Freesia

Picture courtesy of louisa_catlover

 

It is with you,

Ever patient,

Faithful and enduring,

Waiting springs to come to bloom;

 

And I,

Impatient,

Insistent and

In love as I am

Budging against uncertainties

Cutting loose.

 

Or at least,

We used to.

 

For what we are, I guess,

Is the product of a choice,

Of time,

Of fate,

And of compromise.

 

For what ever, indeed,

In the world could make

An angel

In the humble semblance of a flower no less,

Leave the mighty lofts of heaven

To surrender everything

Once grand and beauteous and soft

For a life with a mere mortal like me?

 

In the arms of someone

Unworthy as me?

 

For it is

With your selfsame devotion

To share a happiness beyond any,

Against a life carried away

By the promptings of a Fate

Playing deviously

A game of puppetry?

 

There is no less

For jealous, as he is

In his sky discerns,

The eyes of Fate,

All that we are.

 

And it is none other

Than a war we’ve waged

Just for a love

That’s taken center stage,

 

As I put into verses

All that you are,

And all that you mean to me.

Starcrossed

She was crying, the girl. Six. A torn piece of paper, presumably from arts class, with doodles of houses and clouds and flowers and gangly stick figures at one hand, and her mom’s hand on the other. Disappointment. Of how something she’d probably spent hours poring over has gone to waste.

I was sitting across them on the jeepney ride to school. Words of comfort. “It’s alright,” her mother said when the tears came uncontrollably. At one point, she squeezed her hands tightly.

As fate would have it, we dropped off at the same point, near the conspicuous pizza joint at the corner of where the jeepneys stopped to have their numbers marked as to which driver would take passengers back next. Somehow, they went the same way as I did, and, well, pretty much unsurprisingly, the girl was still very much distracted when we were walking down the sidewalk.

“Sige, halika,” the mother said, as we passed by a convenience store. Me, somehow drawn to the whole thing, felt I was rather part of the story now, and followed them inside. It was just eleven, after all, and my classes didn’t start until one.

With the younger one’s hand still held tightly to her own, the mother took a bag of cookies from the shelf, walked a short ways to the counter and paid. She then turned to the little girl, still crying and all, and with all the sweetness and patience she could muster, said “eto cookies mo; wag ka na umiyak ah.” She knelt down, wiped the tears from her face, and drew the little girl for a heartfelt hug. And in that very instant, the girl stopped crying.

I was moved.

I came from a retreat a couple of weeks back, and my mind has been floating around more than usual. There’s always that little big something due tomorrow, a lab report waiting to be finished, a couple of pages worth of lecture notes waiting to be studied. Admittedly, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this now, the pressures associated with college life – or with being finally branded an adult, even – has gotten me a little bit under the weather.

Truth be told, there’s been a lot of points in this very short twenty-summat days of college where I simply wanted to scream. You know, let it all out, until my throat hurts and my voice gets raspy when I talk. But being where we are right now dictates that you have to keep it in. Hold back your tears, they say, and smile as if nothing’s happened.

Let’s face it. When you were a kid, you could do everything, say everything. Say anything you feel, get mad, get happy, laugh a lot, cry a lot with fear of little to no consequence, knowing that tomorrow, everything will definitely be alright when the one who was teasing you yesterday asks you for a piece of biscuit at recess.

Things have definitely gotten more complicated now. Things you say today may have an impact even long after you’ve long been assured things wouldn’t change. Obviously, they have, and who knows, really? The probably still will.

I guess we’ve always been shaky since day one. Priorities – there’s that rotten word, again – meant that what holds true now may not be the same tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that. Or the week after that. We become more mindful of what needs to be set straight. Responsibilities, deadlines, whatever. It’s a consequence of how much we’ve grown, or rather, how much we’ve aged. And people, well, they tend to drift apart just because of that.

And being where you are? Well, there’s no one to comfort you anymore, nobody older to look after you, no one to squeeze your hand and say everything’s going to be alright, but your own self. Not that you don’t have choices – of course, you do. But when the choices are either to implode, move away, let go or keeping insisting on a lost cause, it’s not really that easy to decide. Bad feelings, no matter how much you wish they would, don’t go away with a cookie cure anymore.

Obviously, I miss being a kid sometimes.

Reality Check

Hello there. I’m Dexter. Twenty. You know, the unidentified flying object floating around in your maths class? Right! I’m the one whose face grimaces like there’s always something foul-smelling under my nose. Remember me? Hey! It’s very nice to meet you, yeah?

So how’s it going? I just thought it’d be cool to get to know you more. I guess I’ve somehow been left out of your ecosystem for quite a while. No, no, it’s not your fault. Honestly. Admittedly, I guess I’m what you call boring. I don’t pollute my bloodstream with Starbucks branded caffeine as often as you do, or scream like a disoriented fangirl at how Kobe Bryant dunked a shot over Dwight Howard until my vocal chords snap in two. I don’t like staining my clothes with leftover butter from the box of popcorn I’ll manage to spill on myself on the cinemas either. I prefer staying online while looking for that foreign radio station waiting to be found. I do intently listen when you talk about them, though, these night out’s with your girl friends and those funny youtube videos you came across when you came home at 2a.m.; I’m genuinely interested in what you have to say, as long as I don’t have to entertain stupid conversations about what people do after dancing with a girl in front of a hidden camera to pass off as updated. Oh, Jun Pyo and Ji Hoo are perfectly fine.

On most days, I’m just the guy sitting at the third seat from the center aisle, doing my own thing, Daphne Loves Derby and Red Light Company resonating in my ears until Sir Quinto arrives, while you’re doing yours, planning on hanging out at some local joint to drink some beer. I do talk when talked to, though. And you wouldn’t believe how much I blab, only, of course, you never really wanted to talk to me. Either you thought I wasn’t the speaking type, or someone who’ve tried talking to me before told you how opinionated I was. Well, I suppose I could be assertive at times.

Out of topic, this, but I know you always liked taking personality tests since way back. Actually, I’ve been developing a thing for them lately, as well. I never really understood what’s up with that before, but man! You know who freakishly accurate they can get? Oh, I was born on the twenty-fifth of September, by the way, which makes me a Libran, so if it were to be believed, it means I weigh out my options a lot. Close friends tell me I do that often. It’s cool, no? A quiz I took the other night told me I want nothing but the best for what I’m doing, although I know when and where to draw the line. I’ve been feeling that a whole hell of a lot lately as well. Maybe that’s how some people have come to the conclusion that I was difficult to deal with. I never thought it was possible, but I guess one could be soft-spoken and outspoken at the same time. At the end of everything, I guess I’ve never really been afraid to step up when I think some things have gone insanely out of control. Truth be told, I’ve lost a lot of people with that. And I’m not sure whether I’ll lose you with this one, as well, but hey, what the heck? I’ll take the chance.

So how about you? Tell me something about yourself; I’m very eager to know more.

A Freedom Day Too Early

Here we are, I guess – sunshine, day-off celebrations and all that. I’m sorry about this, you know – I know it’s been more than just a couple of days too late and I haven’t been able to talk to you about anything at all. But, God, the weather’s just been really crazy lately. And you know how my connection always acts up when it’s like that, don’t you? I mean, not that it’s ever been that good to begin with. But, never mind that. Maybe, I’ll save the excuses over coffee, so I’ll have something to say, anything to crack you up. Right now, I want to talk about something else.

I guess it’s been a crazy ride, huh? But hey, this is it, and I’m really happy for you. Finally, things are going the way you want them. Frankly, it’s about time. I’ve told you time and again, you deserve it, maybe more than anyone else does, if only you’d keep faith. And you have. I am not oblivious to the fact that, for months, you’ve been waiting just for this very thing, frustrated, sometimes, but always hopeful and positive. Now that it has, you’re just about to, as cliché as it sounds, take that next big leap. To everything you ever wanted. To everything you ever dreamed of. That little corner of the world you’ve always wished was yours is, well, just a stone’s throw away.

All well wishes aside, however, I have to confess, and you’d have to forgive me. Remember how, when you grew tired from routine the first time around, you found yourself landing somewhere else and said the very same thing? And then you grew tired of that one and moved elsewhere still, you said that was it? Yeah, you can call me exasperated, call me cynical, or whatever, but I’ve been keeping count, and this has been the third time you said you found what you were looking for.

Now I don’t doubt you, of course. Not at all. I trust you have everything in you to know what’s good for you. I guess what I’m trying to say is, well, people have a tendency to not know what’s good for them. We always keep looking for something better, even if we already have something good. Or rather, we keep looking for something better, only we never find it. Trust me, I know. For one, I’ve migrated from a dial-up connection to wireless broadband and yet, I’m still complaining that it’s too slow. Or I’ve clamored to lose weight when I was a tad plumper, but is bent on putting on more meat now that I have. Heck, I won’t even begin to talk about my career options a couple of years back – how believing that “that was it” forced me to give up on my blog, even if I was not really thrilled about not keeping it anymore. Don’t fall into that trap.

Or better yet, just take each moment as it comes. Don’t regret anything you’ve ever done, and don’t get too excited that you miss out on the fun, either. It’s independence day, after all, and on the most essential of levels, I wish you’d be liberated from the fear of not knowing whatever would come next, or from wanting everything from the past to just come back.

Now with that aside, congratulations on a job well done. Don’t forget to write back, alright?

The Faith Factor

A couple of months back, when mom was still pretty conscious of filling the whole unit with an eighty decibel audio from whatever it was that she was watching at that particular moment, I heard Kris Aquino over the tube. It was on one of those considerably less stressful Sunday afternoons, me headset-free and what-not, and after her emoting over something I don’t exactly remember anymore, she ended her tried-hard-to-be-dramatic-but-didn’t-quite-pass-off-as-such speech with a cliché. “Choose your battles,” she said. It made sense, weirdly enough, even though I’m sure it didn’t really quite tie up with whatever it was that she was saying anyway. Even so, it’s pretty much lived with me until now.

I’m not exactly into reliving my defeats and failures from the past. The fact notwithstanding, three weeks ago, I lost a bid to become N.E.C.E.S.’ vice president for logistics and documentation. I think here’s where I’m supposed to insert bitter comments about how my pessimistic tendencies dictated it was never going to work out in the first place.

But I won’t.

Because I won’t make a mockery out all of the experiences I gained from that point onward; there were a lot of lessons learned, new friendships formed, bonds with old friends that got strengthened, and a particular one that takes special mention for being renewed – you know who you are.

And then there are the offers. Of course, a lot of things have opened up for me after that. One’s being delegated the task of organizing workshops for the same club that I ran for, which is nothing short of being nailed in the proverbial coffin. But I’m barring the two more that I’m essentially considering up to now; I’m indecisive like that, I guess – that much still hasn’t changed at all.

Because after everything I’ve purportedly been through over the last couple of months, I’m no stranger to having cold feet. Right after the loss, my resolve was complete; there was nothing left for me to lose. I gave myself the green light.

Yet as though on that line-up less Saturday redux, I’m having second thoughts about taking one more. What if I’m having too much on my plate? What if precisely because of that, I end up undercooking all my commitments? What if I haven’t chosen my battles well enough?

How committed are you? The last line read.

People will have you believe that ultimately, you should let go of your inhibitions. As for me it’s not a question of having guts of steel or having a face four inches thick, but rather it’s the prohibitions It’s all about firmly believing that I can do it all.

I guess the only question now is: can I?