shoe porn

If there’s one label I could give myself and yet continually disavow (in my small public at least), it’s that I am obsessive-compulsive. My fixation on particular things like shoes or my predisposition to certain situations like dying, or shying away from people is not the side I usually want to be seen. It’s nothing that I am ashamed of really, or am being dishonest about, but I feel that my being so, is a private torment that I wish people would overlook or not notice at all. If someone as much brings up in a joking light, like “hey, nice shoes!”, I would get deathly embarrassed and spoil the whole atmosphere by acting like a bumbling fool and muttering something along the lines of “oh this old, cheap, ugly what have you....” Like it is not, so it’s futile. Obviously people know that I am on to something, and I’m only doing so much damage to my ego, if not to my already ill repute. It’s as if my revelry is something sacred to me, and others cannot just march right into it like it’s theirs.

I enjoy being alone. In a café, bookstore, shopping place, or even at home. I love walking alone and exploring nooks and crannies in malls without anyone in tow. The more obscure I am and the place, the better. If there were anything this concrete jungle I work and live in could offer, I would be there, but in a dark corner. I do worship my solitude. So much so that at times the presence of other people seem to wind me up and rouse me from my momentary catnap, and I get a little agitated. I have once said that people, regardless of who they are, are easy to love. But I find it more pleasurable to admire them from a distance that I so choose. Sometimes, I watch a bevy of little children play in the sunshine and I feel truly joyful about it. Yet I am not inclined to articulate of such feelings to other people. Except maybe to the anonymous few in this blog. But no, not even here. If I were to be reminded, I have nothing but murky thoughts in this place. It’s a wonder even that some souls still choose to venture here every so often and rally me on to the brighter side. Right you are, I’m such a sucker...

So anyway, I digress again. I will not talk about death today, but a little on shoes. They say that people who get overly indulgent in certain things—say clothes, food, and yes, shoes—are those that have been, at one time or another in their life, deprived of the very same corporeal things. In my experience, I think it’s true. To some degree. Alright, to the nth degree. Owning something you have hoped for and desired for a long time brings a sense of gratification that it cannot be measured by whether you acquired it for a million or a trifling. It doesn’t even matter if it’s useful to you or not, but just hitching your wagon way up there for the longest time, and feeling that you have finally arrived….gosh, it’s giddiness incarnate. Nothing could seem to sever you from your precious object of affection. Not for a moment.

Even when I was a child, I have loved shoes. But it was not very often that I could slip on a good one. I remember that when my mother buys me a new pair, I feel as if everything in the world is pretty and nice-smelling and suddenly not so unattractive anymore. I would grudgingly resign the old pair to the bodega, and welcome the new ones with open arms and a very tender regard, as though I was holding a little baby for the first time. As if that wasn't enough, I would sleep with the shoebox, and peek into it the moment I open my eyes, making sure they were really there and I wasn't just dreaming.

Shoes were my therapy for those days when things seemed drab and miserable. I must admit now that I have extended far into loving it and developed a compulsion for buying, whenever I set my covetous eyes on one.

When I walk around, I would often look down, past the faces and shapes of people, to concentrate on their feet. I would survey women and men on how their shoes make or unmake their outfit, and smile with accord if someone looks good from toe to top. Emphasis on the toe. Quite obsessively I make mental observations of women who are considered fashionable because their stilettos or maryjanes or mules or thongs pull together what they are wearing. What other reason can my proclivity for shoes be, the gaping awe I feel when I see them on others, and more notably, on me? But of course, it's fatal attraction.

I have forgotten how many pairs I’ve had since the years I started earning my own keep. At times without really keeping tab on how much it would cost me, a leg or an arm, I would have to have it, right there and then.

When the stockpile had gone too far up, I often give away old shoes. In spite of my fondness for them, I am not really quite the magpie that would hoard them forever and ever until they rot in my closet. One at a time is my battlecry. Or maybe five at a time. Depending on my cashflow. If there still is such that exists, as shoes have a way of draining your nest egg to obliteration. It would be uncharacteristic of me though, to buy what I cannot afford. I don’t. It’s just that I love. And you know how love sometimes comes in little unexpected packages.

vows

Our fifth anniversary as a couple is nearing. I got to think--what lies ahead for both of us? Two people who once fell in love and begat two children--two important reasons why they have totally put aside their own needs and shifted their life’s patterns, so that they can enclose the little ones safely in between. Is there some reward for us in the offing? For us and us alone?

My husband and I met while we were working in the same building in the south. He’s a web designer, and I…..well, it seemed that I had been a century old vampire, slaving behind the corporate desk all my life. One day, a towering guy who was young and brash and ready to embrace life head-on meets a pocket-sized woman whose only claim to fame are her proud appendages,and her disturbing brain. Nonetheless she too was cavalier and was never frantic about anything much. They fell in love, and voila, love took root, that's Gabriel and Sophia for you. But can you imagine what we had to do to make up for the remarkable disparity between us, the years that divided us, he being five years my junior? We certainly were not a match made in heaven, and God knows what concessions we had to put up with to find our very middle ground. It was not a walk in the clouds.

Children are supposed to be the underlying principle of our effort to stick together as a family, but sometimes when they come into our life, things don’t seem like they used to be. Suddenly, there are schedules to keep, deadlines to meet, mouths to feed, hours to wake up to, infantile emotions to check, undivided attentions to give. It’s all theirs, and hardly yours or his. You forget to be a wife or husband, to take care of your spouse, to act up fittingly in moments that you should take the edge off each other’s uncertainties, or show the least bit of tenderness and consideration.

It’s not as if I hadn’t. I know how it feels to come home from an endless traffic snarl, smog and the city blight. I sometimes wish that I could go to a place where I can shut off momentarily and enjoy some silence. Far from the car horns, from the earsplitting screams of my kids, from just about anything. But more importantly, from the unforgiving realities of this world. And have someone at your side, come hell or high water. I know he does too. That’s why I never want to censure him for his little acts of neglect. He needs what I need. But when he hates, I hate. When he loves, I love. It’s a work in progress and there are many loose ends to always tie up. It is not beyond me to do it, and do it right and good. I wish, though, that I don’t have to trudge alone. I wish that it wasn't always only me, but us.

I think that if love is to be made an action word, it is as my husband would one day tell me: that it is accepting, realizing, and affirming the other one. I am still of the same mind. If not always of the same heart. On our fifth year together, I feel that it’s nigh time for me to get doing these very verbs, and not just vacillating about them. A random person who refused to be called nice and yet unabashedly leaves nuggets of his wisdom once said, smile and the world will instinctively smile back at you.

So there, I am grinning from ear to ear....

a stranger one day

By this time I am quite aware that the prevailing theme of this blog I started some three years ago is me, me and me. Me picturing me snapping at myself. C’est moi. It will not come as a surprise that people who saunter into this place think I’m self-absorbed, reveling in the wry pleasure of putting myself down in different ways, making blistering disparagements of my life as a mother who constantly carps about her failure in the home front, a person who nitpicks on her lackluster existence of thirty-five years, and many other imaginary things that are greatly in danger of falling over her, if she just as much as manage a little smile on her face. Hear, hear. I’m sounding like it now.

But the truth of the matter is, I never feel more free than when I expatiate about those feelings and ambiguities in this little space. Discomfiting as it may seem for others. I’m sure they must have muttered something under their breath about the unhelpfulness of my glum and pessimistic thoughts, and God knows how tedious it can get, but yeah, what can I say? Sometimes I just want to write. Of something that didn’t or doesn’t happen. Of nothing. Of nada. Nada y pues nada y pues nada, crap that hemingway suckers like me devour hungrily like aphrodisiac.

We live in an intolerable uncertainty, of what’s to come tomorrow, or five minutes from now. Maybe we will succeed, or fail, as we try to struggle in our chores as wife, mother, lover, worker? Or maybe we will go on whirring about, like machines. No heart, no soul, but nonetheless functional and useful in man’s end result. Our end result. We make the hero or antagonist of our own life story. I am both, to myself. And understandably so.

So, as a favor to my other world, where I am a envisaged to be nice and companionable, let’s not split hairs over pointless semantics, I will remain to be what they see me. And I’ll reserve my desultory grumblings to myself alone. Or to a random stranger maybe, who by the same token, will one day shake me out from my lifeless stupor, and scream--By golly, how you bore the living hell out of me!

my irrelevant

Well, here's something. Just when I am all set to close the door on the past or at least a fraction of it, and have in fact rightly done so, here comes an unexpected event that stirs me up again. Not that it can affect me still, but to muse about it now can’t be helped. Suddenly, things come flooding back. Those many nights and days that I walk around wounded, head hanging so low that it could reach the ground, wandering around so blindly and aimlessly that I hardly notice the quizzical look on the faces that approach me. People and friends wonder why I’m so fucked up, while I was too dazed to ignore their raised eyebrows and circumspections. There were probably tattling signs everywhere of me getting scary suicidal, and I could just imagine the hushed tones and furtive looks. Such was my catastrophe . But I chuckle when I think about it now. What if right then, after resolving to finally cross to the brighter side of the street, I do not, in my dejected state, and in a sort of soap opera anticlimax, see an enormous vehicle running towards me at breakneck speed? Like in the movies, I fight through my tears that I could hardly see the rainsoaked road, while a silly goodbye song plays over and over again in my head. In one crucial instant, a blast of light seizes me on my tracks, and I hear the deathly omen of a blaring horn. A second of total confusion, and I am smashed into smithereens. Haze...Heartbeat...Tunnel of light..Flatline..Total darkness... Silence...Void...Totally fucked up thoughts, but I wouldn't be here today boring you to tears, would I? Yeah. Well no, I did cross the road safely, and when I looked back, I sighed. Poor girl, she was cool, but kinda loony.Funny that sometimes we choose to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders and bawl over some person who is not even there, but who is halfway around somewhere, too happy with their life to give a shit about our own wretched existence. And yet, we do bawl.

Now really, if you haven't the faintest idea what I'm rambling about, don't fret. It's because I don't either.

thoughts on a friday

Got busy today, thank god it's the last day of the workweek. And I got to fix my social security finally in alabang. It's funny that I had always hated to go to that place. Being there takes you into an atmosphere of helplessness...a cesspool of old, schoolmarmish women who condescend at you, and sneer at you like you are a beggar asking for alms. Even the security guards behave like bigtime assholes. Yeah, and it's your money running the damn place. Talk about public service. This kind of institution makes me think why I'm putting my hard-earned pesos with them, and putting up with such non-personalities. Anyway, enough said.

I had a chance to meet Sachiko one day, and old friend. We had a great talk, and although we have not seen each other for nearly ten years, it seemed as if it was only yesterday that we last left off. Such is the beauty of pure friendship. Sach and I are out and out honest with everything about us, no airs and no false humilities either, just the brass tacks. I really appreciate her like that. I honestly had misgivings about meeting her at first because of many things in my mind. You know me, I have the propensity to ignore text messages and give shameless excuses about not feeling well. But I'm glad I saw her. Ho-hum...I wish I could say something sad, but heckles, I can be glad too sometimes, can't I?

Shoe Fetish

Ain't she lovely? I just had to have a picture of this little lady , so I took her off on the office floor and snapped. After being angsty about an encounter with a princess warrior in the streets once, when I had a big-hearted altruistic moment with humanity---let alone in my thoughts–-I figured shoes is an important part of our being, in that it helps us feel good about ourselves, and buoys us up to the fluffy clouds of material indulgence. A reward for our hard work and pinings, for those countless times we stick our noses on store windows and salivate on the shiny beauties, longing that on a fortuitous pay day we can finally point with shaky fingers and bated breath to THE ONE, yeaaahhh thaaaaat, and take them out proudly from their incandescent cages of desire.... hence, my unaissailable gluttony for it can always and forever be justified. Who doesn’t love shoes, eh? Stand up and speak out, or forever hold your bunions to yourself. I admit shoes is one of my favorite things on earth, but I don’t mean the manolo blahniks that will disfigure your life, nor the garden sort of variety that will leave a bad taste on your poor toes. Eeeek, fuck the metaphor. I just mean good sensible shoes. Regardless of the name. Regardless of the price. Naturalmente, these shiny black martinez valeros set me high up there in the self-possessing, elation department. And that is rare to come by ....

So sue me.

Nature Boy

There was a boy

A very strange enchanted boy

They say he wandered very far, very far

Over land and sea

A little shy and sad of eye

But very wise was heAnd then one day

One magic day he passed my way

And while we spoke of many things

Fools and kings

This he said to me

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn

Is just to love and be loved in return"

:: Nat King Cole/Miles Davis ::

freedom....

...At last. This week, I have been unchained from domestic slavery, and from the strains of having to be good and meek and too accepting of people’s glacial treatment. So sod it! as the brits would say… First the yaya came back in one piece. How relieving to finally look at an empty laundry basket, smell the fresh sheets outdoors, and appreciate having the walls back to their spotless state again. Because I swear, tried as I might to move around like a bionic superwoman, with two jumpy kids, and a day job I can’t afford to stay away from, I was only indeed as superwoman of two minds as I could get. One mind wants to give way, and one mind wants to give up. So yaya business restored to its normal sway …equals a happy blogging mommy.

Well the other freedom I’m talking about is being able to survive the ice age in the 21st century. In retrospect, it’s all your own doing. You give yourself up for other people. You set aside your emotions, to house them in the center of it all. Their turbulence and their trouble is yours. You listen to their thoughts, you share your thoughts, but mostly you just listen. And understand. You give them the rein, to say what they want, to do what they want. You applaud when they most need encouragement. And you cry with them, when they most need sympathy. You were being a good sidekick. An efficient PA. A genius girlfriday.

And then they break your heart. Just like that. These people that you call Friends, or sometimes in a state of being capricious, Boss. And one day, they treat you so coldly and without the slightest regard, and you wonder where you failed them. You think, rather helplessly, had I not been a funny sidekick? Had I not been an obliging PA? Am I not good enough?

And it dawns on you, and you learn to accept. That you are not. Good enough. So, face it. Time to move on. Time to go out in the sunshine. Time to seek the warmth in the tropics. Time to burn yourself up and resurrect from the ashes. Time to lock it up. And let it rot in the cobwebs! To the bowels of the earth! And the deepest recesses of your cursed soul! With the scums of the universe! Sod it! Forever! La la la la…..

Being free takes a lot of pluck and a good dose of to-hell-with-them attitude. And I guess I cinched it. Today, I smile at the prospect of meeting up with my next emotional and domestic challenge. And I say..... to hell with it!

homage to the once little one

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near.
your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose.
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses).
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

:: edward estlin cummings::

Redemption

Today is my mother’s 59th birthday, had she been alive. I have stood back long enough to realize that probably she would have wanted to see a different me today, a child she once saw living in the outskirts of the city, in the little town of sum-ag, in a house along the street where you can find a chockful of tangerine santans, and a tiny girl with a great love for music, poetry, and her family.

My childhood wasn’t one fit for a fairy tale book. It was an ordinary childhood, but up until the day my mother died, all I could remember was that the sun was always shining amply on my side of the world. I was a happy child, full of life, and ebullient in many ways .We weren’t rich, but it was scarcely necessary to ever feel poor or wanting, what with everyone in a jovial mood, helpful with each other, sharing in many things, even though there wasn’t that much to begin with. It was a life bursting with friendships, and laughter, and an extensive amount of love. It was quite impossible for me to have felt so guarded with everything that we had or didn’t have. I didn’t care about wealth as I was remarkably ignorant of the practical side of life. For me, it was just a happy and simple existence.

But when my mother died when I was fifteen, I realized that life wasn’t so easy, that in fact, we were indeed quite poor, and that the wretchedness of being an orphan was more than I had previously been prepared to acknowledge. I changed almost instantaneously. I was just too upset by the travesty of her death, and the fact that my brothers and I were in no second rendered motherless, and ironically almost fatherless (as my father, too, needed time to deal with the blow all by his lonesome). It left us anguished, but I think I must have felt it the most, being the eldest child. Pretty soon we were coerced into making decisions, about who goes with whom, realities to face that my mother’s illness and death had left the family almost penniless, and that we had to survive, or strike out aimlessly toward an unknown future and fail. I think we have overcome all that, but the sadness had lingered, and stayed for a long time .

It was for me a start of a ceaseless struggle against despair and emptiness. Being at an age where my feelings were in their most defenseless and overwrought, I felt like life had conspired against me, taking away the only reason that could espouse all my aspirations and dreams whilst I was growing up, and clinching my solitary all the more when my father and brothers were separated from me. Sure, I did go on with my life, never had a major clash with people in my environs, or with their accepted morality. In short, I was normal. But the pain never really fled from me. I was always afraid that a little enactment of high emotions would make me flinch and run away from myself or from people who would show sudden leaps of sympathy towards my circumstances.

But I don’t think I ever did.I embraced human pathos and divergence, I learned to love people and empathize with them in spite of myself, but I am sorely disappointed that up until now I could not swerve against my high-flown rantings and come to terms with my loneliness, and be damn crazy happy for once.

What I am is what I call a savage pilgrimage—a person trying painstakingly to be in the swing of regular life, trying not to feel different and alone amidst a throng of a thousand other souls who suffer alone, or are insufferably slow to realize their aloneness. One moment I urge myself to be free and embrace my destiny, but in another breath, I hold back, afraid of the crosscurrents that may take me to an unsafe place because of the wrong choices I might make. And I rail against all these suppressed conflicts inside me. I realized that I am fixated on something almost unachievable.

But it’s not, at all. I think that being a mother has offered a saving grace on the other hand, a form of deliverance. Some nice person once said that maybe creating something can offer a kind of redemption, although it may not always work. But hey, it does. Not always effectively, but sure it does. The passion that I may have withdrawn from many things because of my lost childhood had been conveyed incessantly to my two kids in a show of motherly devotion. I am emotionally in thrall to them, from the moment they wake up in the morning, until they close their eyes at night. Yet I do not ask that they be anything, but only be happy and full of love. The things and people that I see, that I photograph, that I write about on my blog or in my head, they provide me a valuable measure from whence I can tell that my happiness is growing, or glowing, or can even blaze across like the sun I’ve always known to shine amply on my side of the world. I might smile a little now. For my mother at least.

bedlam in bruger...

Bruger is the subdivision where we presently live. How it got its name I can only guess, but everytime the word is mentioned, BRUGER, I can't help but create a mental picture of a juicy burger filled with BLT to excess, and my mouth waters and a teeny bit of saliva is just threatening to come off. Anyway, that is not the subject of this post.

I have been nothing short of a domestic slave the past two weeks… until Thursday at least when the yaya comes back. She has gone away to the province to bury her dead brother. Husband and I have been left tending to the kids on weekends, and me, poor me---a washerwoman, child minder, cook, etc...hammered by crying baby and a little boy who so conveniently throws fits of temper on these bleak hours of domicile mayhem ...There's no one we can ask help from at the moment, and it would be too much to impose ourselves on relatives who have their own hands full with something.

So, can't I help feeling like that french woman banished into a life of slavery, scrubbing floors and hanging laundry, against her repressed sensibilities, while the greasy stinking husband pokes into her poor ass. Only this time it’s not the husband that pokes, but the little monsters that are my children. How much more could I endure, I don’t know. But, patience, patience, patience…is still a virtue.

On days like these, I am constrained to look back at the single life I had for many, many years. Back then, it was only me, myself and shaz (my other self) to care about. The world didn’t complain one bit if I didn’t tidy up my room for one year. No one would dare disagree if I thought it was more practical to sortie the food stalls outside than cook on my own. I could read all I want, I could go home whenever I pleased, I could move at a snail’s pace if I wanted to. It was a simple and uncomplicated life. Not unlike now, urgency is the word of the century, and so much more.

I wonder though, had I remained ensconced in my simple and trouble-free life, if I had been any happier. Strange that having too little to worry about makes me quite unsettled. Sometimes unknowingly, I embrace the convolutions of life….being human and living strenuously brings some sense of comfort—in that I am indeed alive and struggling to overcome Life, and trying to become bigger than it is.

So am I happy being a mother? Ouch, I hear my children shrieking and yelling again…back to the merciless motherly business.

recollections: nam

I am not much of an assessing kind of blogger. If anything, I tend to be more of the stream-of- consciousness kind, with a flair a tad too much, for the melodramatic. I speak mostly of feelings rather than of events or details. I truly believe observing the littlest things is not one of my pursuits or strengths.

But I am at a point of my blogging life that my mind is preoccupied with vague insinuations of things that are neither here nor there. In other words, I am mentally flaccid, waiting for eventual death. So I deemed this would be the best time to at least talk of something more….fact-based. Hence, a nervous attempt at recollecting my thoughts, of my first-time ever to leave home and travel abroad.

Vietnam was my very first destination. It was an almost cursory decision to make, even if the person I was traveling with (B) had goaded me forever to do it. Back then, traveling simply didn’t appeal that much to me. But after I did, in his able hands, I got hooked for life. The first time he broached the subject of going to Nam, I thought duh? Honest. I was blissfully ignorant of the world outside me, being cocooned all my life in my little bucolic world of carabaos and mangosteens. And I thought the only place worth calling a “vacation” is in Europe. Which incidentally I could never afford, even if I held five jobs at one time and saved every penny I could by eating instant noodles at every meal. I still can’t afford it today, but I’m not as ignorant anymore of the bliss at having traveled places and gained experiences.

So fast forward to the whole rigmarole of securing travel documents, and we were off to the international airport. Like a desperate city slicker (slacker?), I had my new beige backpack two sizes bigger than myself, which I lugged around everywhere, nearly breaking my back. Two hours of relatively calm plane ride, his hands over mine, sensing that I was a little jumpy at the prospect of setting foot at alien soil, and I had my first view of the Hanoi runway…..

And you thought I was so psyched up to do this piece. Apparently, I couldn't. Now, I will have to slog and sweat over the next paragraphs and will post again sometime. When I’m ready. First off, cold HANOI up north…..Then the long bus rides and innumerable pit stops to many many places on the way down south, ultimately ending the whole gamut in Saigon, now known as HO CHI MINH city . I know how bitin it is, and I'm strangling myself right now if it's any consolation....

Don’t blame me if this account will come in very patchy and far far in between episodes. I warned you how this is always my achilles heel...

it's impossible...

...not to think of angels when you hear andrea bocelli sing even a somewhat schmaltzy song popularized by a perry como. Its almost impossible not to carry on with everyday life, hanging on with what little sanity you’re left, if music doesn’t exist. And it’s impossible not to accept, in deference to all your sullen and vulnerable thoughts, that a man like him…the voice without sight… can teach you how to want nothing and yet be happy and full of dreams…

SOMOS NOVIOS

It’s impossible…

Tell the sun to leave the sky,
It’s just impossible . . .

It’s impossible…

Ask a baby not to cry,
It’s just impossible . . .

Can I hold you closer to me.
And not feel you going through me,
Split the second

That I never think of you,
Oh! how impossible . . .

Can the ocean keep from rushing to the shore?

It’s just impossible!
If I had you, could I ever want for more?

It’s just impossible!

And tomorrow

Should you ask me for the world,

Somehow I’d get it . . .
I would sell my very soul

And not regret it . . .
For to live without your love,
It’s just impossible!



:: andrea bocelli . amore ::

Transcience

Year after year, there are people we know who pass away and leave our physical world to the vast infinite cosmos only they can know about. We hear of friends and relatives who succumb into illnesses, or have lived long enough to want another day on earth. Thus, they willingly take that last trip down the road and disappear forever. We do mourn for them, true. We feel deep sadness as the ones left behind. But, the impact is not as deep as losing a person who is next of kin, or who has been nearest to our emotional core. Like a mother, or a child.

This week, two of our relatives passed away on the same day. The son died earlier, and the mother died too, a few minutes soon afterwards. They lived in different towns. But strangely, the mother who hadn’t known yet of her son’s demise, was asleep and never woke up. Just like that. As though they had a deal, a vow to walk and knock on the pearly gates of kingdom come, together.

Together. Not a day apart. Eerie, but it happened. And now, there they are, two happy souls drifting above, looking down on their nearests and dearests. He was 65 and she, 85. Although they were at the ages when death seemed fated and inexorable, the circumstances of their departure, is enough to shake me up and remind me (again) of our stark mortality. How, in the grandest scheme of things, we can be blown off the face of the earth in a single breath of sickness, or accident---creating, thus, our life’s conclusion.

Fortunately, we can lessen our chances of meeting an uneventful end, by being cautious and vigilant of what we eat and what we do to our bodies. We can veer ourselves into safety at all times, or create miracle concoctions to prolong our youth and extend our lives. Unfortunately, we are still faced with the fact that we are but transient beings, and that physical death is preordained. There’s no escaping it. We may try to meander around its curves and turns, or sometimes even cheat it. But at the end is the same cul-de-sac, the same blind alley that we will fatally collide with. We can not just ever go back.

I don't mean to scare but....

But the children….I can never imagine to leave them alone. Not now. Not even if they have everything they will need materially whilst growing up. Because I have been there, a place where sadness is so profound that nothing else can mend it or alleviate it, except death itself.

And yet do I hold supremacy over it to say no? Maybe in principle yes.

But words are ever so empty when Death’s black mantle finally comes closing in…


written 9.12.06

love is not all

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

:: edna st. vincent millay::
posted at 360 on 8-07-06