Dead End

Sometimes it's easier not to explain.  Days have been strings of "What's it like without her?" or "Do you ever miss her?" or  "Why are you so stoic?"  Questions I never warrant answers to, because well, what can I say?   I mean, what the hell could I say to What's it like without her?



I say I'm fine of course, like a phony does.  I think I say it more for myself than I do for anyone who asks.  Not because I think that they don't care enough to really hear what I want (need) to say. The truth is that (some) people really care, they do.   It's just hard to meet them halfway, when I can't even meet myself.  When I don't even want to meet myself.  I say I'm okay because it's easier -- there's just no time for being sad, or frustrated, or angry.  Detachment has become a necessity.  I mean, in between school and family and friends there's just no time.  Being sad, or angry, or frustrated are always stolen moments, sneaky instances.   Like during taxi rides home alone, or during an exam.   When it suddenly rains and I don't have an umbrella, on days when classes are suddenly suspended.  My mom listens to all my rants.   During family pictures on Christmas.  Mostly on jeepney rides, in the whispers of the wind. And always, always on late nights (like right now, like tomorrow night).

They say that the pain comes in waves.  It doesn't.  It comes in flashes of lightning, a sudden ripping -- usually blatant, ungentle, unkind and unforgiving.  The kind of crippling pain that you can't do anything about,  the kind that makes you want to crawl in bed and never get out.

Dinner and then gone.¹  Here one moment, and gone the next.  Her eyes were gone even before darkness.   Here, but gone.

You usually say I miss you and at some point it stops because you meet and then it becomes hugs and kisses and tears.   But how can you miss someone open-endedly?  (I should know the answer, I guess.   But I don't.)

How can you miss someone without the promise of a hug? A kiss? Tears?

¹ from Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking