12.25.2011
tidings of comfort and joy posted at 12/25/2011 10:21:00 PM
this is how christmas smells:
cigarette dank agains december
chill, alcohol a slow
waft in the air. my older relatives are
laughing, old men having uncorked
a bottle of whiskey, and tonight i feel
young again--
i am a kid, uncomfortable and alone. my
cousins are strange, and we don't talk.
unlike before, younger, conspiring against
adults we ran around ignoring the christmas
lanterns fading into the night. sometimes
we lit sparklers and laughed
until midnight. now we are older,
and every christmas we become perpetual
teenagers, squirming and conscious of
the months we've never spent. i am too old, or
you are too young, or you are too old and
we live too differently. later on when we're alone
we discover faults, like
how i smoke too, and drink too much. you've
handled crystal and i still snort coke. i'm sorry
your niece has shitty relatives. i'm sorry you have
cancer. i haven't stopped drinking and
we're talking about nothing and doging
years of separate heartbreak,
and we know this. it is christmas time,
december cold as i puff the last stick,
draw it out for all it's worth, throw
the ember on the ground.
ooo
It's nice to know that despite the terrifically terrible year, some things you can still count on. My family were the usual--I could count on them for wine and champagne at midnight. Coffee and tablea chocolate to sober up, good gifts, mild awkwardness.
These things never change, even when I don't know what to do with my life these days. It's good to know that at least I can count on my family to get a little quality alcohol in me to deal with the holidays, no need for a xanax or a joint, just plain old wine.
Labels: blame it on chemicals, sad
12.23.2011
afternoons in suburbia posted at 12/23/2011 05:50:00 PM
On days when I feel particularly vulnerable—days when I feel like myself when I was twelve and holding myself together in suburbia—I try to make myself an egg salad. My neighbor made it for me one soft afternoon when my mom left me outside with no key and took my brother with her.
It’s not a very interesting story—you have to understand, this was suburbia. The sunlight always hit the rooftops just right, never too bright but never too dim, everything was saturated, everything was quiet, save for the chirping birds in the afternoon sun, a piano tinkling from the distance. This day in particular was my brother’s high school graduation, and a few days ago, my mother took me to the department store to buy new shoes for him, and myself, for the coming school year.
I’d insisted on a nice pair of Florsheim loafers made out of black velvet. They were gorgeous, and it was heaven to walk in them. On the morning of my brother’s graduation, we woke up with no breakfast and I watched him get ready.
This was going to be his big day. From the window in my room I watched the robins on the aluminum roofs flutter, the sun blinding in its refracted light. I think I remember what I wore: a white long-sleeved button down, denim jeans, and black shoes. I remember how I felt clearly that time: hollow and flat. As if I was watching the world through a shell of myself; I wanted nothing but to lie down and watch the afternoon fade.
My mother saw me walking towards the gigantic and foreboding front door and stopped me in my tracks.
“Why aren’t you wearing the new shoes I bought you?” she asked. Reluctantly, I answered, “I just don’t feel like wearing them, and I don’t want to dirty them yet.”
The truth was she had warned me that the shoe might not fit in time for the school year, when my feet had become big, and to my horror the shoe wouldn’t fit properly after a few days. I couldn’t tell her it wouldn’t fit because she would have an actual fit, and it would leave me marked again. Not my thing.
She started getting angry, “wear the shoes, do it!” and I wouldn’t budge, she started pulling my hair, hitting me on the head, screaming at me—but I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t because I knew that the moment she knew it wouldn’t fit me, this would get worse and carry on until the school year.
Finally she got tired of forcing me, and she said, “I don’t care anymore,” and took my brother and told him to get into the car, opened the gate, sped off without even looking at me. Over her shoulder she shouted at me to make sure the gate gets closed, and that she hoped I would be thirsty and hungry. “You deserve it,” she said, “for being disobedient.”
I watched her speed off and felt left again, and in a rare moment I felt like I hadn’t in a long time: that I was a kid. Turning thirteen in November and still unsure, I had no idea what it was like to feel okay, except to shut off. I cannot even begin to tell you how strange that feeling is, especially when you look back as an adult and understand that no child should have ever felt that way.
But for that moment, I was soft and I wanted to cry. Nothing more. The gates of the garage locked me out into the subdivision street. I climbed over a part of the fence that was small, sat down and watched the wall-less garage with its garden showing the vibrant blue sky and the wonderful cumulus clouds, the chirping robins dusting themselves off the dried soil, the kamias tree with its fragrant smelling fruit, the sharpness of cut grass, the glint of light from the neighbor’s windowpanes, their windchimes hanging from their star-apple tree, the piano notes from their living room.
I breathed in and for that five minutes, let myself understand what vulnerability meant. No food, no water, only hard cement and hot afternoon sun, my sweat trickling down my neck and all alone, I couldn’t even get into that imposing house of ours, walls the color of washed-out peach.
I had to think of how to get in. I considered breaking the screen from the big windows open again, or breaking the sliding glass doors, but the former would only make my mom more furious, and for the latter, the sliding doors had shatter-proof glass.
I sat on the ground and watched my neighbor’s house through the grills of our gate. I wished I lived in a house that looked as soft and accommodating as that one. But I had to be somewhere, I couldn’t just wait here. I knew she wasn’t coming back until evening, and it was far from that. I was hungry and I hadn’t eaten or drank anything the whole day. I had to go somewhere.
I climbed out of the fence and onto our driveway, I looked around slowly, felt the breeze and decided to just walk. Maybe I could beg for food at one of the small food shops. One thing I’ve learned is that no one says no to a child, even a well-dressed one when they look pitiful.
As I started to walk away from my house, the old neighbor, a woman my mother knew from her childhood, went out and told me to come into her house, since I was locked out. I’d always wanted to see what was inside her house, because her house looked cozy and wonderful—old and with character.
It was picturesque from the outside. The owner was an old piano teacher, and her husband some doctor or something, her now adult children flitting in and out of the house occasionally—one had a band, and played the piano, another the drums, the other one had her car over every weekend and she dressed wonderfully: like an Indian mistress.
And always her house smelt of baked cookies, or cooked fish, star-apples all played to the backdrop of windchimes, evening or night, frightening storms or sun-kissed summers.
As she ushered me in, I saw the piano that I always wanted to play since we moved back to that village. It was old and I asked her if she still played. “Oh sometimes, but usually my daughter does, the one who comes over every weekend.”
Her husband came out and welcomed me, and as the piano teacher told her husband to look after me, because she was going to get drinks for us, he took me to their kitchen out back and asked if I was hungry.
I just nodded. I never expected to talk to an adult who was very polite yet caring, and who wasn’t family. It was a good feeling to understand what kindness was. I looked around. Their kitchen was a separate shed from the rest of the house, and there they used a stove that used only wood. They had a stack of chopped wood and logs in their backyard, and after he loaded their stove, he took out a fork and handed it to me.
“Here,” he said, “I’ll show you something interesting.” He rinsed his hands under the water, and opened the boiling pot. Inside were hardboiled eggs, and on top were steamed eggplants sliced into strips. He put some opened eggs into a bowl (one for him and one for me) and put a scoop of mayonnaise on top.
“Watch,” he said with a smile, and he started mashing the eggs with the mayo. Then he took a strip of eggplant, ate a scoop of the salad, and with his teeth pulled out the eggplant from its skin into his teeth, and chewed.
“Try it,” he said after swallowing. Reluctantly, I did, and found that I liked it. Not the taste, but more for what it stood for—it was comforting. For the first time in ages, I felt safe. After I swallowed, with the bravado of an old uncle, he said, “What do you think? Good, no?” and I laughed my yes’s as he led me to their living room and told me stories about my grandmother and my mother during the 80’s.
As evening approached, I watched from their lace-curtained windows to see if my mother would come back, and when she did, I ran out—partly to show her that we had good neighbors, and partly to show her that I did okay without her, and other people were kinder.
She thanked them with a polite smile, fake laughs and thank you, thank you for taking care of my son while holding me in a stiff hug by her side. As we walked in the front door, and the door shut, she let me go and said, “That was embarrassing. You were embarrassing. You should say thank you, and ask pardon. Look at what you did; because you were disobedient you inconvenience other people. Embarrassing.” And she went to change into her room.
Outside, their windchimes sung, and I walked to the kitchen to wash the dishes and get our dinner ready.
***
These days I never seem to be able to re-create that same taste, even though I’ve tried many a late night, or quiet afternoon. Always too salty, too alone.
This morning, as the sun rises, I feel very vulnerable, like that child again. And I don’t know where to seek comfort—there is no sadness like the sadness of knowing there is nowhere to hide, or at least, feeling that.
Labels: blame it on chemicals, memory, sad
12.21.2011
posted at 12/21/2011 09:04:00 PM
Pew--why didn't my mother marry my father?
She never had time. He came and went.
Why didn't Babel Dark marry Molly?
He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling you the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it.
--Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
I'm tired of doubting. Bahala ka na. If you fail me, I just go. I feel like a ghost sometimes, but either way, I always love you so. Labels: blame it on chemicals, cryptic, sad
12.13.2011
posted at 12/13/2011 06:35:00 PM
I feel so lonely. I don't think I've got anyone who I can speak to in an honest way right now, and who can speak to me as honestly as well. My friends' schedules and mine rarely pan out, I don't really know when my partner finds something wrong or good, and the only person I really talk to these days is my shrink.
I feel terribly lonely. Labels: sad
12.12.2011
must enjoy the sun, must enjoy the sea. nothing too heavy; posted at 12/12/2011 09:14:00 PM
I did something stupid. And it raised more questions. Other than my own personal sanity. I saw his chatbox in his mail with a guy saying hello. Some random. And it confirmed one of my greatest fears. He says it isn't true though.There was no reply anyway. So I guess I'll just agree--in any case, what does a message saying hello mean?Labels: sad
12.09.2011
posted at 12/09/2011 09:25:00 PM
Sometimes you just have to ride everything out. My life feels like it's in a state of transition--winter to summer, summer to spring, spring to summer, and summer to deathly autumn.Labels: disappointed, sad
posted at 12/09/2011 08:50:00 PM
it's the small things that matter the most--i just feel that sometimes he really has no interest in my life. you make an effort to be included in the important things to him, but he doesn't seem to, only asks that you be beside him all the time.
i want to let you in my life, look, i open the door and well, he's just ignoring because he wants me where he is, not because he wants to be where i am as well. that's what it feels like.
i'm just going to be glad that at least i'm around him instead, but this sort of situation doesn't seem right at all.Labels: oh well, sad
12.07.2011
posted at 12/07/2011 08:32:00 PM
Right now he's at work after I just got to his apartment. I'm anxious and missing him, and also a little sad. No scratch that, terribly. But I can't bring myself to listen to anything but sad music and I don't feel like going out. Plus some strange nagging thought is trying to convince me that he hasn't been so loyal and basically I'm driving myself crazy.
I fucking hate being bipolar. I'd rather see him so that I'm assured, but hey--we can't have that. I wish he'd text or something. I'd go into that emotional crawlspace but right now I know if I do I won't be able to get out soon, so vulnerability it is.
Labels: bipolar, blame it on chemicals, psych, sad
& on feelings posted at 12/07/2011 04:16:00 PM
Dissolver of Sugar
Rumi
Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me,
if this is the time.
Do it gently with a touch of a hand, or a look.
Every morning I wait at dawn. That's when it's happened before. Or do it suddenly
like an execution. How else
can I get ready for death?
You breathe without a body like a spark.
You grieve, and I begin to feel lighter.
You keep me away with your arm,
but the keeping away is pulling me in.
Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.
Love moves away.
The light changes.
I need more grace
than I thought.
****
Rumi has always held a soft spot in my heart, despite Islamic scholars saying that, "no, it isn't about homosexual love," and it's so easy to ignore those facts because Rumi writes in a very non-gendered way, and it's love in it's purest form.
I first encountered Rumi in class, and ignored his poetry in favor of a Sylvia Plath one, after the class, I re-read him and wondered if he was Middle Eastern. Months later, I broke up with my college boyfriend, and in the middle of pulling me out of running myself into a wreck, my mentor, Ricci, pulls out a thick volume of Rumi from her carpet bag randomly. In the middle of our conversation she says, "Babe, I really want you to read this. I want you to read and understand Rumi the way you have to understand Neruda--with painstaking slowness, detail, each word scrutinised and felt."
I asked her why, and she said, "I think you'll understand what I mean when you read him." I returned the volume to her after glancing at it, and when I got home I started looking for a complete volume of Rumi's poetry--and slowly, painfully, I got a glimpse of understanding.
These days, Rumi always comforts me, calms me down. He understands the kind of love that wishes to give but cannot.
Labels: love, poetry, sad
the boy who blocked his own shot posted at 12/07/2011 03:41:00 PM
So call it quits, or get a grip.
Say you wanted a solution, you just wanted to be missed.
Everything turbulent and fearsome makes more sense when placed in the compartments of a rational mind, and so the enumeration.
1. Yesterday I discovered more of his ghosts--ones he never told me about, forgotten, or perhaps wished to forget. For a moment there was a sense of entitlement and then it bothered me that I had a sense of entitlement to his feelings, no less. As much as we want to own people, as much as a beloved announces their betrothal to us, as much as they say "I am yours," I remember that I must take this with a pinch of salt. It's a wonder what googling can do and the names that pop up, what asking a few people here and there can unearth from the past. Of course I won't mention a single word of this to him--it's his past, I dug around, and I'm covering my tracks.
I'm aware he's made the same promises before, so what remains to be seen is if he will go through with this.
I'm just going to think that I know nothing. I know though, I've always learned how to read between the lines.
2. When I remember the people I learned from, I realized we all had one point where we came from--we understood leaving, farewells, goodbyes, that last poignant note.
Ricci and I felt that with each other, and with Ophelia Dimalanta's legacy, we all learned that from her. It pains me to realize that my poetry holds such a huge sway on the way I will handle those I love, and that I rebel against myself because I do want to keep what I have now together, until that terrible word: forever.
In Ramil Digal Gulle's tribute poem regarding the death of Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta, "Ophelia's Water-Method to Ecstacy," he points this concept of leaving out of love so very well:
Now I can tell you’re done: small feet padding
across the bathroom carpet, hand against baby-
blue tile, wet black coils set to spring from
under the towel, an alert nakedness beneath
the bathrobe. But this time, I have the mind to leave
because leaving’s the only way for me to stay.
To depart, as you might wish, with a love for love’s
contradictions: something to have but never keep.
You mastered this last, most lasting trick: leave
everything to the beloved—dreams, books, apartment,
coffee, clothes—everything, except ourselves.
And now it scares me to understand what I have always been capable of. Even when being left behind I have managed to leave a mark on the people who have hurt me--despite me not being there. Modesty aside, I attribute this quality to the poetry I write and the poetry I was raised with.
It's very frightening.
3. This is very important. I have found the ability to leave, and cannot will it away once more. If I do, I will definitely be unable to stand on my own, and as it is I do not think I can lean on anyone completely, at all.
There seems to be no one who can give me that privilege.
You are calm and reposed, let your beauty unfold,
pale white like the skin stretched over your bones.
Spring keeps you ever close.
You are second hand smoke,
you are so fragile and thin, standing trial for your sins;
holding onto yourself the best you can--
You are the smell before the rain,
You are the blood in my veins.
Brand New's The boy who lost his shot.
Labels: poetry, pointless, sad
12.05.2011
i just had to take a moment to not cry today. posted at 12/05/2011 05:02:00 PM
27
Nerisa Del Carmen Guevara
And by the time I reach 80
I would have fallen in love with
An entire city.
All the people on the streets
Would follow me down with
A knowing.
All hate gone. All sorrow.
The word absence would not
make sense.
The dinosaurs are still underground;
All the species the eco-warriors were not able to save
Have walked without regret to wastelands they haven’t found yet;
Most of the people we love, walking or dead,
Are sometimes in the dust we sweep out on Sundays.
The trees always leave an instant mix,
Just add water
And we are still
Here
Remembering even what we try to forget.
The once loved, the once loving,
The kept, the abandoned,
Finally making sense of it all.
****
I miss my mentor a lot--Nerisa, or as I used to call her, Ricci, was a woman who gave so much wisdom and constantly helped pull me out of my desperate sea. But actions taken are never ones that can be undone, only forgiven and even then not forgotten.
Today, I think I need that wisdom more these days. I contemplated sending her a hello message, and tell her that I missed being her son in poetry, and realized that it might not come out of fruition anyway. I just miss the wisdom and comradeship.
Labels: feelings, poetry, sad
to be quite honest; posted at 12/05/2011 03:38:00 PM
I don't think he loves me as much as he did his last lover. I know he's over it, but I know he won't ever be able to give me that much. This is a fact I need to get over--I will not be posted in photos of his own accord, I will not be thought of always, I will be seen as selfish at times, I will not content him if I simply go along as it is.
But I have no choice--if I value being sane and alive, if I value only the barest minimum: survival, then I must leave a little space for myself, the smallest. Most compact. To want nothing.
 |
| Nerisa Del Carmen Guevara, from her book Reaching Destination |
I know that he loves me to the fullest extent of his heart, and that he does his best. I know that it is useless to mourn such a small thing, and useless to mourn love that would never come but I feel so delicately, I guess, more delicately than I would permit myself to admit. And this is what has always been missing between us--he would not have dropped his life for me, unless I ask, would not have given unless asked for, and what is such a request granted if it had to be asked in the first place?
I remember his past lover's things stagnating in his old apartment, where he constantly asked me to occupy--out of consideration to him, I let it be, and later on, out of consideration to myself, I asked for it to be gone. And that is how it has always been, me forcing open shut doors and seeing only what wounds me, and deciding, later on, after telling myself that he would do it of his own accord for himself, realize it wouldn't be so. And so I ask.
I believe in sacrifice and giving, but I understand its beauty only when given freely, perhaps pointed out later, but nonetheless; freely.
Today a friend wrote on their Facebook, "occupy yourself so that nothing else can," and to me it sounded like the best advice for not drowning. I must, once again, learn to be small.
Labels: feelings, ignore me, love, sad
12.01.2011
make amends, make a vow posted at 12/01/2011 12:23:00 PM
Somehow after being diagnosed with Bipolar II, I imagined a series of long halls, wistful looking out of windows in some asylum, pills that make you go off the edge being constantly switched around, and this hanging sense of non-control.
I initially imagined being forced to go to a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous for crazy people. "Hi, I'm Jacob. I barely hung in a few weeks ago when I was ready to buy cyanide and sleeping pills, rent a cheap motel room and send the last few love notes through text messages to all those painful loves: family, friends, lover. It was very clear and I was about to do it if not for a new acquaintance who talked me out of it, and diverted my attention."
I mean seriously. Currently what I've learned is that I can still make choices, I have to fight for it though--not in the sense that anyone is stopping me, but that I have to be more aware if it's actually me talking, or the mental disorder. It's crippling, to say the least.
Some days I wake up and feel so hopeless about my relationship, that my partner isn't supportive enough, or that he wants to see other people because he's with someone who just got on the crazy train. And when I look at it objectively, I don't have heavy evidence.
Imagine it was a court trial for adultery, older accounts of cheating, lying, hiding, answering unknown numbers, strange messages for a while, silent statements of not being over their ex are the evidence I have--he is doubtful, sure. Even my psych says that. Hence I'm doubtful. But it doesn't hold water, because when we present declarations of love and loyalty, a willingness to show messages and history, his putting himself aside to give way for me--doesn't compute. Since I feel hopeless (as evidenced by right now and since the other day) I should, logically, chalk it up to the depression brought about by this disorder.
But see that's not how this thing works. I can rationalize all I want but the feelings aren't going away until they want to--and this is why it's so debilitating. I have to constantly hide these emotions because for most people, emotions are triggered as a response to an event. For people like me, emotions appear out of nowhere, and the hardest part is, amplified when an event that agrees with the emotion occurs.
For example--I'm on the up part of the disorder. For me it's called hypomania, not too manic that I become psychotic, but high energy levels, choices made without rational thought, participation in illegal drug use, racing thoughts and speech patterns; these are all terribly textbook and they all occur give or take on or two symptoms.
But anyway, let's say I'm on the up part of this thing, and I'm at this fun party and everyone's fucked up and just happy. What'll happen is that I'll feed off this and bounce it back and my reaction to everyone and everything for that moment is happy! Boundless energy and joy! You want more drinks? Sure let me buy us some! Or I want more drinks I don't care if I'm getting home or not more drinks! Or You're offering me cocaine? Why yes I'd love to snort some of that stuff up, and perhaps ask you for more later! I want to see pretty lights, where can I get ecstacy? HAHAHAHA LET US LAUGH AND GOSSIP etc. etc. You get the point.
It's the same for my depressive phases. I become totally insecure and vulnerable and I know that anyone can take advantage of me so I become irritated and sad as a defense, then I start thinking my partner will take advantage of my depressive state, or that he wants out because no one wants to be with a sad person, or if my partner says or does something that truly bothers me but in a normal state, I can brush it aside--in a depressive state, I just react and react and sink into the quicksand of doom.
And this is why this thing is terrible for relationships. You become much more self-destructive, and you unwittingly sabotage your environment, the people around you.
But of course there's a flipside. I'll reference my psych just because it makes more sense when I use what he says. "Loving partners will be supportive and understand," to paraphrase our long winding talks about my relationship, mood, brain chemistry, etc. Basically partners who want to make it work will do everything they can to make it work--not just for the bipolar partner, but also what it takes to keep themselves healthy. Of course on another hand partners can choose whether or not to be supportive, and a lot of them aren't, but choose to stay in the relationship. It doesn't seem fair if they don't want to be supportive but stay in the relationship, but it happens--so in a lot of ways, it's hard for the bipolar person to cope with this.
Moving on. I've officially (as far as I know) been diagnosed not just with Bipolar II, but also Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and an Anxiety Disorder since August/September, if I recall right. It hasn't been what I imagined psych patients go through, but in a lot of ways it is. Medication problems fucking up with my mood, symptoms manifesting and taking supreme efforts to rein in, feeling stupid (like now, I have write pointless posts just to get stuff out of my head. I used to be so meticulous about these things) and other stuff.
People think it's so easy because we seem normal, but it really takes so much effort just to keep yourself in check--whether you're up or down--because we endanger ourselves, and possibly other people in the process.
Labels: feelings, pointless, psych, sad, technical
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