambled and I tried to get the weight off me, until my hands found a ring, pulled it out and found that it was attached to a cord.

And out came a parachute.

A girl said that to me while we were chatting on Facebook yesterday.  Two nights previously, another friend sent me a reply text message saying, “tnx jan.  i knw i cud lways dpend on my bff.”

I’ve been thinking about that these past few weeks, about the special friendships I share with certain people.  It started when I retook a Briggs-Meyer exam, which revealed, among other things, that I have become an Extrovert.  This is a major turn-around for me, since for the longest time ever the Briggs-Meyer exam indicated that I was an Introvert.  Granted that the recent exam came from a Facebook application (thereby casting the results in dubious light), nevertheless, I do see the change happening in me.  I really am becoming an extrovert, someone who feels good when he interacts positively with other people.

But going back to the last few years, I’ve been building very close friendships with certain people; people whom I am privileged to call my best friends.  To date, I have three who have themselves affirmed that we are best friends, with two other people who, as of late, have also become very close to me.  There have been some other persons who have drifted in my life and become a “best friend” at some point, but unfortunately, these friendships have not stood the test of time.

I don’t know.  I guess I have that quality… a certain trait that makes people comfortable with me.  Charisma perhaps?  But my charisma is not of the same kind as my friend Raymond’s.  His charisma inspires adoration and adulation… much like how a rockstar inspires idolatry from his fans (which I have called the “Everybody Loves Raymond – Effect”).  My kind of charisma, however, inspires trust and intimacy.  It’s the kind that has had perfect strangers open up their lives’ stories and deepest secrets upon our first meeting.

But perhaps that’s an oversimplification of the relationships I have with my best friends.  The truth is that I genuinely care for people around me, more so for those few that sit close to my heart.  These people I would die for.  These people I would tolerate when they are at their most annoying, forgive when they are at their most hurtful, and be patient with when they test my patience.

Or at least try.

——–

This week, big decisions will be made, and I am very apprehensive.  There will be questions of short term stability versus long term results, self interest versus friendship, and penultimately, the issue of trust will be placed in the cruscible of fire.

Lord, please don’t desert me in this my dark hour.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that so many people (trimedia journalists at that) subconsciously wish she were dead?

——–

Speaking of great numbers, it seems like so many of my peers and contemporaries are having babies.  For the past two months alone, around 5 or 6 of my friends and family gave birth to beautiful bundles of joy.  I’m a sort-of-grandfather now, would you believe it?  My first-cousin’s daughter, Carmel, recently held a baptism for her daughter Isis.

A few weeks from now, my best friend Raymond will also be a father.  His friends JP and Gun-gun respectively had children this week.  My partner James and Nika celebrated the birth of their son Hans early this year, while a few weeks from now, Jan A. will be having me over at his house as a godfather for his son Julian.

I have mixed thoughts about all this.  Partly, I ask myself if I’m getting left behind.  Partly, I’m relieved that it’s them and not me having a child.  Partly, I’m questioning where my place is in this world since I am in no hurry whatsoever to start a family.

Que sera sera..

——–

I have a horrible backlog to contend with this week.  Groan.  Here’s hoping for no more distractions and attacks of procrastination.