tattooed on my mind

I can’t understand myself lately. Pain and enormous boredom has taken a bad toll on my usual vigor towards work and people… In spite of this, I’m not scheming to do some nasty things and create a sinister act that will harm those who are around me. And if I have a magic wand, I could have used it to make me disappear instead in this part of the world. I have a feeling that everything here is turning against my own path on my personal pursuit of happiness.

I just wish that things would be the same as it was few months ago when all I care about this world was (or is, as categorically I still do) the person I love so much…it’s been more than three months already…but just thinking about it now, and the way we were before would generate some sort of lump on my throat, it seems like it’s more comforting to just cry, than suppress sobs and tears…

I still have pictures of his faces on my bedroom wall. I still use our common toothbrush occasionally. I still sleep on his boardshorts… and it would be so dishonest if I won’t admit, I still long to sleep with him like the way we use to when we were still couple…

I even browse my old personal journal books and recall entries/dates when we were together. I know it’s not a good idea to do that, but it is like a panacea for me, it can take out some pain while recalling the good times together… the effect however is just palliative, because once I’d go back to reality I can not do something to spurn out the source of pain and emptiness. Well, separation anxiety is not an issue I can handle too well …

the longing soul

(written while thinking pensively about going away from present work and home)

I don’t want to be desperate. I’ve tried hard to be happy in every which way for the past days… seems like nothing and no one, unfortunately, makes my day worth living… What keeps me going recently is the hope that somehow the life of this soul inside my body will experience some sort of upgraded vitality regardless of some unmet longing for quality life and quality relationships, be it with my family or my lover/s (take note of the extended –s-, I’m actually considering going on a freelance erotic relationships)… I still have some quality friends anyway, although they are literally far from my abode they are within reach anyhow…

I am numb, I think… Perhaps I am also becoming escapists, or was I, even before this awareness had emanated from somewhere else? I know there are things, big things, I need to reconcile while my world is not being swallowed by unrequited love affairs or by unsatisfying and deceitful familial affairs/matters.

We usually worked too hard, fought everyday to make life worth living because there are some very good reasons to live for. Now I am asking myself that very question; what do I live for?

Its so amusing, my way of living is so simple, and I am traversing everyday in a very insignificant place, but I do not seem to act on making this life more interesting. I said simple because it is so in a lot of ways…

I do not have a house, I have written about that here not so long ago. I do not have a car or a car loan to think about. I do not have the most expensive techno-gadgets to bustle about, if I have, it is only this laptop that I am using to make reports or minutes of our COOP meetings. I do not have expensive clothes, and my choices in my wardrobe (as if I have one… ) are just in between work clothes/uniforms and household garments. And I do not have a very significant idea to mull about.

And yet… yet everyday, I would wake up with my head full of things to think about, or worry about… Should I reply to Biboy’s text messages and try to cater his needs even if in reality we don’t have to because we have decided to separate ways already? Should I be amiable and civil to my traitor cousin who always leers whenever we cross each other at the house yard because we are neighbors as we are relatives? Should I be tolerant to my co-workers even if I have these silent curses every time I heard them make bad comments and back bites the passers-by at the lab? Should I be considerate to those in my workplace who are bragging about what they have done to the Company even if they do not have the smallest iota of know-how about their work and what they’ve done is making more work less easy for those who truly are capable and learned workers? Should I be contended with what I have at present even if my heart longs for a convenient, comfortable and worry-free lifestyle?

I have always long for adventure, I always wanted to be somewhere else other than this backward, unsophisticated place. I always long to be in some colorful place wherein I can see and meet people who can appreciate art, good music (when I say good, its not something loud and monotonous) and facilitate discussion about more interesting things and not just about talking at other peoples’ backs. I long to wake up in the morning where I can listen to unfamiliar earthly sounds of creature I’ve never seen before and not about the incomprehensible yelling of my neighbors. I long to poke my head on my room’s window to see a beautiful garden or perhaps a nice scenery or landscape and not the boring site of rice paddies…

But here I am living in a countryside area where all I can see are familiar greeneries of bananas, coconut trees and ricefields. I wonder what other species of flora I can see in my lifetime. I interact and go along with people everyday who believe more on witches and ghosts, and talk insidiously about other people’s affairs. I work in an area where diligence, ingenuity and initiative are not the basis of assessing good workmanship but how one sticks into our bosses asses or how ones’ name tags relate that to our superiors’.

I sometimes think this is not where I suppose to be. But if I go somewhere else, could I make my life better? This place is my home and the people here are my tribe. How can I possibly make this better if I will go away and escape to somewhere else more fascinating than this area. Perhaps I have to hold on yet to what I have here while it is still bearable. I am not sure if there is something I can do to make life worth-living here but as long as I do not feel like I’m being swallowed to this system I think I can win to make my life here fervently meaningful.

Somehow I believe the days to come might bring some unexpected events that will bring colors to every turns of the clock. Or perhaps a passionate person might come to bring aflame to my numbing heart. Whatever it is that is yet to come, I still have a speck of hope that everything in my end will be better… and if it will be, I hope it would be so soon, because hope is all that I have right now…

abandoned sometime ago… could be homeless very so soon…

I will be using this blogsite again to ventilate my indignation, angst, dismay, disappointments, sadness, loneliness, helplessness, defenselessness, and vulnerability. I so regret I couldn’t find a single soul here at my immediate environment where I can express all these without being adjudged unfairly for being a bit emotionally irrational. But when a person is confronted with indignity there could be no other way to make him rational, most of us would react violently.

Well, I am sober though. I can also control all these just as I have always done, I was upset though (but not literally angry…) and DISMAYED… that I almost throw up. Probably because I am still recuperating from all the depression of my relationship that had gone into quagmire when this news came, and because I have just knock off from the graveyard shift where I work indefatigably at the lab trying to meet the deadline for the result of chemical analysis I was doing recently for our corporate gods in Makati Office. What makes me terribly upset was that I was so tired that I wanted desperately to sleep when my mother told me we are to be evicted from the house where we are presently living!

The news came out as a surprise for us, especially for me, as I was honestly not anticipating this would come to me in an unguarded time. I didn’t even know how to react and what to think to resolve this. I looked at my mother with enormous pity because I know it took her a lot of courage to repress her tears, and I know precisely that if this is true somehow she would think that this was actually directed to her and this will be the last of her life’s frontier she could protect. She definitely is at the losing battleground because this is not truly her home.

The house that has provided us shelter is truly not our home. It’s my Aunt’s house. Now I realize that in her struggle to stand to raise her kids she had somehow created enemies within our clan (my father’s side). Definitely now if we are to be evicted from this house, this will make her enemies happy.

Somehow for the first time in my life I feel so terribly homeless. We lost our house when my father decided to sell it when he was asked to be in another work assignment far from this hometown. Nanay, our Aunt (my father’s closest older sister) was kind enough to accommodate us, and we lived with them since, even my father died a year after our transfer to this house. When my Aunt died several years ago my cousin and uncle (Nanay’s Husband, that’s how I call my Aunt) allowed us to live there and we seemed to live like a family. It stirred a lot of undesirable thoughts to those around, even to relatives in our village. There were a lot of malicious issues thrown to our family, stories I didn’t desire to hear. Much more to this, my only sister made numerous misdemeanors that up until now she had not outgrown with, and this was something they could feast with.

There were a lot of times I would not go home and I would normally choose to stay at the campus when I was already a college student because I want to evade from all the issues. For so long I tried hard to correct my sister’s misdeeds but it has been so ingrained to my family’s detractors, they love to talk about it insidiously all the time. I have learned early in my life to just brush it off away from my thoughts because if I should, I would only end up getting depressed for realizing that I do not have a wholesome family, and ultimately hate my sister all the more for dragging us down with her notorious deeds.

It is extremely even painful to just realize that whatever good things my father had instilled to us to become worthy inhabitants of this planet, is quite different from what my relatives had construed about us too. And it is also quite hard to swallow that my relatives as well doesn’t consider us family, we are like outsiders that they seem to wait any mistakes any of us could make so they can fester on it and proliferates stories to the villagers to make us appear as lowly leech, opportunists homeless orphans.

For years I have tried to make us belong to the clan. I have accepted with all humility any comments they would blurt out because I would like to pretend they were doing it as an act of concern. But I always feel otherwise. Now finally in recent years it becomes so clear. I have been betrayed by two close cousins on two separate occasions, I didn’t even show any anger just resentment for the bad things done. I could not hate them because hatred is something so stressful, I cannot afford to be consumed by negative ill-feelings. I thought it would make them realize what to learn in life, but their pride is larger than the lessons they could learn from it.

Well now perhaps I have to make way to provide my family shelter. I do not know how… not for now… especially that my meager salary is only enough to make ends meet in providing food for us. One thing for sure though, that it is an immediate problem I need to urgently address. I am afraid though that the moment I would go home from a night shift’s work, I will find my mother cast away, sleeping outside the door.

I just wondered though why for the long time there was an abrupt change in my cousin’s attitude (the one who provided us shelter). I wonder how she become cold nowadays, I started asking myself about what wrong could have I done to her and her family to deserve her apathy. Each one of us, Jay my brother, and my mother would took turns in helping support my cousin’s kids send them to college. This is not enough a payment for the gratitude they have provided us home and support, but it was done so from the bottom of the heart. The money we shared was not taken by having asked that from some politicians or from other big moneys, it was an output of hard work through blood and sweat. If she was angry with my sister there should be no way she could drag us all because of that issue. Have I somehow made a terrible mistake and have I recently offended her too much to just drop us without even telling us earlier she want us out of her property?

If she has been planning in good fate to lease her house, why haven’t she considered us to be the lessee? We can work it out that way for sure, and it wouldn’t be a problem. But the fact that we were not told about it had somehow eliminated the point that we were considered. My immediate reaction was to verify it from her and hear it from her words, we might just been fed with a misinformation. I did try to contact her by phone. She did not take my calls even if I attempted to call her thrice. Every time I ring her phone I can hear the other end was being dropped.

It weakens my knees, so it was indeed true. I was horribly dismayed I could not surmount the distressing fact that we were to be scorned. I know I have to stand up for my family to provide them with this basic necessity but I was so disappointed why my relative, my closest cousin had just turn their backs on us… so unexpectedly…

Until now it isn’t yet clear to me… I still wonder why this has to be so when all she could have done was inform us formally, and now she refused to talk to me…

I have been abandoned by a lover. I have been betrayed by another cousin by destroying my long term-relationship with a lover. I have been betrayed by my sister when she stashed away every penny and property my father left for us. I have been left alone by the rest of my brothers sooner than they should have left to have their own family and I think I have to take care for my mother, alone. Now another close cousin, someone I even considered my own mother and sister have turn her back on us… and I do not have the slightest idea why…

Life though is still generous… I still have a job though and with all the undesirability of my co-workers attitude they could still provide ways to make me smile and sometimes a good laugh for some stupid jokes. I want to continue living as normally as I can because they are problems provided to me by this universe to aid my maturity. I just hope though that if there is yet to come, something bigger than this, I will not succumb to act on something that will spoil the balance of this universe…