because people are changing.

Finally I cave in. to the confluence of the things that have the tendency to break me down with startling consistency. It's hardly a coincidence that it is the start. of the monsoon season. It rained early this morning and it will be some mercy if the sun sleeps today. I hear stories that the second storm for this month is coming in to port and looking at the sky, perhaps they are true. It would be nice to put on some music after I get home and not think at all but as it is I still have to get this work day over.

There is this surprising calmness now like the moments when you are crossing a major eight lane highway when you can see a car hurtling towards you and you are not really sure if you will reach the other side in time. Then you run, and those moments are. zen.  The sound of your heartbeat will cut in later when you reach the other side. That is the calmness I feel right now, but still without that heartbeat thudding in my ears.

I finally get to watch the rain again and there's nothing like it.

Just to hear it falling on rooftops and concrete walkways and watch it scatter and converge and then get lost as it flows to somewhere, then the wind comes through the window bringing with it the coolness that no air conditioning can ever hope to achieve, that coolness of cool.

And as the rain continues to flow and be scattered by the wind, I know that they are not the only ones falling, flowing, scattering and then gathering again like magic colorless mercury. I finally can embrace myself again, and it is both comforting and something needed.

something long wished for and something long longed for.

who you gonna call?

Your face is still like a ghost these days, it haunts me; and the only predictable thing that I find myself doing is replay scenes when we both weren't ghosts to each other.  My dreams as of late verge on the supernatural, situations that wouldn't happen normally, or perhaps I should say verge on the impossibility. But I guess that is what makes them dreams. It's just that these isn't really healthy for me. Or that this situation is really not making me live. I will be a ghost soon myself if this goes on, with a big difference: I don't get to haunt anyone, not even your dog. That kind of thing doesn't really cut it out for a ghost, it isn't a way to live. It's not really living. No purpose.  You at the very least get to haunt me and also have a life at the same time. That's living the life.

Egon Spengler better be good on his word

an agreement for leaving.

is this what I was waiting for
without knowing I am estragon and vladimir
then perhaps a second look would confirm
not that the first was insufficient
or lacking in factual details.
I guess, I just have to be sure.
but my mind knows the answer.
this is just hope.
despair veiled in positivism.

also my mind tells me I am not
estragon
or vladimir.

since unlike them forever looped in postponement,
what I have been waiting for has arrived.

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

smell the flowers.

You have to wonder sometimes where this is all going someday, even if wondering seems like staring into something endless and black. I happen across the traces of some lives that I have lived with, and loved; them having been a part of my memory and history without ever insinuating their presences, the wind just blowing them in, and having stayed there -- with me -- as if they have always belonged there.

(They were just like flowers in my field; one moment nothing was there then there they were, putting out roots and after some time they were in bloom and the field just wouldn’t look the same without them now.)

They are mostly in the music I play or listen to, photographs that have mostly faded from my mind that pop up somewhere, a postcard, certain turn of phrases, some old films on a rerun, mid afternoons, the stars or when the rain falls and the lulls in between them. They are just there, even if I'm not looking.

And these vestiges of times glorious and golden, after the initial ache of missing those souls pass, will sometimes lead me to some subdued thoughts of where exactly are we leading ourselves into, if there even is an end to all those roads that we have traveled on and forks that we still have to take, if ever there will be a chance to smell those flowers again, or perhaps we have just always been the captive audience of our collective imagination.

It is good that these thoughts are not the lingering kind; only exercises for the mind not a monster that I should battle with because the flowers that are still there are at most only short-lived and I should always find the time to stop and smell them.