my leg is killing me, thank you for asking.

I have to realize that it is going to be me and my pillow yet again and that part hasn't changed much in the past seven years. it seems rather empty now that I look at it even with the sweet short intervals in between where I don't get to sleep there; the thing is I still go back to it, I still have to go back to it. Perhaps the cold weather is just making it more pronounced or perhaps just more recognizable for what it is. Only that there is a reason why I am here with that empty bed and a pillow that I mostly use as something to close my arms over.

Right now. there is just too much and as a case in point, lately I have come to realize my old current work interferes with these daily epiphanies that I think would have made me better but then again along the motions of going to work, the work itself and going from the office to the aforementioned empty bed, there also are epiphanies that I happen upon, like what is the difference then. And then I come back to my situation and wonder why I have only been here not somewhere else, except that I know the full reason why I am here. I have to recognize that truth of getting the answers to my questions because I think this one of those times that the abyss just looked back. I may perhaps be overthinking it again, then again I may just missing the truths that stare me in the face every day. Missing a piece is a good thing when one needs to be alive.

I am now in that haze after recalibrating my thoughts about certain things that I have continually done and knowing suddenly that there might be other ways that I could have done it. In that haze it sinks in again that the better way for all these is someone to converse it with, and share that empty bed. Going through this is just plain scary, and all of us wants to make it through anyway. There is no use if there is no one to affirm that. Just yourself is never enough. I can blame the weather for all I care, but that truth will also burn right through it.

(and I guess this goes out to all of the persons that I miss and pine for; those conversations that I cannot remember most of the time where they end)

all this evening needs is rain falling.

Looking at the days inching closer to the 23rd makes the months that have went past more real; enough to put the nearly 12 months of those days to make a year, when time a few months ago never seemed to move. I know that everything that has been is real, I was never a fool to deny that part except that I knew there was one thing that I could deny for the most part, my emotions about it all.

I knew that you wouldn't be around forever, but with that same breath it would be so great to have a little more time to spend with you. There is nothing that I would have wanted more tonight, as a prelude to the anniversary of your passing.

And then it begins to rain outside, and I can't help but rain also. (with the almost dry heat of the day I didn't think there wouldn't be any chance of the heavens breaking down in tears.)

Yes, perhaps I shouldn't deny myself anymore. I can hear you say now, that we will get over this in time. I have to start working again on the things that I know I should have done more. And I hear you again saying that everything gets better with practice.

I'll be there in a week, Pa, with Mama saka si Topsy, then kumpleto na naman kita.

this is from one of those books that we dog eared with reading, Journey to Ixtlan.

The Definitive Journey

… and I will leave. But the birds will stay, singing:
and my garden will stay, with its green tree,
with its water well.
    Many afternoons the skies will be blue and placid,
and the bells in the belfry will chime,
as they are chiming this very afternoon.
   The people who have loved me will pass away,
and the town will burst anew every year.
But my spirit will always wander nostalgic
in the same recondite corner of my flowery garden.

(by Juan Ramón Jiménez, translated by Carlos Castaneda)

Miss you, Pa