Prime Time at Twenty Two

Goodbye

"I suppose in the end, all of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye."

- Life of Pi (2013)

I froze the moment Pi (Piscine Patel) uttered this line with his audacious and hopeless tone. I felt a sudden silence as if the whole world sympathized with such familiar pain. I sat there in a pretty shell of a body looking as if I had no care in the world; my person as the only being who knows about the heart buried deep - slowly breaking into pieces as the soul excellently and passionately endures.

I remember you, the person who left without saying goodbye. I remember all the times you, who disappeared out into the horizon, professed how I was sunshine to your every morning and the glowing star of your every night. My heart starts to smile as I dig deeper into the most amazing flashes of memory - moments of truth, laughter, and passion.

I will always remember you and graciously smile like a defeated warrior. I am free of bitterness and angst as life taught me that pain is a gift of nature bound to serve its purpose - it was designed to be the very reason behind  every soul's ultimate future. 

For whatever reason you may have, I respect it. For whatever guilt you may feel, I forgive you. For whatever regret that may try to linger, its now time to let go.

I was happy with you but the stars whispered to themselves that we were not meant to be - maybe not now. If you should know, I cried a few tears for such loss. If you should know, my world did not stop when you left.

You should know that I am nothing less than thankful for having such a beautiful soul pass me by in this lifetime. You are pristine and perfect in every way. Your heart is amazing - its unlike anything I have ever known before.

Thank you for the heart-ache and lessons that you have taught me. I knew you were worth every bit of it since day one.

I don't want to be one that leaves without a word...

...so for the first and last time,

Goodbye.

Yellow

Unexpected Friends

V

Ten years from now, I'll look back at your memory and smile. Somehow, I know I'll feel my soul mourn as my heart would feel that sudden pinch of pain...

Knowing that you have always been the greatest love I never could have.

In That Coffee Shop

I cannot recall the last time I was left alone to my thoughts. I cannot remember the last time I was comfortable with my being alone. Don't get me wrong, there's a difference between being alone and being lonely. I am, absolutely and undoubtedly alone - nothing more; nothing less. I have been around, seen the world in different perspectives - met people I never fathomed I would, been to places I never thought would be possible for me to reach, and I might have fallen in-love with an idea of a possibility that never could be.

Possibly, maybe, I have been in denial whenever I forthrightly express how happy I am - then again, as I step back and see where my reality has taken me, I do not sense a single manifestation of sadness, anguish, or pain. I am free. My free spirit and my existence took me to the path that lead me to people and places that I have come to embrace; I am grateful for the genuine love and respect I have been experiencing. 

...But today, my soul yearns to go back and live my being alone. 

I shall read an unconventional book in a quiet corner; somewhere in an unfamiliar place where there is no but slightly chance that anybody would recognize me. I shall sit here with this  unremarkable and commercialized cinnamon roll accompanied by another yet preserved raspberry juice. I smell that soothing aroma of coffee and feel the romanticism until it lasted. I settle down - get lost in the book while hours of the day goes on. Page 1, 2, ... 79. This book is exceptional - the art of doing business and understanding money. I needed to know more, I thirst for the peculiar words and thoughts it has to offer. 

Despite my fascination, in a split second, I was caught in an involuntary act of glancing at you. It seems as you have been there for a while and my senses felt how you have been staring at me since then. I catch your eye and to your surprise, you look away. You seem familiar, I may have seen you before. It does not matter - I am here to be alone and it shall stay that way. It makes me uncomfortable how I can see you stare and fidget as if you had some kind of agenda you wanted to protest. I could not concentrate on my book - I felt like a performer in a spotlight being watched with every gesture I make. Its time to go. 

I close my book and carefully stuff my bag with my ancient yet essential music player, cellular phone, and  pink pen. I can see you fidgeting even more as I get up and walk towards the direction of the exit which is yours. You have eyes that make me see a kind heart, you are reading a law book which makes me see your intelligence - you let out a seemingly awkward smile as I catch your eye for the second time. 

I'm sorry. In this moment all I ever want is to embrace my person - it is the wrong time and the wrong place. 

Maybe some other time - maybe never. 

Things I Learned at 21

(1)          College is the Best Time of your Life

As I stepped into College, I always told my High School friends how our time was the best time of my life. Looking back, it gives me that little satisfying moment of chuckling about how oblivious I was of the world I was faced with. I always thought sitting in that ancient arm chair, not doing anything with my classmates, was the best way to spend my days. Somehow, doing nothing and just letting things happen did sound appealing at one point in my life.

As I sit in this quarter they call an “office” (having finished the things I needed to do, of course) , It has never been clearer to me that college is the best time anybody could ever have in their entire lifetime. How could I not feel invincible when I had everything under my control? It was that time of my life that, in the deepest sense of the phrase, I was the master of my destiny. Nothing was ever forced into you while you were in College; not even the classes you seemingly “had” to take. You were always left with a choice – to study or to flunk, to shine or to disappear, to make each moment count or to live blindly in the shadows.

It was that time in my life that I surprised myself everyday with the slightest decision I chose to make. I never thought I would end up to be a strong-willed child, packed with my own beliefs and ideals on how the world should be. I never thought that given the option to indulge in the limitless array of possibilities, I dealt with freedom the way that made my parents proud. Sure, I fucked things up once in a while, had my share of failed subjects, and partied hard until I passed out – but hey, who does not go through that? I was a good kid but that does not mean I wasted my youth living the “right” way every day.

I fell “in-love” hard and felt the most painful heart ache I have ever experienced, I gave in to temptations of cutting classes and failed, I worked hard in one of the best school organizations and went on to be a respectable officer in my field. One thing I am most certainly proud of about college was that I had my own business, one that allowed me to create my ideas into tangible items that would be part of other people’s lives.  I stumbled upon hundreds of failures - but that one moment you get to put a smile on somebody else’s face will always be worth the sacrifices you made.

Work allows you to earn money and have freedom just as well but where I am now, I have come to know the difference of living young and free from that of living inside the rules of a rather bigger entity. Having a job means you have to please your bosses and be mindful of your actions – at all times. It means you have to blend into the culture no matter how hard you have to bend. It means creating a version of you that should be turned on as long as you get to be associated with the corporation’s name. It is almost like you get to wear an invisible uniform mixed with the complicatedness of being a unique individual while you prove to everyone else that you belong. It is like being trapped in a fish tank, mixed with different kinds of sea creatures – you are put in a spotlight with nowhere to go.

As I have come to know how it is like to be thrown into the so called “real life”, my mind has been made up that college was in fact, the best time anybody can have in this life. In a way, it felt like one huge experiment – a stage where I was held responsible with every move that I made. I had a whole army of friends and family but looking back now, I never depended on anybody to make my decisions for me or to shield me from the consequences of my flawed judgments. I was the only ruling party in my own universe, an individual capable of winning and losing – but winning some more (for it is through failure we learn the best).

College was the time of self-discovery, where we can all make mistakes and wander the halls aimlessly as we try to find who we really are. It was an excuse to play around this playground of a world. We lived a life where we all get judged less just because of the ultimate leverage of being young. It was that time that we formulated an idea of who we really are and who we want to be. You may not know it now, but as you look deeper into your existence, you already know the answer - you just have to accept and embrace your very existence.

(2)          You can Never Choose who Stays or who Goes

It has always been a choice whether to leave or stay in someone’s life. There is no one in this world that has not experienced loss. By now, I am sure you have thought of one or two people who left; may it be by choice or through an event bigger than us – one that is totally out of our hands. At the higher part of my list of the most painful events in my life would be losing someone special. I know that I could be the hardest person to understand or even to be with; but at the end of the day, those who make the effort to get to know me surely gets to have a piece of me – my loyalty, my kindness, and my trust. Once I fall in real friendship with somebody, I choose to never let go.

You can never choose who stays or goes. You can have this really annoying suitor who would choose to stay even if you try your best to shoo him off every day. You can have this amazing lover who, at some point you thought you would marry – but then you find yourself in that situation where he has made up his mind about leaving you for good.

                See, we are all given the gift of freedom by some kind of higher being. It is the thing – we may wish to select those people in our lives that get to leave or to stay. Sadly, it never worked that way and I am so sure that it never will; not now, not ever. We enjoy the freedom of choosing if we should stay or go in somebody’s life - and that “freedom” is the same freedom that stops us from controlling who stays or goes. Aside from the whole grey area of uncontrollable events, just like you, everybody else exercises their right to decide when to stay or go.

(3)          Dreams are Overrated

I can’t remember exactly when I started dreaming of something I wanted to be or wanted to have. I’m pretty sure it comes innately with the mind the moment we develop our consciousness. I am no expert in this field but based on my twenty years of observation, we all have this image of us that we want to experience in the near future. The oldest memory of a dream that I can recall was that I wanted to be a big shot doctor – then later, when I started going to school, I wanted to be a teacher just because I enjoyed drawing on the blackboard. I remember dreaming of having a sticker album with a complete collection of all the Lisa Frank stickers.

By now, I have realized that as we grow older, our dreams become bigger. As our dreams get bigger, they seem to get harder to grasp. As I have come to realize this, it made me think – which one of these dreams in my twenty one years of existence came true? Maybe there were a few – one here and there, scattered wildly in between the timeline. One thing’s for sure – not one was significant enough to be remembered or praised.

We all have that one vision that we want ourselves to be part of a couple of years from now – as we grow older, it transforms and adapts into the current predicaments that we are faced with.

I have always looked up to people who dream as hard as I could – who see their vision not as tiny flashes of photos but as one bright and vivid movie. I always thought that these dreams are the ones worth living – the ones that are meant to move from the mind into the realm of reality. The sad truth about this is that they are just dreams – visions in that brilliant universe in the mind. No matter how beautiful it is, no matter how vivid and bright it can be narrated, it will just be a dream – unless drawn out from the mind and brought into the physical world. Until then, a dream will just be an over-rated attempt to seduce the receiver – wordplay, imagination, mindfuck.

(4)          Time Heals the Wounds but Never Erases the Scars

(5)          Society does not Recognize Uniqueness

(6)          True Friends Love You More than You Think They Do

(7)          Nobody Ever has the Right to Judge Anybody

(8)          Studying Hard hardly Gets you the Job

(9)          Love is Infatuation

(10)      Photos do not Always tell you the Truth

(11)      The Difference between Acting Mature and Being Mature

(12)      Somebody will Always be Better than You

(13)      Things Happen for a Reason

(14)      There is No Shortcut to Mending a Broken Heart

(15)      Nobody Remembers who they were at 21

(16)      The Number of Years in a Relationship is Not an Assurance that You will end up Together

(17)      Your Parents are your life’s greatest miracle

(18)      Never Revolve Your World Around Anybody

(19)      Trust is one of the Hardest Things to Do

(20)      Let Go of the People who Chose to Give Up on You

(21)      Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

(22)      Every day is a Date with Destiny

(23)      Every Tear Drop Makes You Stronger

(24)      As You Grow Older, You Carry Heavier Baggage

Here Comes the Sun

Hello, Stranger with a Name

The moment I had my arms around your neck as I was about to say goodbye changed everything. I was looking straight into your eyes and it instantly felt like I had butterflies all over my tummy. It left me with a question that has been playing in my head over and over, in different forms and visions, in colorful flashes from distinct seconds of memory: “What if I stayed and just let go?.” Would it have changed anything or will I still be just another girl you met?

You see, I promised the rest of the night to a friend that I haven’t seen in five years. The plan was to catch up about everything that we have missed and to just be sober. He had all the courage to ask permission from all of my three bosses to take me out. He even had to give out his number just in case they wanted to look for me. As a friend, I am the most loyal you’ll ever meet – and it means the world to me to keep my word with every chance I get… and so I did what I had to do.

I must admit, the glistening water at the beach as the full moon shone all over it was amazing. The breeze was unlike anything that I have ever experienced before. It was like the universe conspired to create that perfect moment. It was magic.

I just was not so sure if it was really him I wanted to be with. A part of me was pulling me back to you.

I met you twice that day – a day that was part of my year’s greatest adventure. It came as a surprise as I was not anticipating to have a person I spent a couple of minutes with be one of the highlights of that utopian holiday.

It has been eight days and yet thoughts of the way you looked and the way you were comes more often that you think. They catch me in the most unexpected moments of my day; and you know what? I indulge in them. They make me smile or give me flashes of that fluttery feeling.  

I know you will be coming back soon but I do not know if you would see me after this. Its a huge risk, you might think of me differently now and run away as far as you can. It doesn't matter, I just thought that you deserve to know what a few minutes with you meant to one person in the world.

No regrets. :)

Forever Young