Gnaw

After hours of fiddling, out the phrase you never could have ever known.

“Infiltrates are seen,” it said,

Infiltrates? Doesn’t really sound friendly, does it?

Kind of makes me imagine of a pool of pirates with metal swords and tattered shirts

With teeth all yellow and red from betel nut cigarette

They are too many,

 Far too many they form a grimish looking, dirty green of a thing.

They are approaching, swarming gradually, closer and closer towards me

And my two inner islands my lady, with all her pleasantry, calls lobes

My lady sits by the corner, lurking forward, turning me paralyzed

In her milky white robe, with hair the color of the shadows under my eyes

She called out and right then, snatched me by the heart.

I’m trying to listen but I cannot hear a thing

Did she say I’m okay? Or that I will be?

My spine is trembling,  

Almost gnawing now as I pull away from the metal beds that spark from the fluorescent

I could see her mouthing, words I cannot remember or too bemused to utter

My heart is pounding, pulse banging in my ears

I’m getting dizzy now, a little tissy

As if I just got up from bed, still fumbling in a half-awake, half-asleep daze

I’m trying not to faint, faking brave

Coaxing self: one can never be very blessed. And this?

One have prepared for this long before, nonetheless.

Seconds crawl like millipedes without the arms

Twirling, twirling, hovering by the soil where it had dug out a hole

Dancing and dancing, rejoicing in the irony the universe has pummeled this boorish atrocity

Help

Cuss and smoke fill the air but I don’t care.  Another guerilla night out it was then.

 

I sit there, a chair away from the carpeted wooden duck with two bits of a stair and glaring heavy colored lights. There was Basti then, there was Jet and then Kevin and a lot more like them—Gods of music, fathers of Rock.  Great musicians came all together as one for a night of selfless performance for the typhoon-stricken people in the Visayas. 

At some point, we closed our eyes and bowed our heads. We offered some bits of silence. And then we raised our glass to cheer for the brave members of those families who passed over.

We made a toast for a man and all his likes, who lost his home, his wife, his kids, but who decided to stay when he had all the reasons not to. 

The Dawn performing "Iisang Bangka"

It was tonic ecstasy that got me high. But it was the genuine heart of the people in that night that pulled me up, touched my heart and revived what has been a long and standing affection for these men —  the men of black shirts and electric guitars, with a cigar and a beer in each hand, with hearts of gold and ecstatic hype to rally round the hapless with their  trembling growls  and guitar string-callused hands.  

Jet Pangan

Basti & Kevin 

- HELP Concert; 19East bar
 

"You are an addict," take it from Liz

"In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place."

the culprit

"I was despondent and dependent, needing more care than armful of premature infant triplets. His withdrawal only made me more needy, my neediness  only advanced his withdrawals, until soon he was retreating  under fire of my weeping pleas of, “where are you going? What happened to us?”

I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement.

Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore– despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free).

Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have ‘that thing’ even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you’re someone he’s never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You’re a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes. 

So that’s it. You have now reached infatuation’s final destination– the complete and merciless devaluation of self." - Eat, Pray, Love

This I read last night. How amusing (and embarrassing) to finally find the right words to describe the situation you are in right  now. To see yourself, your story, articulately described, painfully drawn in words you never would have discovered for yourself. To find in paper, the puzzle you  have been trying to navigate your life with. 

That I am an addict is undeniable, that the only help i need should come from myself  is a universal truth no one else but myself MUST adhere to.   

Furnace fight

At the end of the day, what matters is whether he is worth all the pain.

You will cry and lose a heart from time to time. Your pride will be trampled upon, your dignity will be pushed aside, but think, suppose you retain all these, will you be happy?

Happiness is a state of mind, it is not conditional. It is not a question of who, and how, but a question of what. “What makes you happy,” is more appropriate than, “who makes you happy”.

You decided to keep him not because he does make you happy, but that having someone to love, being loved and be able to share your life with someone special, do.

Striving to make peace is peace in itself. It is entrusting your fate to your muse--- a mystical creature with the ball of your fate in its hands.

Surrendering is trusting. Admitting that you need help is courage. It is not cowardice. It is not a sign of weakness but of strength.  No one is ever called brave for fighting a fight that he knows will only have his heart as casualty in the war. No one ever won a war if when he goes home, he goes home to the wreckage of the furnace he had fought to keep hot.

The heart is a furnace you try to keep burning.   Love is a fight you need to keep winning. If the fight would entail your furnace to die down to darkness, will the fight still all be worth it? If losing the war will win you your heart, will you not surrender?

At the end of the day, it is not him that you went after for.  You surrendered for peace.  You surrendered the pain, the rancid thoughts of hate and bitterness. You surrendered to keep your heart whole, burning hot. 

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ― Brené Brown

- 10/23/13 07.53AM