Lately, I feel as if I'm wandering around, just vaguely aware of what I'm doing. No, it's not like I'm floating. It's more like I feel like there is a screen between me and my body. I don't have concrete memories of things I've been doing lately. I remember them somewhat, but they're not as real to me.
Strange. Weird. Scary.
And yet strangely, it's saving me day by day.
Thesis isn't done.
I'm flunking Organic Chemistry.
I wonder if I'll make it. If I do, it's Bora time.
But if I don't...
I don't want to wonder just yet on what I'll do.
I feel numb mostly. I don't know if I'm lonely or if I just want to be alone.
I gave Tinkerbelly a bath yesterday and I used strawberry shampoo.
Now she's like a soft, fat, fluffy tube that grabs french fries from my hand.
On most days, it amuses me how far charisma blinds and binds people.
From Hitler to Jonestown to... where we are right now.
Someone has mastered the most crucial of the 48 Laws of Power: work on the minds and hearts of others. Poets are good at this, the book says, because they use mental imagery to evoke compassion and loyalty.
I'm not surprised that Hitler was an excellent painter or that Hannibal Lecter is a poet.
Dante's first sonnet in La Vita Nuova depicts the lady Beatrice eating Dante's heart out of Love's hands and feeling utter terror. It doesn't surprise me either.
That's all it takes. That's all it ever took.
I had the chance to go confession to Father Roche, SJ (a.k.a. "Papa Roche"). He told me a story about a great sculptor who was permanently paralyzed because of a car accident. Unable to sculpt anymore, he resolved to starve himself to death...
Fr. Roche: "Love is not about what you can give to the beloved, love is about loving the beloved regardless of who you are. It is the complete opposite of self-love."
Poet's Obligation (Deber del Poeta)
by Pablo Neruda
To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.
So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying "How can I reach the sea?"
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the gray cry of the sea-birds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
The outcome is inevitable and yet
I trudge feebly on as if
There was actual hope.
The foreshadowed rejection is so concrete that I cannot help but lament even before I begin.
Wicked The Musical. This picture shows Elphaba and Fiyero.
Where are the blue diamonds on Fiyero's skin? He's supposed to be a Winkie .
I'm in dire need of a valediction.
I need to learn how to say "fuck off, asshole."
I also need to learn when to feel happy.
Or, "kailangan mo lang ng boyfriend," as my brother so intelligently put it.
I don't think so.
My mind needs to stop working in all the wrong ways.
I need...help.
---
I can't do this anymore.
According to the guidance office, I'm very introverted, "highly intelligent in a very different way," "the way you see the world, or the way you think is different."
("Which is why you don't agree with me when I tell you you're intelligent, because you think intelligence is measured in the conventional sense. There is no test to measure yours.")
That's new.
But this isn't: I'm also very depressed, anxious and... (drumroll) "unstable."
And the last interesting bit is this: "you have trouble distinguishing between real and imagined failure and rejection."
I'm having my immersion, and I'm too overwhelmed to even begin to write about it. So I won't (for the meantime.)
I can feel.
I do not know what it is I am looking for, but I want you to stay. I don't know who you are. You could be anyone and everyone. I have no clue. And maybe I don't know any better.
But I do.
There is hell in my head and I'm shrinking away to a corner, trying to find my way out. I'm really screaming for help but I am maimed. I'm trying to tell you things that I desperately need you to know but I have lost the capacity to articulate so much grief.
No more silent tears
No more gazing across
The wasted years.
It's so sad to not even begin to expound on this condition. Why? It is a prerequisite that there is a self that actually does the expounding. And I don't have that, or I don't know that.
I don't know who I am, or what I'm doing here, or what it is I am supposed to find.
(I simplify my words to evoke the most primitive of heartaches.)
I'm tired of struggling. I need to learn how to accept gray areas. I always see things in black and white. Weeeee, checkboards everywhere and I'm stuck in 1920.
And I must stop making associations between things. I think I saw my friend today, and I confirmed it was her because I saw the way the fingers curved slightly on the steering wheel.
Is it really so bad, I ask myself, to see glass on spilled sand? Or phantoms swirling into view on the marble floors you always knew? And to detect in the choice of words (it is the nouns that give you away) irritability, a smile, a mourning for yet another way to live?
My head wants to explode from all these calamities, and they're never the right calamities. Little calamities of everything (yes, I tell you, everything) that no one will want to listen to. Not even me. And yet, they're too strong for me to push away.
See? How can I not find this awe-inspiring?
How can one keep from sighing?
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat. "We're all mad here. You're mad. I'm mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat. "Or you wouldn't have come here."
-Lewis Caroll, in Alice in Wonderland.
Tell me am I very far?
-from Time Explained v(2.1)
