dérive you.

There's this pull, sometimes urgent and sometimes almost vague, to just drop everything going on in my life, just step out of it and into myself again and go walk around, drift around, wander around almost aimlessly and feel that much alive again.
And have conversations with myself again, some sort of hellos to an old friend who has been always there inside me.
So I take the road, even for the while of just a few hundred minutes.
Upon giving in to the pull, I become untethered for some time, for hours, unbound from the concerns and paranoia that the constant proddings of routine have. This is a sort of detached happiness, for want of a better description.
I remember having been this way since high school and if I could I brought a camera during these directionless walks. The photos, when I stumble upon them years later, also serves as more fuel to the fire.
I also see you in some of the photos, and it is momentary nuclear fusion.
Walking around, this is how I became intimate with the streets and the sidestreets of my city back then, and the people that lived and were living; they that walked around in Naga, they that made their lives and filled their lives with Naga, they that fell in love and fell out of it, they that were made mad and found themselves again, they that cared and just continued, they that just went through it like unfamiliar tv channels; they that couldn't wait to leave Naga (and now wish to come home again), they that wanted to grow up so fast, they that wanted to be young again, they that only measure what they have lost, they that forgot and only remembered some certain years in their lives, they that only had music in their heads, and all the usual suspects that I have met, known, love(d) and didn't have the chance to know that peopled Naga. I saw their eyes, I saw them and lived and died figuratively with them and with some quite literally.
I saw the dust flying in Quince Martires during summer days. I saw children that grew up too fast. I saw contentment and ambitions caged inside the blacks and browns of the eyes of the people in Naga. I also saw despair and glorious hope alongside them. I knew that we were one of those people and that we could always leave Naga, but Naga wouldn't leave us anymore than we could forget ourselves. Just before I left for Manila I also saw Naga start to change. Sometimes I think that perhaps it was just me at that time but I have more reason to believe, that it happened at the same time.
I gaze at the photos again and feel myself burn, burn in the way that your fuel could only make me.
The pull, we found out was something shared and it was more beautiful when both of us felt the tug and we went along like fallen leaves on a stream. And we talked incessantly along the road, streets and sometimes forgot where we were. There were also our silences, that were just as lovely. There just wasn't a camera for every time that we were walking on concrete, on drying grass, on cracked asphalt roads, on sand and on cold wooden buildings, but I still kept those pictures in my mind, something that no photograph can compare to.
I still walk around, even if Manila isn't Naga. It is still therapy for the soul even if we aren't together. Even if everything here is strangeness above all, it still reminds me of you.
When I am back home in Naga again, let me dream of us together, drifting away again in its streets and going back in time with clasped hands, and veiled desires as we walk.