Time really flies and leaves the littlest trace. I could barely remember how my life went by, except for its obstinate sameness I desired and loathed, enjoyed and frowned upon.
It’s the last day of February. Time seems to be passing in light-year units nowadays. Time really flies and leaves the littlest trace. I could barely remember how my life went by, except for its obstinate sameness I desired and loathed, enjoyed and frowned upon.
Though you can’t really remember everything that takes place in your life, little seems to be actually taking place. Dinner and dessert with friends, and laughs, drinking at home with my brother and his friends while they finish their thesis, drinking alone at bars, dressing well, going out and meeting someone new and then wanting to meet someone else, going to work, writing those e-mails absorbed in a professional-sounding disclaimer language, then eating compulsively, watching films, reading these good books, listening to music and writing my journal. I have surrounded my life with these niceties, which seemed to have lightened my need to affirm my existence, like many other people who have not resisted mediocrity.
“This is it.” We’ve always thought. The now is what you have thought about before. Then time fled, and “this is it” becomes “that was it” or maybe even “that was it?” It all became ordinary, as always getting more and more queasy of commonplace happenings, glad at rationalizing that it’s all right and steady.
I’ve always wanted to delve deeper in to the moment. At the back of my head, I am wishing that there was a way to suspend time --- not only to make a memory persist, but to allow a moment outside the plane of time.
I started writing at around 5:00 am today, after a day’s off goodnight sleep. It’s six thirty in the morning now. The morning light begins to rinse the sky, and the sun finds its way into the room filling it with fresh and crisp yellow shine. The sound of vehicles vroom in the streets. The day is a ball rolling. There it goes again.
I went to the mall to buy this 900 peso CD case I never would’ve bought if I still had my more practical ideals set two or three years ago. But then I thought of the welfare and protection of my pirated CDs, and the will to just have the things I fancy and can afford when I’m desirous --- this one for example, books another.
My fancy was also struck by a 600 peso board game. I’ve enjoyed and triumphed in Scrabble even as a child. I realized I’m not a child anymore but I bought it with the thought that it would be fun to play alone, play with the words in Filipino, and even the mere idea of forming words out of a random set of tiles with letters and corresponding scores.
When I was playing alone in the room, my older brother laughed at this idea. He joined in and we ended up playing for six hours. What was pathetic is that it was supposed to be my game but I only won once, with all the words my vocabulary supposedly flaunted.
