It’s Tragedy! (when the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on)

found while taking a leak at a public toilet

~

1.
The tragedy of Friendster.com is that it inevitably displays how people move on with their lives. I was browsing stalking old friends in le internet just to see how they were doing. I’m rarely online in my own personal accounts just because I’m too busy prowling other alleys in cyberspace, but when I do log on to update my profile, it’s when something significant is happening in my life. And that’s when I check up on everybody else and see what I’ve been missing while I was busy having a meaningful existence. Enter Friendster: it’s a goddamn place for both the real and the pretend at the same time. People pretend that they are friends with a lot of people and say good things to one another when in real life they’ve really got no connection at all. Trust me, it’s real: I’ve done my fair share of online hello’s, only to end up snubbing each other off the net. But it’s also a repository of pictures taken by people of recent events in their own lives, and this is where my depression sets in.

2.
As I browse through profiles of people I know, or used to know, I remember being part of that person’s previous life. Oh, I was part of so many different lives. And now, seeing their photographs years later with new faces, they look so happy and content and so moved on. Which all boils down to me reflecting on my own life, and if I have, in fact, moved on myself. What do I have to show?

And then I can’t help but slap myself silly. THIS IS NOT ROMY AND MICHELLE’S HIGH SCHOOL FUCKING REUNION. Fucking high school reunion. Fucking Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. (Eh. Any way you say it, it still doesn’t sound right.)

Yes, it’s wonderful to see everyone finally growing up, having real lives, and yet, I can’t help but think – where is that someone I know from years back? How have things evolved since then? What happened in the years after I was gone? And more importantly, why wasn’t I in them? What were I doing these past few years?

3.
I’m thinking of Kundera, and that something I read in Identity: we have friends to mirror our own past. And when I look at these people who used to be my friends, I try to search for that certain year when we were all together. We were but children then. And then somewhere along the way we got caught up in our own lives much too much to care, and now it’s years later, and everybody else has moved on. Haven’t you wondered about that, even once? How people manage to move on without you? How alienating that seems?

When I look at their recent pictures I sometimes see in the background a person I also know, another common friend – and then I’m back to wondering, why are they together and why wasn’t I included? What happened? What did I do? What was it about my own life that ceases to gravitate towards other people who were familiar to me once? Was I bound to move from one person’s life to another, without having an intention to stay?

4.
When I reflect on this I just come to the terrible conclusion that yes, I’m fucking scared. That maybe I haven’t moved on. That maybe I’m stuck in a rut. That maybe I’m bound to experience new things without other people to witness them happening to me. That maybe a lot of people have other things now, and I’m still here playing with memories and what-could-have-beens.

I try to look back at those years where I’m gone in other people’s lives and I realize that I’ve been doing stuff on my own too. Maybe I have moved on. Maybe things are happening in my life, too. But is the “movement” in my life enough? Have I done enough, experienced enough? And then a pause – why am I so fucking bothered?

5.
And then I think, maybe it’s all about the pictures. People filter what’s going on in their lives through the pictures that they show other people. Don’t you think it’s funny, how you can summarize a day, a week, a month, a year of your life through pictures that you can pick, leaving other little details to gather dust somewhere in the bottom of a drawer? If you have a picture of a significant other with you then you’re telling the whole world that you’re with someone now, and you used to be single. If you have a picture of you in a toga it means that you’ve finished your school, are done with them, the fucking bastards who brainwashed you. If you have a picture of you with your old friends years later it means that the friendship you have with them is solid and going strong. If you have a picture of you in a new look it means that you’ve changed your fashion sense over the years. There are lots and lots to conclude from there, which makes my brain explode often.

Why why why do I bother. Friendster.com is freaking trash. I should just be done with it. Maybe I am just depressed because I only check my account when I’ve done something significant in my life, and when I check up on others it’s happening to them too. The uniqueness of my experience is not mine anymore. I only discover more and more things that other people I used to know have achieved in their own lives, and I find that I’ve done it, too. And I get upset because they all document it through their pictures, and I’m just a fucking loser because I don’t have any pictures to prove that I too am moving on with my life.

And yes I get wistful that others have managed to moved on without me. And I guess I was just expecting that I would be friends forever with a lot of people I used to be friends with, but no I have to remember that I really can’t be friends with a lot of people, as I tend to run and run and run and not look back. Except for these kinds of times. When I graduated from high school I ran away and never looked back. Today most of my high school friends are still friends with one another, except for me. I wasn’t there, and that is the only bottom line: I wasn’t there, I was here, in the middle of my own shit and oh but it’s a lonely spot but I know if I had to do it over I would have still done the same.

6.
Or, on the other hand, maybe I just realized how totally removed I am from other people’s lives. It shocks me a bit. Maybe it’s because I once considered certain people to be important in my life, hence I have seen their significance in my own life, and maybe I thought that that means they would still matter to me ten years, twenty years from now. And so I again realize how I make significant relationships with people but only for a given time.

Eh. I’m talking shit. I’m full of crap. It is what it is: I only have a few friends. And I have an issue when it comes to forming relationships. And that is all.

Because this will always be one of the best things I’ve written in a long time:

Overture

written 14 February 2007, 11:58 PM

1.
Because Naya has mentioned Atwood and Horowitz, I bring out the beer stashed under my bed in case of emergencies. And this moment seems to be pressing, somewhere, something is breaking, inside my body. I put on George Bruch: Violin Concerto No.1 in G Minor, and then, this.There is time to smoke, in a while. For now, a poem:

 

I Was Reading a Scientific Article
Margaret Atwood

They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,

each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.

It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate

red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.

I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light

You rest on me and my shoulder holds

your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:

my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colors, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene

its other air
its claws

its paradise rivers

2.
In my Market Research class, we were tasked to conduct personal interviews all over Manila about the latest ad campaign for Coke. A lot of them don’t remember anything now. A lot of them don’t even drink it now.The tea phenomenon is invading the metro. They say, We have to keep the body clean. Detoxify. Keep healthy. Here: it is a temple, where your blood runs like a peaceful river. Like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on a sad night with no rain. This is how quiet the body can be.

I just took my can of beer and emptied it onto the bathroom sink. I put some water to boil, brought out a packet of dried leaves, smelling jasmine, the only thing I’ll find around this house now. I’ve read somewhere that Longjing is a famous Chinese tea. It stands for Dragon Well. Yun Wu is for Cloud and Mist. Chun Mee means precious eyebrows.

It’s a known fact that drinking tea can be good for the body, especially the heart.

3.
Chopin pitter-patters with Nocturne. I tiptoed around the kitchen trying not to make any noise. Everyone else is asleep; there’s no one to stay up for, no one to think about at this time.

Your birthday in two days.

4.
Teacup in hand, I return to my room to find Bach’s Air playing. Ah, but what else can I do but sit in the corner of my room, by the floor:

My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I’m at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, Who smells shit? – small daily humiliations – these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. Other damages I take in other places. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it’s over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes.Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don’t know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees, it takes half a tube of Ben-Gay and a big production just to bend them. To everything a season, to every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

- Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

5.
Franz Schubert casually slips into Unfinished Symphony No. 8. I now feel archaic. Time-worn. Passé. I think I sleep somewhere between forgotten and vanished.

Karma Chameleon

halfway between Bonifacio Avenue and Guadalupe

~

It was one of those afternoons: we were in for a long drive, and I was in the car with the two people I’m resigned to simultaneously hate and be fond of at the same time. My parents are on a mission to buy me some clothes so I’ll look respectable (finally, after ages) when I go to work this week. I just had my pre-employment medical exam at a clinic and was feeling a bit nauseous, when I was suddenly attacked by my perennial bout of paranoia.

Before I go into that, I’d just like to say that because of that exam I’m scarred for life, and I think I may never apply again for another job just to save myself from another trauma-inducing event that left me feeling shocked and a bit out of breath. The family doctor who was interviewing me just suddenly grabbed my arm, stood me up, and felt my breasts. At first I didn’t think it was an assault since she was a woman, but the nature with which I was accosted was very much bizarre and far too much for my brain that I immediately went apeshit. On a freaking breast exam. Of course it’s not everyday that I have my breasts man-, no, womanhandled, but of course I’m also not new to this breast-groping thing. (I grew up in an private Catholic school for girls, where it’s but normal to grope one another.) However, I did feel that this was much, much INSANE compared to when my ex-boyfriend-now-married-man-ergo-FUCKING-BASTARD and I were complete fools for each other. This was like the season finale to Titties, Meet My Hands if ever there was such kind of show. You know what I mean? I’m telling you, I’m fucking scarred.

Anyway, I was in the passenger seat, tucking myself away for preservation, trying not to think of some weird shit like nipples coming alive and attacking me til I die, when I was suddenly gripped by a wild panic attack. A few friends have once seen me hyperventilate: it was during my late-night birthday celebration at someone’s house and I suddenly thought of school requirements and then Attila the Hun’s fist was squeezing my throat dry. I was like that in the car, but this time I was fucking worried about karma.

It’s like this: I’ve always believed that I’m bound to experience the hardships in life no matter what happens, because I’ve got a birthmark on my left butt-cheek because life is like a rock, it’s hard. I’m kidding. Because my life is like that. I’ve seen it happen so many times to me in the past, it’s but logical to assume that the same course will be predicted for my future. And since I’m going to spend so much time channelling my miseries into positive energy, the chance for happiness will only come once in awhile, thereby enabling me to appreciate the good things with complete sincerity. I also think that this might have happened since I’ve done something really, really bad in my past life and I’ve done nothing to appease the karma gods by continuing to be an idiot in my present life.

I know: these all sound like I’m sitting on a pile of big-ass shit. Maybe, but when I’m intoxicated with my own list of philosophies I believe in the authenticity of these self-serving principles.

Anyway, with all my recent mishaps after I was accepted for a job (delays in government-related papers, a little spice of elder sister-cum-black sheep brand of envy, getting sacked by the flu, and the what would now be known as The Medical Exam Disaster), I was convinced that I am now at the receiving end of a series of unfortunate events. Add to this the fact that I also believe that since having a job is a good thing, and I’ve had quite a few good shit happen to me in the early parts of this year (graduating on time, achieving all my listed goals), it is now time for me to experience a few disastrous things. I’ve been slacking off with my misery, so maybe now they’re making me pay. BUT FOR THE LOVE OF KAMA SUTRA, WHY CAN’T I JUST BE FUCKING BLISSFUL NOW AND THEN TURN ME INTO COCKROACH PISS IN THE NEXT LIFE?

Pfft. Seeing as I am not in any way religious, I think nobody would listen to me anyway, one god or another.

And since I’m stuck in a car with my parents who will never understand how they were able to breed some asshat like me, and I just needed to spill, spill, SPILL MY FUCKING GUTS ALL OVER THE DASHBOARD OR DIE, I opened my mouth. And I talked. And I told my parents shit, shit I’ve never even told my friends because they’ll think I’m a fucking nutjob. I said: I’m scared, I’m fucking scared shitless, I don’t know what I’m doing, I think I’m fucking things up, I think things are starting to fuck up for me because the good thing is done and over with, and things are always like that for me, when one good thing happens about ten bad things happen after, it’s a constant fucking exchange, and it will never change, this cycle, I’ll only be entitled to happiness once in a while because after that I have to get ready for the onslaught of the fucking bad things that break my heart and I don’t want to fucking hurt anymore, you know, and now this is the point of no return and what the fuck am I doing what am I doingwhatIamdoingwhattheFUCKamIdoing???

I might as well have told my parents that I’m Dirk Diggler and I actually got a ten-/eleven-/twelve-/HORSE-inch schlong inside my pants. I might as well have told them that I once caught them having sex and that it scarred me for life, too. SCARRED ME. HORRIBLY. So I sat there and killed myself over and over for about thirty minutes hoping in the back of my mind that my mother won’t take out her precious rosary and place it on my forehead. After I finished spewing dumb stuff my father turned to me with a stoic look on his face, and I instantly knew that I was adopted from a pet store and now they’re giving me back. My father said, “You’ll never be happy in this life,” like it was some prophecy I don’t already know. But his voice betrayed his disappointment, so then I felt really small, and really adopted and wanted them to give me back to wherever I came from. My mother, incredulous but still riding on her high horse of denial, as always, told me to “…stop thinking ridiculous thoughts because I’m only poisoning my mind,” and that I should turn to prayer so that I’ll get some direction in life.

So I shut up, and tried finding friends in my address book who might be able to understand, even just a fraction of what I’m feeling, and thankfully I did. Both of them told me that this was normal, and the things I’m undergoing regarding my papers and other stuff pre-employment era are normal, and my way of making sense of things was normal, and that I was, in fact, normal. And after about two hours of freaking out, that was the end of it.

I know I still have to explore this fucking confusion, and I also know my paranoia has masked itself into a healthy sense of alertness of things. I’ll deal with it sooner or later, I suppose, but right now I’m just concentrating, really, on not dreaming about evil lady doctors and their hairy monster molester hands.