Love love love

I wrote this a month or so ago when I was in a much different headspace (I am cycling through depression right now). But I still want the same for this relationship. 

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I think about you all the time. After my first heartbreak I thought I’d never love anyone as much again. But this love makes that young love pale in comparison. This morning when I came home and saw you lying in our bed you looked so wrapped up and so small, so fragile. I thought: my whole world is somehow contained in that body. How can something so vast and so mysterious be in something so ordinary-seeming as flesh and blood? But there you are, your eyes like oceans I could fall into and drift in forever, your hair like a forest my fingers get blissfully lost in. The hills, valleys, caves and cliffs of your body. I could wander forever.

I’ve never really been happy before. Oh, maybe some fleeting pleasure. But I’ve never been able to be “patient, kind, balanced, fine.” Not fully, as you know. But I’ve learned so much. I’m starting to trust you and myself more. I understand now there are things we can’t give each other. But now I want to know how we can help each other find them.

Let’s stay happy together. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s be patient. I want to make this last forever. I want to beat the odds with you.

You keep me up with your silence

You take me down with your quiet
Of all the weapons you fight with
Your silence is the most violent

– Tell Me How, Paramore 

* * * * * *

I used to think that people were so lucky to have friends to spend time with (because I hardly have any) but lately I’ve noticed that even for people with many friends, their relationships have become more and more fragile and fragmented. It’s so easy to cancel a date, so easy to keep messaging “Let’s get together sometime,” telling yourself that you’re doing your part to maintain the relationship, and just never actually show up.

I have no idea what we’re all supposed to do about this. I do know that this is very, very bad news for all of us, and probably the main contributor to anxiety and depression. Uncertainty = anxiety. When the world is telling you that your generation is a failure, when the job market is telling you that your hard-earned skills are useless, when advertising is shitting on your values and repackaging your most precious emotional experiences to sell you laundry powder, what truth and worth is left in life except the love and trust that we have in our relationships? And how are we supposed to feel when it turns out that we can’t trust each other to be there when we say we will? How many of us can honestly say that love exists in our relationships – even in the ones where it did exist before?

the fucking laundry powder

I’m tired of getting over it
And starting something new again
I’m getting sick of the beginnings

By the way – it should go without saying that I rely on my girlfriend for human company and that I’d be totally isolated without her.

I think this is why having a significant other has become virtually a necessity in our social landscape. It’s evident simply from the sheer number of articles discussing why you don’t need a significant other – why must you deny it if the pressure wasn’t so strong to begin with? – and if it affected you so, it must be something you feel internally, too. I’d even go so far as to say that the pressure to have a significant other is a personal desire that is projected onto others as an external, societal pressure, so that you don’t have to face the fact that it is something you desperately want. Nobody shames people for not having a boyfriend or a girlfriend – that just isn’t a thing that happens.

SO’s are a necessity now because the monogamous romantic relationship has become the only type of relationship wherein one person can be reasonably expected to reliably be there for the other; it is the only relationship wherein it is acceptable to demand to be a priority, to demand that the other keep his or her commitments and not make excuses. This is something that most people seem to have become uncomfortable in asking even from close friends and family members. There is the fear of being labeled “clingy,” the shame experienced in the perception of having fallen down the list of another person’s priorities, and the pride involved in the unwillingness to admit that you value their presence enough that your feelings were hurt by their absence – if it is apparent that they don’t feel the same about you, how could you admit to the way you feel?

I can’t call you a stranger
But I can’t call you
I know you think that I erased you
You forgot me but I can’t forget you
And I won’t replace you

There is this need to keep up the illusion that our own lives are filled with exciting experiences and opportunities. Our real relationships are sacrificed at the altar of the illusion. Why should you feel bad about someone failing to show up at your apartment for a quiet night in, when you could just as easily go over to four clubs in one night and meet a dozen hot strangers? Maybe: because you and your friend missed an important conversation about your problems, your fears, and your plans, and instead you wrecked your liver with shots, your lungs with cigarette smoke and your eardrums with a hundred decibels of awful DJ’ing; and you met a dozen strangers who will never mean anything to you, and that you will never see again apart from the next nights of irresponsibility and running away from the pain of disconnection (if that).

I feel like I may have asked too many rhetorical questions in the course of writing this.

I’m procrastinating about my paper right now. I know this is the only ticket to getting out of here. And even then it’s more like standby booking than sure seating. But still…

When I think about this disconnection, I think about you. It makes no difference in the grand scheme of things, and the things I’ve described are true even if I had never met you… but the truth is that I think about this because of you and the hope you gave me that things could be different. For a short while, they were. It was all the difference in the world.

And now you’re gone. Yes, you’re still around. But your face is like a bolted door. And you don’t smile anymore. How do you do that? How do you close yourself off so completely? How did you learn not to need anyone (except your girlfriend, I suppose – though I suspect you could get by without her just fine if you had to)? I want to know, because sometimes this pain is almost more than I can bear.

The truth is that need you in my life. And this is as absurd as any ridiculous crush I’ve ever had, even if I now only want you as a friend. Even more absurd – a crush people can understand, but to want a friend so desperately? How much of a loser can you be?

You don’t have to tell me
If you ever think of me
You don’t have to tell me, I can still believe

Hayley Williams

Reality will break your heart
Survival will not be the hardest part
It’s keeping all your hopes alive
When all the rest of you has died

– 26, Paramore

• Ten years ago, I was in my carpool on the way to school, not quite awake, when CrushCrushCrush came on the radio and changed my life forever. From that moment on, music became one of the few things that offered me an escape, from feeling trapped inside the weighty loneliness+sadness combo that’s always been with me for as long as I can remember.
• I learned to play guitar and I tried to learn how to sing because I wanted to be like Hayley and turn sadness into something beautiful.
• I dyed my hair with red streaks in the summers and finally dyed it fully red in the first week of freshman year at college. It stayed that way the whole time I was in that university.
• I didn’t hear from them for so long. When Paramore came out it sounded so bizarre and somehow mostly meaningless to me that I thought it was all over.
• After years and years, my girlfriend puts their new album on Spotify while we’re making breakfast. “26” comes on, and suddenly I’m the kid again, knocked out of a lonely daydream by a voice saying she gets it, she still gets it.

MJM

Caring for someone who’s depressed means you’ll always second-guess yourself. I should have encouraged her to be strong and maintain her workload / I should have told her to relax and take it easy. I should have made her go out and meet her friends and do what used to make her happy / I should have let her rest. I should have been there for her more / I should have given her space. I should have made her seek professional help / I should have let her choose what she wanted to do

**it’s weird, I walked this way and I feel it all the time with the same name, but I still don’t know the right thing to do for you and it’s all that’s on my mind now. I love you after all, and I wish I had protected you; I’ve completely failed in that respect and I’ll always be sorry. Give me another chance to be the person I should have been for you all your life (and rarely ever was)

I love you. I love you. I love you. Live through this, and you’ll see that you have a life beyond their eyes and beyond everything they think and say about you.

Woops

Someone asked me what I could share about the art and science of marketing and being in a sad mood / birthday tipsy I ranted that:

– the process of creating a marketing strategy begins with the segmentation of the population (putting people into boxes) and selection of the target market (judging the worth of people based on their buying power)

– which I thought was a bit dehumanizing and also essentially made you worthless if you don’t fit into any of the right demos

– that ethics wasn’t part of the curriculum

– that marketing can be much more useful to society it is now, if the right people would get into it, with the right training, for the right reasons and the right products

– and that in its current form marketing is poison for society and a major contributor to the isolation of individuals, waste of resources, and devaluation of relationships.

* * * * *

After sobering up, I reviewed the conversation in my head and realized that he might have been sizing me up for a job offer (I had mentioned I was close to graduating).

Ahhhhhh. Ahhh. Aaaaaaaaaahhh.

Hello world 2

There are almost no pictures of me here; I have no idea how many people read this blog and know me in real life / care who I am in real life. I’d rather make it irrelevant (focus on the message, not the messenger), etc etc.

But this is probably my favorite picture of myself, for many reasons that I guess I could get into another time

Snapshots from lives I could have lived

This site is dead now. I find it rather appropriate that it died around the same time that part of my life ended – the part I lived in these places and had the same musings about random pretty girls on the train or stumbling along the avenue with their friends on Friday nights.

* * * *

Loneliness (L. Barcia)

It’s not like you imagine yourself / in the arms of every stranger you pass on the street – Just the ones that smile at you

* * * *

Missed Connections Manila 

Pink shirt, office attire, shoulder-length hair, tired eyes – w4w – LRT

You boarded at Araneta station, and I only noticed you because you were looking straight at me. Can I just say I’m sorry? I know it’s rude to stare but I couldn’t help it. You were facing me directly and you were looking at me (straight at me, okay, it was pretty unnerving) and half the time you had your mouth open in this sardonic “oh, you sweet summer child” smile. Was it so obvious that it was my first time to ride the train at night? Whenever I made a joke with my friend you would smile too, as if you heard it, as if you understood the inside jokes half the time. Did I amuse you? Your eyes were so tired, but it seemed as if you knew exactly what was going through my mind. I was glad when we both got off at Katipunan and I didn’t see you in the crush of people (also because we wandered like lost sheep for a while). You unnerve me, woman, and I would like to talk to you. Just to see what you would say.

A Polite Desire

For most anyone else, it would be a bittersweet film about a relationship that couldn’t last but nevertheless made each person better for knowing the other.

For me, it’s about the impossible longing to go back to the moment where everything could have been changed. To correct the trajectory that was a fraction of a degree off course at the launching, a tiny mistake that became larger and larger and more irrevocable the farther we went.

“Here’s to hoping that our friendship can go where our love could not.” – A., 2015

I only found that note months after the last time I ever saw her.

The French Conditional Mood: The verb “aimer” is used to express a polite desire, sometimes one that cannot be fulfilled. 

J’aimerais que si j’avais été un peu plus âgés. J’aimerais que si j’avais plus patient. Si j’avais été mieux. Si, si, si… 

Not because I’m not happy now. But because I needlessly wasted so many good things before I got here.

Nothing but wordless images now –

an open window, a moment of panic, before I saw her perched on the ledge, smoking and listening to a sad song. a body against my back, fingers suddenly harsh and unfriendly on my throat. a low voice. peeling the backing off a fever cooling patch, patting it down on her hot forehead. being manic then, I didn’t need much sleep, so I would go into the kitchen and watch movies and eat cookies with milk while she slept on the mattress on the floor. we made so many plans and there was never enough time or money. a subdivision guard knocking on the steamed-up car window, looming in the darkness outside. a christmas party with all her closest friends, giving her a box full of our history, as well as I could document it. The musty room filled with musty objects, the four walls within which we had to contain our love. a lighted river, a moment of uncertainty. fingers on my cheeks, wiping away my tears. poems. poems and poems and poems, flitting back and forth between us like birds singing the sweetest notes.

I don’t think about the endings though, all the good reasons why, all the good reasons to forget. My mind doesn’t wander down there. I still don’t really know why.

The path I walk now, and the one who walks with me, is  just as sweet – and often sweeter, in its way – but the long journey here was so needlessly bitter

What It’s Like These Days

The statistics aren’t on my side. At least 25% – 50% of people with bipolar disorder attempt suicide. It’s like having cancer, the way it takes over your life, how you try to live in between the surges of disease in your brainbox.

On my wall I have a corkboard with the business cards of people I met when I was full of idealism and hope. It keeps falling off and scattering pins everywhere.

In the morning I’m so disappointed when I see the sun behind the curtains and realize I’ve lived to face another day. I would’ve been grateful to stop breathing during the night.

I don’t like writing about this here. I hate most of the novels written about bipolar disorder. They’re self-absorbed in a way that goes beyond the introspection of other writers, other artists and dreamers. I never wanted to be that way. But I’m fascinated and repelled by this illness, how it warps everything that I am. It’s hard not to pay attention to something that’s taking over you like this does.

I’ve lost almost everyone from my life. It didn’t happen right after my manic episode, which I would have expected, but sort of gradually… I don’t like myself, and I suppose it must be difficult to like someone who doesn’t even like herself.

I live for those visits with ____. The only times I ever feel safe anymore. My isolation is almost terrifying in its completeness.

I don’t like writing about this at all – but I’ve told myself – someday, when I’m brave enough, I want to write about all the ways I’ve made life horrible for the people who have tried to love me – like a part apology, part love letter, part confession –

To say thank you and I’m sorry –

To send some words on the wind and hope it finds them again somehow

I guess this is practice, because it’s really hard.

Random thoughts

People of ancient civilizations told each other myths because they couldn’t explain the world around them. Things that are now as prosaic as rainfall or the coming and going of the seasons were so mysterious, their origins so far beyond understanding, that the only way to console their ignorance was to tell a story…

* * * * * *

The origins were almost always traumatic. The murder of a family; a failed experiment; the death of a planet. In each case, something was irretrievably lost; something irrevocably gained. Their stories are long, but not encapsulated neatly between the covers of a heavy book – they span decades and leap between universes –

– and can always be rewritten as the mind and pen see fit.

Whereas my destiny seems trapped in stern lines.

* * * * * *

I think my country is dying. My regard for our leader and for myself followed practically the same trajectory. I loathe him / myself. I’m not sure what significance that has, or if it has anything to do with anything, but it’s a fact.

I think my country is dying. I never really loved it but I never hated it as much as he seems to hate it.

* * * * * *

Someday I hope my suffering and confusion could seem, too, as prosaic as the rain.