Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Crater

Ideally, you should be panicking. You should be clutching on your chest, exhaling labored breathing, struggling to oppress your pulse from inching above wholesome progression

You should be inclined to keep your strides from wobbling.

Presence of mind should dictate that you steer all your willpower into not losing sight and collide into things.

However, your faculties are not in agreement with you. Nothing is discernible among the blurs of emotions except an abundance of emptiness, a bottomless gulf that fences you.

You want to feel a thing, something, anything. Even pain would have a lawful corner in your sleeplessness. Pain is a dreaded acquaintance but a much more welcomed guest than…this.

Suddenly words have rendered themselves inadequate. Metaphors have diminished its convenience and you fumble for vocabularies to withdraw and name your sentiment properly from the gaping cellar of intangibles.

Even time refused to oblige. Hours dissolved into days, days swelled into weeks, and weeks grew into another stem in the limbs of another year yet you still cannot seem to medicate this inexpressible feeling of nothingness. It’s almost a kind of translucence. A fogged dream you walked into, a keyhole where you become an onlooker to the aimless drifting of your unoccupied self.

You rummage through half-forgotten drawers of memory for crumbs of joy or grief, or whatever thing you will find there that will illuminate your displaced feelings into wakefulness.

Yet all you grab hold of is the same glutinous mist.

So you give up the wearisome gamble into phrasing suitable dialects with which to properly consign your emotion. You catch yourself ceasing from the folly of yet another version of What Could Have I Done Differently?

You keep your feelings to yourself.

Not because people will not understand your anguish.

Not because you are robbing compassionate people the generosity of well-intentioned empathies.

But because, with what little that you know, and no matter how flawed it might be, this is a modest way that you can muster to cope with the piercing throbs and ambiguous questions that elude answers.

So you choose to dwell in the hallway of sweet, melancholic silence.

Occasionally, on the way home, you negotiate the pavements, leaving a trail of whispered wishes. You inattentively dissolve into the evening crowds, and suddenly a face stares back at you, echoing all your unspoken love and sadness, a mirror floating among a sea of strangers.

You meet its familiar gaze.

Unapologetic, unblinking.

Read More......

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Hello stranger, I got no minute to spare

Months ago you vanished, nowhere to be found. One unremarkable evening, you’re back, remorseless, a truant lugging bagful of secrets. You are a trespasser now as you once were. And you will stay thusly: a beautiful riddle whose secrets have been watered down by absence.

Read More......

Friday, March 13, 2009

Paalam


Priceless chance for proper goodbyes was denied of us.

Your departure was anguished, fraught with deep longings for beloved absentees who ache in equal measures with you.

This is what wounds me the most: that fate wasn’t charitable to our shared thirst for one last embrace, for one last episode of mumbling brave reassurances that things are going to be all right. Finality has descended, as opaque and inscrutable as midnight, as conclusive as an extinguished breath that cannot be mended by grief, or revoked by tears.

But you are not entirely gone. You will be right here whenever I hear crisp, hearty laughter or whenever I walk into summers perfumed by ripe mangoes and freshly-threshed rice. Your face will burn in my mind whenever I hear strains of Besame Mucho which I will vividly recall being violated by your off-key hums.

I love you. I will incessantly love you.

I am fortunate that you had me in your lifetime and I am in profound gratitude that you have been an imperishable footprint in mine.

So for now I will mourn in silence, my labored farewell exhaled inaudibly, every saddened syllable carried by the faint evening breeze towards the infinity you will now call home.

Read More......