Delayed Reaction

It feels like an empty Friday night.  Outside, the world is alive and moving (on).  Meanwhile, I feel heavy and out-of-it.  I guess the word I'm reaching for is 'melancholic'.  Even with that, it does not feel absolutely right. I don't know.  "Sadness" is not something I easily succumb to nowadays; mostly, because I don't have that leisure.  But also because I find it useless. If I do say so myself, I've mastered the craft of reining in my emotions.  Lately though, I've been losing control.  So, I just find these little pockets during the day when I can (be sad).  Sadness is never something that I can admit out loud or in a crowd, or in person, or ever.  I shrug it off as a personal defect.

The ugly truth is that I thought I would've written more now that my life has been divided into a Before and an After. I thought I would've found a certain profundity, a sudden incorporation of truths and meaning.   But I never had a renaissance.  I realize now it's because I write to remember and all I want is to forget, forget, forget.   The things is that I probably have the words (somewhere deep... I had them once, right?) but I do not have the courage.  I leave them.  They are wedged in dark corners  -- in between the pages of my notebooks, at the tip of my tongue, lying in an alley in the middle of Manila.  Unfinished, abrupt, not real.

But I think it's high time I am truthful to myself, at the very least.  I don't want to sink and disappear.  I don't want to be a nobody buried beneath lies and delusions.

Lately I've been a nomad in my own home.  I find solace whenever there aren't dark corners, which is usually an eventuality.  Dark corners, I mean.  I'll escape for a day, maybe two. They have a tendency to poke and prod and eventually, invade.  Like a storm cloud heavily moving across the city swallowing buildings in its wake, like shadows reaching out.

My mind had been unusually empty and silent in slumber during the past year or so.  No dreams or thoughts of my Mom the way everyone else had.  The days After, people would approach me, with that distinct smile (the one of sadness and pity and something else), and tell me about their beautiful dream -- how she was ethereal and happy and such.  How she was wearing her favorite shirt (how in the world do they even know her favorite shirt?). The days After, I only felt numb and shocked and betrayed.  Betrayed because, even it if sounds a little bit illogical, she hasn't shown herself to me.

A year and nine months after, I am running away from the dreams I had hoped for. I'm running from shadows, from storm clouds and Death.  Every night I dream about her dying again, and again.  In different ways, different places and never the way it really was.  I dream about other people dying.  Again and again.   And I am always incompetent to fight Death.  I am never on time, I am never there, I trip, I don't know CPR, I'm studying Interior Design instead of Med, I am afraid of blood.  Then I wake up.  The dream sticky and hot in my mind, a mess.  Some days, I wake up crying.  Not like in the movies, with screams then a comforting hug.  I'm just awake, and my eyes are wet, and my heart is heavy.

Outside, the world is alive and moving on.

(Writing is exhausting.)