Happy 27th, self
I'm still crying and finding it hard to breathe without choking on my tears. I've always been a crybaby--stream of tears readily peeking whenever I'm reading a book or watching a movie--but I never cry when the fiction stuff happens to my non-fiction world.
I just read a book about a girl who found love. But of course, the complications of that basic premise was the cancer she was trying to outlive and her boyfriend's cancer that was killing him.
The even seemingly harmless conversations (SPOILER ALERT: before even one of them died) left me with muffled sobbing like a kid who saved up his allowance for a week for a cone of ice cream that smacked to the floor after someone so carelessly brushed passed against the hand holding it up.
I cried even more after I closed the book's flap, after reading that brief description of the author and after staring blankly into his smiling picture which made me curse him more he killed someone I just fell in love with. Wholeheartedly.
There was this longing, or aching, or wanting of something else. Would I have been satisfied if the character lived? I might have been disappointed, (and that I know is true) or I may have tossed the book to my pile of garbage if the cancer patient lived.
Because I lived with a cancer patient once, and cared for her and cleaned her arms and legs with a damp towel as she cried and took pity on her condition so I know they die. They fight the illness and only a couple rise from the bout, still breathing.
It was never something light to tackle, because we were very close, she was my aunt and second mother and even close to an honest friend who revered in my little accomplishments but one who called me out on my insensitivy.
I remember crying for hours when she was declared dead, I was by her bedside when she passed away, and I remember trying to find solace in writing but couldn't manage to get a word typed on my computer.
I remember not crying at her funeral and hugging my little cousins who showered her coffin with flowers, and I remember watching friends and family sob incessantly during the whole affair.
The funeral was for the living, the book read, and indeed it was. It was that closure, that final moment given to the living for them to say their goodbyes, their praises or hurt to she who will be buried under the earth. The funeral was meant to make part of the pain go away, as if waking up tomorrow would be any better with her gone and her memories flooding your senses.
But it wasn't enough for me back then. There was a big sense of loss, and until now, I can say it never diminished, that big empty nothingness that she once occupied in my life: it just hovers around me, I guess, despite my forgetting her some days.
The book was cruel, it was honest and it made me think about how I can affect a lot of people mostly after I die. So I think about how other peoples' deaths made an impact on me and that was enough to shut down my consciousness for a couple of minutes or so.
I'm not one to romanticize a lot of things, in fact, I usually take the cynical tone, but I want to say I want to do things not because of the YOLO (you only live once) principle my sister brands her risk-taking adventures, but because I do not want to tell my dying self, 'I could have'.
And I hurt more now and cry louder although still muffled between my pillows and my sheets, because there is that person I can't stop thinking of, I can't help but want to see. All this time I kept on telling myself I might graduate from this nonsense if I just courageously show up on his doorstep and tell him I like him but now I'm more likely leaning on the theory that this feeling wouldn't easily evaporate to the stars even if I crazily profess this infatuation over him.
So now I will force myself to sleep and think why, despite knowing death will come to each and everyone of us, we all choose to love, to associate, to hurt, to create more links instead of, I don't know, living alone and fighting battles without comrades and letting acquaintances stay as strangers and firming up that wall around you.
Because as the book's protagonist realized, sometimes, we're all like grenades, doing more hurt to those around us after we're gone.
Happy birthday to myself and even if I haven't figured out a lot of what I plan to do with my life, I'm quite satisfied with how I'm controlling it with all the planning I obsessively do.
I just read a book about a girl who found love. But of course, the complications of that basic premise was the cancer she was trying to outlive and her boyfriend's cancer that was killing him.
The even seemingly harmless conversations (SPOILER ALERT: before even one of them died) left me with muffled sobbing like a kid who saved up his allowance for a week for a cone of ice cream that smacked to the floor after someone so carelessly brushed passed against the hand holding it up.
I cried even more after I closed the book's flap, after reading that brief description of the author and after staring blankly into his smiling picture which made me curse him more he killed someone I just fell in love with. Wholeheartedly.
There was this longing, or aching, or wanting of something else. Would I have been satisfied if the character lived? I might have been disappointed, (and that I know is true) or I may have tossed the book to my pile of garbage if the cancer patient lived.
Because I lived with a cancer patient once, and cared for her and cleaned her arms and legs with a damp towel as she cried and took pity on her condition so I know they die. They fight the illness and only a couple rise from the bout, still breathing.
It was never something light to tackle, because we were very close, she was my aunt and second mother and even close to an honest friend who revered in my little accomplishments but one who called me out on my insensitivy.
I remember crying for hours when she was declared dead, I was by her bedside when she passed away, and I remember trying to find solace in writing but couldn't manage to get a word typed on my computer.
I remember not crying at her funeral and hugging my little cousins who showered her coffin with flowers, and I remember watching friends and family sob incessantly during the whole affair.
The funeral was for the living, the book read, and indeed it was. It was that closure, that final moment given to the living for them to say their goodbyes, their praises or hurt to she who will be buried under the earth. The funeral was meant to make part of the pain go away, as if waking up tomorrow would be any better with her gone and her memories flooding your senses.
But it wasn't enough for me back then. There was a big sense of loss, and until now, I can say it never diminished, that big empty nothingness that she once occupied in my life: it just hovers around me, I guess, despite my forgetting her some days.
The book was cruel, it was honest and it made me think about how I can affect a lot of people mostly after I die. So I think about how other peoples' deaths made an impact on me and that was enough to shut down my consciousness for a couple of minutes or so.
I'm not one to romanticize a lot of things, in fact, I usually take the cynical tone, but I want to say I want to do things not because of the YOLO (you only live once) principle my sister brands her risk-taking adventures, but because I do not want to tell my dying self, 'I could have'.
And I hurt more now and cry louder although still muffled between my pillows and my sheets, because there is that person I can't stop thinking of, I can't help but want to see. All this time I kept on telling myself I might graduate from this nonsense if I just courageously show up on his doorstep and tell him I like him but now I'm more likely leaning on the theory that this feeling wouldn't easily evaporate to the stars even if I crazily profess this infatuation over him.
So now I will force myself to sleep and think why, despite knowing death will come to each and everyone of us, we all choose to love, to associate, to hurt, to create more links instead of, I don't know, living alone and fighting battles without comrades and letting acquaintances stay as strangers and firming up that wall around you.
Because as the book's protagonist realized, sometimes, we're all like grenades, doing more hurt to those around us after we're gone.
Happy birthday to myself and even if I haven't figured out a lot of what I plan to do with my life, I'm quite satisfied with how I'm controlling it with all the planning I obsessively do.