Since last week, I have turned to my shelves and stacks of unread books but still found myself fragmenting into thoughts of you. Before our email exchange, I had had no inkling of the goings-on in your life and our friends’ as I have taken some time off Facebook to which I generally outsource the sad thing I call social life.
In your email, you said you were sorry you did not get to ask me how I was during presswork the last time I stayed in Vinzons 401. I was supposed to write a Kultura article but could not turn any draft in. At half-past eleven the next morning, I left the Kulê office and wept through the train ride home and wept in the shower and wept into my journal and made a heap of blankets on the floor in a corner of my room where I stayed till the wee hours of the morning, weeping. I told myself I was only going through the motions of grief.
The tears, for the most part, were for all my best-laid plans that had gone awry, for future itineraries that now need rerouting, and for all the sunflowers along the University Avenue that will not make for a profile picture backdrop anytime soon.
One morning I managed to pull myself together enough to make peace with life’s irreverence for linear arcs and predictable plots. The difficulty of feeling persists, but I feel a little less leaden, less loveless, less lost. I am hopeful if not excited about the long days ahead, no matter how tedious they seem to unfold over years.
If the past weeks have also taught me anything, it is that pain need not be tucked away.
“I think I’ve lost much of my worth, self-esteem, and courage in the past few weeks,” you said in your email, and I marvel at how brave and frank this declaration of frailty is. You said you were so weak you depended too much on the one person you thought you could share your anxieties and aspirations with. You likened this experience to addiction, the withdrawal from which was no such easy feat that you also had to pull away from the world awhile by way of rehabilitation.
I cannot presume to know what you are going through. But I have at times also wondered how good it would be to soldier through life knowing I could trust the person I love with my vulnerability, without the failure of intimacy and the tragedy of unreciprocated love.
For it would be nice to cry in the presence of someone with whom you can talk about the matters that make your voice break and your breath catch, to fling your cares to the wind, to quell the fear of being hurt by the one whose affections you most yearn to keep. After all, it is damn scary to bare your emotional glitches and hope he would not find your scars revolting as much as you would not think his wounds beyond healing.
Yet, only in loving can we be freed from the silences of an insular life. The fact, then, that you have loved him with openness, patience, empathy, and earnest grace is not so much his for the taking as it is yours.
What matters now is to learn the kind of love that is freer, gentler, and more liberating, the kind that I am only beginning to understand, too. It starts with befriending ourselves and recognizing that many of the sorrows that afflict us arise from the stigma which insists we should not wear our hearts and hurts on our sleeves when, really, there is no shame in withering and wanting.
I believe you when you said you would strive to be okay soon. But if, one of these days, you find yourself braving tempestuous skies to mend the walls you have torn down to let other people in, please remember that beyond those walls must be fairer weathers. ●
*Apologies to Conchitina Cruz and Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta. Published in print in the Collegian’s June 8, 2018 issue.
