You know you shouldn’t have said that one word, or turned around when you should have faced it. You breathed in heavily for survival, forgetting that it was actually the carbon dioxide that would kill you should you not breathe out.

It’s not healthy to relate to these words too much; you didn’t write them. It’s wrong to be too proud of all this beauty. If anything, you should be ashamed that you were here before. Once it’s out, it’s out. It’s cracked. You’re dead a little more and you take it as though you felt like you believed you were immortal. Where would this arrogance take us?

And yet, shouldn’t there be a consolation for doing the right thing? Had not all religions been based on that? It might have taken you time to get yourself to do the right thing, oh, but you got there. You got there. It’s time to breathe out.

What hurt the most was you knew you were capable of so much more. You were maimed but you had your heart and you felt like it was all you needed. But alas, your memories would forever betray you. You would give anything for anyone to share with you the immense weight your feelings gave you every time you let your mind some rest. But it’d be better this way that it was all yours.

Oh, what one would give to be fifteen again.

Oh, what one would give for these little deaths to stop from recurring.

Oh, what one would give for that big one to come to stop it all for good.

This is me trying to say to you what I can’t muster the courage to still my heart, move my mouth and transmit words I should have said to you more than two years ago.

I am my past and you fell in love with that. I will not apologize for that. You are what you are and I love you. But it’s pure guesswork when I say that I am selfish enough to believe that everyone must be products of their pasts as well. I love you for everything you are, flaws and all and some. I can’t change. I can’t go back in time and fix the broken things that would end up breaking me. I can’t have you do it for me. One thing I apologize for, though, is how I may have disguised myself as functional when I was barely chugging along.

I am what I am now, and that is who is with you. I fold. I tend to run away. I’ve become so good at it. Whatever strength I might exude that you, or everyone else, might be privy to, I have not achieved by not fighting and getting scarred. But there are wars I choose not to revisit or recount. I am telling you: I will fold, I will run.

I am sorry that you feel like I have never moved on. I am sorry that you are right. I’m sorry that if we were to quantify, though we shouldn’t, the gravity of the love I’ve given in the past, what I’ve given you might seem miniscule. I’m sorry for thinking that love is love, is love, is love. I said a lot of times in the past that there exists an infinite well of love we can draw from.

But what if I was wrong? I hope you don’t incriminate me for that.

I am hurting you; I am doing it effortlessly. I am ashamed. I am a lot of things. I am my past. Some people move, some people don’t. I’ve stopped believing I might be the first kind. But I am with you. Everyday. What do the days count for?

I know you said you can wait. I tell you you are waiting for wheels that aren’t ever turning. I know you believe that with the immensity of the love you’ve been throwing my way, you can change the things that have gotten me like this.

How long must you wait? What if I’m right?

But more importantly, what if you are wrong?

I wish I am able to talk you like this. But alas, I am my past, and I’ve always been like this.

There is some comfort in knowing that you’re leaving things, if not by memory via the brain, not by feelings via the heart, at least by distance and by the time needed to overcome that. There is some comfort in a lot of things.

No spreadsheets. No calls, please. No complexities. I want to go back to the primeval.

There are places you go back to for the vaguest of reasons. And then there are places with a million obvious reasons for you to never frequent again, and yet, you stagnate. Maybe we just really all do what we want.

I want to give some perspective to those who lost as though it was something that could be spared. Since when did I acquire the right to judge the people around me?

Like I said, we just all do what we fucking want.

And oh, those strangers, they shall remain strangers. I like that.

He was optimistic like that.

If he were a word and an adjective at that, he’d need an adverb to go hand in hand with. He was colorless and when he was in solitary, he’d have to move inches every second just for people to notice he was even there. He was boringly mediocre. It wasn’t that bad, though; he knew of people who were worse off.

He had heard it said that there were only two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffered from a lack of life, and those who suffered from an overabundance of it. Too many nights alone made him wonder what kind of sufferer he was. Though, as one night, he started developing a habit of talking to himself, he kind of knew the answer.

It wasn’t all bad though. There were many perks of being so alone. For example, he never had to cook for anyone. No one would criticize his long-standing love affair with MSG like it was a blasphemy. And, there were no dishes that he didn’t dirty that he’d have to wash. There was nothing more painful than washing dishes.

But there were nights, like this one when he was picking up cigarette boxes, that the darkest of darkness covered him. He would start thinking of things encompassing from existentialism to extreme right-wing politics. The worst was when he’d have to ask himself whether everything mattered the least bit, and whether the future was necessary and/or important.

“There’s only one instant, and it’s right now,” he would say, and after a dramatic pause would add, “and it’s eternity.”

“But isn’t it that to say yes to this instant,” with a more dramatic pause he’d say, “is to say yes to all of existence?”

Neither would know what to answer to that.

*******

He waits for the bus at the bus stop. It was the morning after a night of good spirit and a couple of wine bottles downed with gusto.

There are days that apart from the sun and its inclusive light, nothing is different from the nights. Sometimes, the less obscure things are, the worse they seem. He’s made a mental note to set a palaver with himself whether that is a good or bad thing.

And then there is this day, in this time, in this spot, in this mental constitution, that you can’t just wait for the bus to get there. For the bus to hit you and drag your bloody body down the road to the next bus stop.

Just so, you know, you can do some more waiting there for a more violent bus.

“The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving,” he whispers to himself, waiting, waiting.

Where does one run to to get away from his own memories?

Like coffee in the morning, you are. Like cigarettes in lonely nights, you are. Like a god I die to touch again, you are.

Sometimes, there are dreams. I would get close. I would live as my heart stopped beating. You would whisper to me things how like coffee in the morning, I was. Like cigarettes in lonely nights, I was. Like a god you’d be dying to touch again, I was.

So what were these gods really waiting for?

There was no sense in waiting; what a pathetic thing to realize as I lay on the floor, doing nothing but.

Like morning sunshine, you were.
Like dying with a smile in the mouth, you were.
Like the air I breathe, you were.

Like silence, you were.

For a new one, thank you.

There really isn’t anything else to say.

It was what I thought I’d only read about in books I didn’t even get to finish. Not because they were bad. You knew of beauty which hurt the eyes? You knew of songs you shouldn’t sing along to? You knew of hells in glitters of heavens’?

What made you say what you were thinking in this cold month, like Novembers should be? You came in the same month of different years. You presented yourself once as the same person, twice as different persons, received by me of then and what was after then. Who were we, really? We shouldn’t be. Yet, we were.

I’m glad we met and I’m glad we ended.

That time we were at — of all places — McDonald’s and you bought me ice cream cause you wronged me. It was foolish and simple. It was beautiful. It was something I’d never forget. I didn’t even finish the ice cream cause we had to get in a cab and to the nearest motel to make mad love the way only indistinguishable anger could bring about.

I should have bought you a cone, too. I had wronged you by letting us not talk through all the pent up misunderstandings we had. Why was it so hard to talk? To you. For me.

But, what made you say that?

And that time we looked ahead to what we thought was waiting for us, we never really mentioned to each other whether we saw the same things. We just smiled — the way people who hadn’t a clue smiled — and we did whatever it was we needed to do. I wonder if that was when we started drifting. You to yours, mine to my path. You always had the most slippery hands. I hope you knew that I tried to hold on tightly.

I almost died. You thrived. Was it obsolescence I feared? Were it really you with the power to classify what was real and what were mere plug-ins and footnotes? I was a speckle in the beautiful. One which anyone could simply just blow away. I needed an explanation.

And honestly, I wish you had said more than just goodbye.

It was being alone she couldn’t stand, and all physical or emotional pains that went with the effort of extinguishing that aloneness, she dismissed as collateral damage. Part of the deal. Like that millisecond of irritation she had always experienced as a penis penetrated her, and that eon of guilt which always followed after everything was over.

No biggie.

She sometimes felt like she was a Hollywood star. Glamorous. Sought after. But behind all the shine and the sparkle, every bit as fucked up as everyone else.

She was on her sixth beer. She looked around, trying to find something interesting to tweet about. She focused on the couple in front of her. She composed something but stopped and deleted everything before she could send it. It was pathetic. Not interesting enough. What she needed was a pregnant tweet concerning the affairs of the universe. Something that was exorbitantly deep with which everyone could pretend to comprehend and relate to.

A swig of beer and epiphany hit her.

For the heck of it, she turns on the location-aware feature of her twitter client and says: Alone. Six beers. Feeling like I want to be taken home now. First one gets me.

Maybe it was the fact that she knew she would be gotten that made her somehow disgusted; her profile photo, the upper-half of her boobs bared, would make sure of that.

She pulled the mentions feed down and waited for it to refresh. One mention. A mutual followee. Fifty seven seconds ago. 

To your left. Let’s go.

She looked and saw.

She was a lot of things. Promise-breaker wasn’t one of them. After all, a tweet had an inherent sacredness.

She nods and stands up, grabs her bag and starts walking out into the dark. She has always thought it funny that the most fun things start in the dark. She feels him come near and she asks, without really bothering to look his way, “Your name?”

“You already know,” he answers in a deep voice which she has to admit turned her on.

It was true. She knew him. And him, her.

Why else would they have been following each other?

I had them all laundered and packed in a paper bag. All of them. Even the ones I liked and secretly thought of keeping.

I sent you an email. Read it. You always don’t. What’s the point of setting up an email account? There are several hundreds of megabytes of photographs — beautiful photographs, if I may add — and short stories that you have left saved on my computer in a folder aptly named MINE. Well, they are yours and with a heavy heart, in a week’s time, I will permanently delete all of them if you don’t give a word. There’s this one photo there of you and me in a trip we had in Laoag in front of this charming church. You told me once, we would go back there. To do exactly what, you failed to tell me.

I will delete that one first.

I was checking my calendar and saw that we set up a dinner with your cousins who will be visiting the country next week. Can you cancel it? I don’t really know them and you know me…I hate awkwardness.

Sigh.

I know you have several reasons for leaving, each one as valid as the ones I could give you to stay. One of those would be love but that would be in a thicket of all these other emotions. I would ask you to try to pick it apart from the rest, for the sake of trying to remember, but that would be asking too much. Why the thicket? Why the timing?

But I digress.

I would love to talk to you soon.

But give me three months.

I wake up and walk to the shower. I get dressed, get out, walk, find a cab, get in, listen to music. I pay the cab driver and get out of, walk to the elevator, to my cubicle. I sit in front of the computer and do things, I pretend, I walk to the john, go back, do more things. I walk to the elevator and down, smoke two sticks, eat some food, smoke some more, walk to the elevator and up, walk back to my station and wait.

I find a ride home, walk to the apartment, take off my clothes, walk to the bed, put some music on, and die to wait to live for another day.

For all I know, I walk incessantly in my dreams.

Sometimes, you just learn to hate it all. And you long for things to distract you, those that make the walk more intermittent, so intermittent that it’s no longer one. And you glance at your few friends and your thoughts get transported to a place where everything gets processed by their brains as their eyes have seen it. You are no longer yourself.

You are them; you are walking the same walk. You want to scream. But why bother?

I hate it that no one asks where we are all going. What the money is for. What the ache in the muscles is for. What the tears are for. Who created all the distance in the first place. If it even reaches to an end we all crave. What the questions are for.

I get so frustrated. I stop. And I breathe. I stop. And I know.

I wake up.

I walk.