I Wish I Had a River

            It's been that time of year again when I fight to keep from going under into the dark and swirling holiday murk that usually engulfs me in these months. And I'd managed to keep my head afloat pretty well, too - kept away from shopping malls with their never ending Christmas carols, away from their perky people bubbling over in shiny happiness, the holiday decorations that mean next to nothing to me save a distant reminder of my childhood. 

            After the Christmas day celebrations with my family I came home to smoke a cigarette on my little porch. I was scrolling through the new Facebook timeline feature on my profile and saw the first four people who had added me as friends in 2007. Among them was a boy that I had met through MySpace which was more popular at the time. He lived here, and I was still living in Cebu. He had sent me a message with his friend request, telling me he thought I was pretty and would I like to go to the beach sometime. You see, I had put down Jacksonville as my location. His profile picture was of himself in jeans, shirtless (looking good shirtless, I might add), standing on what I assumed to be a bar, wild hair, eyes shut, arms extended outward, his head tilted a bit toward his right shoulder, with a red plastic cup raised in his left hand. The lights and the background were blurred and there he was in the middle, vivid, swaying to music. He was  pretty good looking (That's an understatement. Hot is more like it.)  that is if you're partial to the epic hair, Harley-Davidson riding, sneaker-clad, Marlboro reds-smoking, chin-pierced, fun-loving, bad-boy type,  which I'll admit I am. We only exchanged a few messages, but I was flattered enough to look forward to them. He was a wild one, you could tell. I didn't know him, but I was intrigued by him. He just looked so alive. 

        Anyways, when Facebook became more popular, he added me there, too. We didn't exchange many more messages but I would sometimes see a 'poke' from him or something like that. When I arrived here nine months ago, I entertained the idea that I would look him up, try to strike up a friendship maybe, seeing as I didn't know anyone here outside of my family. Once I thought I had spotted him at a local mall. The idea would resurface sometimes, but I never acted on it. 

        So when I saw his little picture in that box on my Timeline, I clicked on it, curious to know what he was up to. I scrolled down the wall, reading the little messages from friends saying that they loved him, they missed him, etc. Now where could he have gone off to, I wondered. As I scrolled further down I realized he had died. 

        My mouth was agape in disbelief. What in the world?! How could someone so alive and so young be dead? This is a joke right? I scrolled down for a good 20 minutes, determined to discover how he had passed, reading more messages of love more 'RIPs'. And sure enough I found it. He had died in a motorcycle accident one month before I moved here. Jesus. I Googled the date and the words 'motorcycle accident' and found a video of the news that night, about a man who was in critical condition after an accident on a local road. There behind the reporter, in the middle of the road, the dark background slashed intermittently by red and blue police lights, was the outline of a motorbike on it's side. He had hit a car. No one else had been hurt. 

        I found my thoughts going back to him for the past couple of days. You might wonder why this would affect me considering I barely knew the person. But it does. I don't know exactly what, but it's something. This was a human being that I was connected to by a feeble string, despite that being composed entirely of half-forgotten e-mails, it was a connection, nonetheless; an awareness of another person's existence in this world.

       So what is it? A reminder that life is fleeting and tomorrow I could swerve and drive myslef off a bridge and it could all be over? A reminder maybe to act on those little things that you put off or push into the back of your mind? The things you want to do but are afraid to? I don't mean to say that he could have been the love of my life or anything like that, because he likely would not have been - I'm saying that I might have found a friend in this person. What kind of insight could this person have brought to my life? What kind of fun might I have had from knowing him just looking through his photos was such a riot? (The image of him at some party wearing nothing but a lime green Borat  man-kini with a drink in hand is still enough to make me smile. I kid you not. Rare is the man who can make that look good.)

       Maybe it's just to tell me to live my goddamned life because it's fucking passing me by. I don't know. But it means something.  

         Rest in peace my almost-friend. I wish I had known you.

The Endless In-Between

Has it really been three months since last I wrote? Well, in that time a couple of things have happened. I got a job, for one thing. Is it a dream job? A paycheck is a paycheck. And with it I've been able to sign the lease on my very first (self-funded) apartment. Is this cause to be happy? Definitely. Living with my brother and sister-in-law was pleasant enough for a time until it became varying degrees of unpleasant. 

So now I have 800 sq. feet of prime 3rd floor rental space which feels like so much more considering the only pieces of furniture I  have at the moment are a twin bed (a hand-me-down from family), a tv stand (with a little tv courtesy of my brother) , and a little wooden stool that I bought at that wonder of stores where you can buy ammunition right across from the milk and eggs - Walmart.

On the one hand it feels like I've finally taken a step in the right direction, a step forward. But sometimes I can't help but feel like I've moved across the world to do the same things I've always done - read in silence and stare out of windows at the people below. Only the names of the streets have changed. 

By far my favorite part of the apartment is the screened in patio from which I have a great view of the swimming pool below and to the right. To the left is a sand volleyball pit. Just beyond these is a man-made lake of the sort you get in every Florida apartment complex - pretty nonetheless, with throngs of ducks swimming about. And beyond that still is the apartment building across from mine. All framed by two tall trees that I've discovered is inhabited by a number of playful squirrels. 

It should feel like a step forward. But all I feel is dizzy from swimming in circles. Stuck in this no man's land between someplace forgotten and somewhere imagined, I'm trying to get there but it feels so far away and the transition feels interminable. Am I making any sense to you?

What of the wretched hollow, the endless in-between. Are we just going to wait it out? - Imogen Heap 

From a Year Ago...

 * I found this post buried among the drafts of half-formed ideas. It was written over a year ago in a fleeting moment of maturity. Just wanted you to know I'm still alive (some form of alive anyway...) How have you been doing?

I've decided to forgo with a long part III to the story of le garcon. Why? Because - of the four people who will read this post, three and a half will be gay men, and I realize how difficult it must be for you to summon any sort of concern for a random (heterosexual) girl's romantic misfortunes. But please realize that the trials and travails of the twenty-something looking for love are not bigoted.  Loneliness is no straight supremacist and makes no distinction between the perfectly straight, the perfectly gay, or people of whatever integer on the Kinsey (Sexuality Continuum) Scale. So we should have something else in common besides our mutual affinity for men.

While blog hopping I came across some interesting posts by people younger than me who seem to have experienced so much more than I have in terms of relationships and heartbreak. I read their entries written in tones of wisdom and sometimes cynicism, but never without a little optimism, and I wonder how I have gotten to this age and still feel like a child play-acting at being an adult. Although I do my best by way of mimicry, I feel like sometimes my naivete sometimes shows above my collar. 

I  just have a slow life learning curve. I suspect my psych evaluation would read: I.Q? Normal. Emotionally? Retarded. So in attempt to show that I have indeed learned something in my 25 years of living, here are just a few lessons learned in the year 2010

1. Just because you think you are hot shit, worthy of unmitigated respect, doesn't mean that every person you meet will treat you accordingly. Some people just don't seem to recognize (your value) and your deserving respect, or recognize it but then ignore it. 

2. If a guy only ever wants to hang out with you in the dead of night that is not a date. That is a booty call.

3. Don't allow anyone to treat you in a way that doesn't live up to the standard you've set. If you let them do it once, they'll do it again.

4. When in doubt, act in congruity with logic and reason.

5. No matter how much you value a priori knowledge (that gained through experience), sometimes it really is good to listen to the voices of reason (the voices of people with experience). I used to never believe anything anyone would say to me, (especially if their advice was anecdotal) because I had to subject every theory to my own mind. I had to see for myself. Sometimes, (lo and behold) people actually know what they are talking about. Who'd have thought. 

Ticker

"Could it think, the heart would stop beating." 

25 Years of Deception I

Painting by Alice Neel

            

              What is your stand on the truth? Do you think it is useless if all it can cause is pain? Or are you of the opinion that stark honesty is best - whatever the costs? After twenty-five years of digging around in the family closet, I’ve finally found the proverbial skeleton that I felt was there all along.

               I am adopted.

           When I was  a little girl I would sit in front of the mirror and try to discern whose features I had acquired. My (very) Filipino nose was certainly my mother’s, I thought. My cheekbones were hers as well. My eyes I could never place. They didn’t look like my mother’s eyes. They weren’t my father’s, either. I didn’t resemble him at all, really. But my suspicion that I was adopted didn’t stem from not looking like him. It didn’t  come from not looking like my siblings either because my brothers and I actually share some physical similarities. How is that possible, you wonder? It’s possible because we share 12.5% of our DNA.

            We are first cousins.

            As I was growing up my family would take trips to the Philippines – for vacation or if someone in the family died – and I would have these sporadic chances to spend time with my relatives. There were some people I wouldn’t readily admit a blood relation to, some cousins, some relatives by marriage… and then there were my mother’s two sisters. One of them looks like a chubby version of her. They look so alike, that when rifling through old photo albums, I would constantly get them confused with each other. Can you sense where this is going?

           Looking back on those trips now, I remember that everyone (family, neighbors, and village idiots alike) kind of looked at me oddly. My mother’s family is from a very small town where everyone knows each other’s business and the older you are and the longer you’ve lived there, the more of your neighbor’s business you know. I don’t know exactly what it was in there eyes that I detected, but I knew (even at eight years old) that it was something. Pity?

            ‘The poor dear, she has no idea.’

             I don’t know. But there was something in the way they looked at me that made me think they knew something I didn’t. Knew something about me that I didn’t. Can you imagine that?

            Years went by and the thought took a backseat to more pressing pubescent  concerns – boys, acne, Brad Renfro. But I would always be reminded of it when my mother would scold me for anything I had done wrong. She would say things that sounded so odd and non-sequitur to me that stand out in my mind to this day. If my father and I had a disagreement, she would say,

             “You should be thankful to your father for giving you your last name.”

            And I would think,

           'Well isn’t that generally what fathers do?' 

           Why did she have to point that out as if it were significant? Because it was.

            Aside from weird slips like that, hints were few and far between.

              Then my father died. 

          I was ripped from all that was familiar to me, disconnected from every tenuos connection I had managed to make, and transplanted to the Philippines with my mother. Her reason? She did not want to continue living in our house without my father. My brothers were all grown by this time and living away from us. (The youngest was in college in Hawaii at the time.) And so I went.

           We moved into my maternal grandparents' house, next door to the aunt who looks just like my mother. Right next door to the aunt whose sharp tongue all my relatives say I inherited.

             My doubts escalated. 

            (to be continued. I can’t write all of this in one go.)

Streaks in Skies & Sad Goodbyes

            It’s funny how blogs are left dormant in two situations – either nothing is going on in your life or too much  is going on. The latter is true in my case. What have I been preoccupied with for the past month or so? We-e-l-l, packing the last ten years of my life into two suitcases with a weight limit of 50 lbs each, for one thing. Your friendly neighborhood neurotic has left the city she has called home for over ten years to go live on the opposite hemisphere of the earth. If on a globe you stuck a (long) needle through Cebu  and pushed it all the way through to the other side, you’d be in the general longitude of where I am now. What am I doing here, you ask? I ask myself the same question.

            I’m at the cusp of a new period in my life and it’s terrifying. Change always terrifies me. And this is pretty big. I feel like this is the point where I should finally forgive myself for all the stupid mistakes I've made  in the past (by commission or ommission) and start anew. But there’s that nagging thought in the back of my head that tells me I can’t just wipe the slate clean. There are consequences and repercussions of past mistakes that affect me to this day. Consequences. Despite my age, I feel like I still need to fully understand the meaning of that word. There are a number of things I wish I could have done differently in the past. I was so immature, I didn’t think about the future and the simple idea that what you do (or don’t do) today will affect you tomorrow. But, you know… spilt milk. Now I can only hope to prove that the past doesn’t have to define my future. 

Of Being Alone

There are some things happening in my life right now, big changes are about to take place... I'll write about them soon, but for now I just wanted to share this beautiful poem...