At times it is bearable to cope with this sense of loss. Hope clings to the surface of our consciousness like a damp cloth.

I once dreamt that I stood in the middle of a near empty highway at night. There were no cars. As soon as a headlight reared itself from a distance, I crossed. What was the point of this? I knew that regardless of how unthreatening it might be to stand in emptiness, it is still precarious. Precaution is never the absence of danger. When danger waltzed in, I felt safer. At least I knew what was coming. Knowledge is never reassuring but it has the illusion of security. When we know then we become less afraid. Even of dying.

But dying is different from death itself. We do not know what death is like so we are afraid of it. Is this what they mean by “face your fear”? Is it facing the possibility of death? It made me think of all of those who stared down at death from the precipice. It must pass through fear somehow. And after that, who knows. Is it a vacuum? Are we emptied of all fear when death finally comes?

Perhaps this is why some are no longer afraid to die, or at least they say they do. They know it does not last: fear, life and death. For that matter, nothing lasts. We cling to the transience of things being where they are at a certain moment before they are gone. We are obsessed about preservation, permanence and the habitual discourse of living life to the fullest. When life is full, does it not become empty? Heidegger must be rolling in his grave by now. Are we not living paradoxes, in that sense?

Every day I contemplate. Modernity prescribes that this is a pointless exercise. I laugh, I talk, I eat, I sing, I love, I dance, I drink, I cry – nothing wrong with that. True that no one tells me what to do but how come all this pressure not to think? I ask, I think, I think again and on top of another point of analysis, I think about that too. I have been told that I think too much like it is the most laughable thing. It is funny. It is funny that it is funny and even funnier that it is funny at all. We laugh at the darkest things to ease the tension, to reduce it to its most trivial form. For when things are small they become bearable. I remember how the late Edith Tiempo described, for instance, how love is folded up so it is compacted in our hands. We compact those that overwhelm us. An act of suppression that makes life all the more bearable: we fold and fold until we run out of halves. We are all made of the little things that we shelve in the back of our minds. The little things we would rather not think about.

Albeit, it is pointless! It is pointless to think about the big questions. I am just as clingy as the damn damp cloth. For what little or much I have to live for there is that pointlessness to it. We all fall down eventually. We all fade. We all lose. But here I am and you can read me and that is the point of it all.

***

According to Tito Cube, the great philosophers never settled down with one person because they are married to the world.  A person has only so much love to give.  It appears to me as a reasonable choice.

***

I’d love to spend my birthday somewhere very far from home.  I am seriously putting together the possibility of traveling abroad to Malaysia to visit my friend Kye. Yes, just need to file for my lost passport etc…basically put up with the mindless bureaucracy to what end I desire.  It seems very near, at the same time far off.  Consider also the funds I have to raise for such an endeavor.

However, if not at all possible I still plan to fly a considerable distance from here.  There are some events in Dumaguete come July which appear to me as the perfect excuse to go there.  Excuse, being the operative word.  Albeit, my old teammates from the debate team are encouraging me to join their adjudication pool and the idea does have some appeal.  You know, my favorite part of these conventions are the socials.  Meeting like-minded delegates from different parts of the country…and possibly new love interests, hahaha.  But on a serious note, no, I am not looking for love interests at the moment.  Shouldn’t I be at this stage of exorcising such ridiculous thoughts of love?  Yes, I am projecting my friend R who says that one can do stupid things now and justify it later with cynicism.  Whilst I dwell more at the latter portion of that thought.

There is just something about traveling that stirs the soul.  The sky shifts above you and yet you feel the oneness of the terra firma. The singularity of the world no matter where you are.  Just a new perspective.  New smells. New sounds. New images.  One beautiful subject.

Yes, the things you hope for to be content with one’s lonely freedom.

The absurdity ensues.

She has spent a great deal of time thinking about what she had done wrong.  And that maybe, Freud was a considerate enough man to have thought that one is destined to do what they do, for one is not their own shaper.  For if that was the case, and then whatever that was done whether of sound judgment or not, has been pinned down by a most powerful unconscious.  There is nothing gorgeous about isolation and desertion – but how is it humanly possible to cause others to leave?  Everyday there are people who are called fuck-ups for that reason.  (Makes you wonder what their childhood was like).  Try to open your mind to the possibility that they are not their own fault.  Ask: why are there persons who are condemned?  Why punished?  Why are they carted away to incarceration, as far away as possible from the “normal”?  Truth be told, normal people are as mad and as vicious and as poor as their own complacency.  There is no such thing as impalpable madness, only personal history.

Please read this woman right.

This woman I am writing about; this woman who has done so much of nothing to deserve so much of nothing.  She is the heroine but she is the heroine of a tragedy.  Her personality and resolve is triumphant but not her deeds or the result of them.  Do we really want a hero that has done so many things so easily and have taken the certain steps that were recommended to get to that point?  What’s the point of this? To finally get there. Wherever that might be.  The woman asks herself that if her world view has been distorted and has been cruelly reduced to a vague and impractical lifestyle, why does she speak as though she gripped her words, nursed them in her mind for so long and uttered them with so much affection and certainty.  Is that not the sign of clarity?  For the person who is mad, everything appears to be clear and full of eccentric meanings that they fully assert.  The half-wits, the safeties, the squares, the planned futures, and the comfortable – they don’t sound at all like they’ve understood.  Because why else do they categorically call the impractical, the clochards, the sloths, the gays, the drop outs, the criminals, and the marginalized as misunderstood?   Yes, misunderstanding exists.  But the problem is on how to respond to it.  Do you confront misunderstanding by showing no interest or no compassion? The assumption that a person can be a cut above the other permits ignorance. On their part, they have failed to inspect close enough.  They don’t really care.

So look.

Who do you think that woman is?  Do you really know who she is or is there an assumption that you know her better than she thinks she knows?  Have you spent more time thinking about her life than she has?  Shall we count in hours?  Shall we count in years?  Shall we count at all?