April 2001

Another Holy Thursday. Another Holy Thursday emits a radiant happiness to me, which works through a simple formula: day in day out of classical and chillout music, a good read, the silence of the streets. The pavement is fried from this year’s even more ferocious heat. Coffee distinctly replenishes my senses of smell, taste. Days like this, coffee can seep into one's soul. I face my thoughts now and it gives me a hopeful reflection, the way a prayer gives reflection to the pious. I’m halfway through One Hundred Years of Solitude, and every page seems like a climax in its richness, beauty and ingenuity in fiction. It’s only my second sitting for the book, and I’ve read through three hundred pages as if my gaze were glued to the words fed to it, never wanting it left abandoned. The plot thickens every moment, and the events never lose its fantastic and fascinating tinge. I feel quite affected. I would think that I have my share of the madness and magic the Buendia family inherits. I try to dig up whatever deep Dionysian feeling of madness in my little attic of memory, or my chest of emotions to conjure a feeling of madness or magic. But I have felt no loss, no defeat, no great victory or great adventure that could qualify as such. I haven’t collected enough determination to finally commit the death I would want to plan for myself. I have not survived a great war to test and prove my strength. My fears are growing into monsters always ready to bite my head off. Imagined fears, of failure, and not merely being bored, but of becoming boring. I become boring when I lose the feverish enthusiasm and zest I had for more fascinating things in life.
As a less young person in search of a deeper outlook in life, I could say that I should no longer seek life’s meaning in alcohol, drugs, sex, or even in the chatter of Philosophy, or the beautiful images and ideas grazed in by literature (not that their beauty had seemed to me diminished, for they have not). Of course I continue to drink, or smoke on occasion to relax and relieve minor tensions, while drinking has become almost an obligation to nurture friendships, or just a mere habit that ruins your health. But it’s no longer the Dionysian, spiritual experience I shaped it to be. I spent four years with Philosophy and now I’m really uncertain if my interest to pursue it could be compared to an eternal torch or endless quest I formerly conceived it to be. Perhaps philosophy, literature, weed, booze are things that have become irrevocably Incorporated in my life, but they are not all that there is to my life.
There is always an immense set of mixed feelings in venturing out to a territory unfamiliar to you. The best way to put it is that even before making the journey, I already feel nostalgic of the coming home. I cling to the remembrance of things past, and my many dreams of a future that remains many a dream.

I just remembered that I bought my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude with ____ at Powerbooks, after which we went to have coffee at a Starbucks in Glorietta, seeing the late afternoon sunlight cast its last beams on the buildings, bringing along a comforting breeze that arrives before the beginning of the night. Once again, I try my hand at the trade of the feelings of love. In a way that I could never explain to her, ____helps me mold a more mature conviction. Perhaps it is time to say, what I longed to say, that love has found someone for me, and someone who would think that love has found me for her.