After a 14-month grudge, I decided to live. I decided to live despite what I knew the world had to offer to me...because I knew somehow, that living in an imperfect world is worth it. And so I dared to rise up from the flames of my demise and start living once again. Here is a letter I wrote to someone I wish to remain unnamed:
A decision has been long overdue and procrastination has overstayed its welcome. One can not live in the past, one can not live on a selection of fleeting moments that bleed you dry. It is logic that galvanizes me to motion, to destroy an empty rage sired by a lie and impregnated by a ghost in a shell. Incubus. How cruel life’s humor is to make the shoe fit.
I do not want us to part with grudges against each other but I do not want us to be friends either. There is more to tragedy than hurtful words, more to tragedy than the rhetoric of silence. There are wounds that are beyond healing- surely by now you agree with me that panaceas are nothing but myth. There are happenstances that eat your soul.
I let in the possibility of a relationship between us, not of an ordinary and a merely circumstantial kind, but something deeper and more intimate, though I knew it could hurt me- and throughout the time tended to pre-empt it with my secret pain for that very possibility of pain—I say admittedly. Further in the obscurity (if not mystery) of our relationship is the uncertainty, not the natural kind for a relationship, but of a misplacement caused by the reality of technicalities—that is the only (if not the usual) anchor of realities to the ‘bigger reality.’ Again for so many times, I felt lost. I did not know where to put myself. I did not know where in the map of truth was I to place myself. I had nothing unbiased to hold on, but to the very thing you are shunning—the handle of technicality. My feelings had nothing to hold on. I had no other choice. But, despite its absence, I gave in to chance. And I waited. Even if I knew that I could never lose something (or more appropriately in this case, someone) that was never mine in the first place. Never in the sense that truly mattered. How could I, when I was unjustly robbed even of that?
It was true and you were annoyed — and it might have discouraged you —when I told you that you could not have two things at once. Didn’t I tell you that if you want to hold on to one thing, the only possibility for you to grasp it is to let go of something else? I never wanted to be the bearer of bad news, but I guess the situation called me to be the carrier of sense to someone who shielded himself with supposed ignorance and indecision, be it ignorance and indecision to time, to circumstance or to hurts - heaven forbid you be faced with a situation that demands instantaneous cost-benefit analysis. Your speech and act -they said it all. They gave word to the things that you did not want to say simply because you chose not to. Choosing not to choose in the excuse of indecision when the situation desperately calls for a decision is in itself a choice, is it not? Even if it was a choice to abdicate a great responsibility and leave the situation vulnerable to a nonexistent fate. Have you not noticed that we are condemned to choose? For it is a piece of our existence’s reality – to face the inescapable choices that we are saddled with, with or without our consent. We may not have chosen to be burdened with a particular choice, but we nevertheless have to make a choice. There is no reality except in action - or in some cases, the lack of it.
I did not trust you not because I doubted your sincerity, but because of your very sincerity to your emotions. You give in to everything that you feel, however strong or weak, however long or short-lived. I understood it because I too am guilty of the same crime. And I wondered, if to you I was real or as ether—just another part of your dreams, the ones that you keep at arms length. For this, I did not even know if you saw me then, really saw me as me.
If you say that you did not dream your emotions that time, I would understand you. You cannot possibly dream what you feel, feelings are felt for their degree of reality (relative of course, to one’s paradigm of reality) and persistence (in the sense that there is no false emotions)—and I know the truth of this. But for somebody who grew up around people whose very emotions, real and persistent, betray and hurt the ones closest to them—the emotion that one day loved and ever after rejected the same object, a person of emotions is a willing slave to his emotions, and can be loyal only to his emotions. Never can I trust emotions not to hurt, and inevitably the person steered by it.
I do not wish undone the things that have come to pass. Whether I am better off or not, I can not say with certainty. And it is best if I do not indulge in thoughts that are to my perception, flimsy. There is no point in lingering on the what-ifs, the shoulda-woulda-couldas for the detail that any argument that I could come up in its grounds would be a point that is blatantly contrary to fact. The only thing I am certain of is that I was changed. Do not pity me, it is much too late for that. I can do without it for I am a person who does not sway with sympathy. But just because I do believe in the injustice of that form of coercion (I prefer to be more objective), do not ever wipe out the possibility that I can contend without. I simply chose to argue without- even if the shit already hit the fan, when reasoning with sympathy would have been the most effective means to point out a fallacy in your constructed argument.
I believed in our attraction to each other, that is, in our meeting and togetherness, so I chose to engage in the relationship in spite of its unacceptability by technicalities and rules. Admittedly, I played frivolous at first (I knew you saw this)—I did not know to what I was reciprocating, and to frolic was the safest, most probable assumption (and it may be true that the ‘romance’ started as a play). You were the first to put in romance, I just had to let it happen even if it was only for frivolity. This was part of my unconventionality. But as more time, gestures and emotions were given in, as little by little I could not help it, parts of me were revealed to you, I had only to be serious—I was beginning to share parts of myself to you transgressing my privacy and independence to my unease. For me, it was a form of surrender. But still I did not know to whom and to what. Come to think of it, it is a shame that it had to be thus.
The blow was not at all soft. There was nothing in me to cushion it even if I had lived with the possibility of inevitable pain or the hovering threat of it, whether it be me or someone else who would bear it. And I guess, it was better that I had to be the one deemed less even if it was for the wrong reasons, even if it was because of faulty argument. Blame it on bad synapse feeding immediate sensory perception into faculty of reason. I am not rationalizing. Although it disagrees with being a cynic and a critic at birth, take me as someone who does not rationalize, at least one who didn’t during the composition of this letter.
In truth, I could not understand your perception, at the same time I doubted your truthfulness. How could one deny the truth from someone and be convinced that it was out of care? How could you say you care for someone and refuse that someone something we all know she should know? Then you told me you love me. I thought it was a joke. I did not know to whom you were lying. To XXX, to me, or to yourself-in all sincerity I think it was the latter. How can I trust my well-being to somebody who cares enough for somebody to lie to her, and who loves somebody enough not to give her peace of mind at least? Do you see my point or do you refuse to see it like the many moments you refused to see? When I told you in the movie theatre that I could not go through with things given the current situation, I was not merely asking for reassurance, I was asking for a part of the truth. The truth at least, of our intentions for each other- of your intentions for me. How could I look at it in any other way? I am sure that you are literate enough to read between the lines. But you did not give me that. Simply because you refused not to. But I waited still in my distress. I thought it was too harsh to demand from you something you could not give — as of the moment. I guess I was wrong to even think that. I should have known better. I guess love makes fools of us all.
History, by its intrinsic nature, is always a one sided account. And with grace borne of understanding, I willfully submit to its injustices. She will know me as a thief, as a wrecker of relationships as she so frantically puts it, for eternity – an eternity whose endurance of which weighs on your shoulder. An eternity that I speculate you will bear. Language will leave me with silence. Gravid with eloquence and possibilities as it may be, it will be silence nonetheless.
The time of my contemplation about certain truths has come and gone. I am now moved to seek my own bliss. And so, I ask this of you, an entity to negate what you told her at Eastwood’s Tower: closure. Not just any closure. But the full length of its truth, or more appropriately, your part of it. I am not good with ad baculum nor with ad hominem. As an acquaintance, a friend or however you see me fit to be with regard to you, give me at least this. I have never asked you for something this grave and it is my ignominy that I should ask this of you. But your truth in our little encounter is imperative to my better health, not to mention crucial in the judgment of a circumstance I am faced with.
P.S.
Night’s passion, with its nocturnal residents enlighten me that god must exist.(albeit not the one Christianity shoves down our throats…)
My faculty of reason tells me that I will never understand it/her/him.
My heart whispers that I was not designed to.