27 January 2005
12:17am, Sai Kung
Something that I dreamed over a month ago happened today. It was both amazing and strange. If we really have the ability to foresee the future in our dreams, then is it not possible that all our life is predestined? If not, then how can we ever really see, no matter what level of awareness, something that is still to happen. Dreams are not all memories or longings or undisguised desires then. But what if dreams are the planning stage of human life? What if dreams were where we plot our life, like a strategic planning session? I have quite a few dreams that I can recall.
The first time I recognised that I have dreamed of something even before it happened was when Iyo Crispin Larena’s home at checkpoint burned down. After seeing what remained of the house, I realised that I have seen that exact scene somewhere before. Now, I am remembering the one dream that has stuck in my mind. I am inside a huge house in the middle of nowhere – looking out from a huge open window with white curtains being blown by the wind. And all I see outside is a large white sky with a hint of blue. The strangest thing about this dream is I am looking at myself from the sky. I don’t know what it means, but it seems so sad. It makes me weep even now. I used to think that it is something that I was in my previous life -that all the sadness that comes to take over me every so often is something that my heart has come to feel and learn so well in my past life. But what if it is something that is still to happen in the future? Is it someone’s pre-designed life for me? If so, who is it? Or is it something that I plotted in my dreams? Then how, why haven’t we discovered that there is a way to plan our life ahead?
I looked at my palm today and saw something that has never appeared before or if it did, it was something that I have never seen. Bing said that it means a “breaking-up of a relationship”. This year seems to be a heart breaker for me with so many strange lines appearing in my heart line. But if there is any consolation, lots of stars are connecting and shaping in my career line. Bing remembered that this very line seems to show a lot of promise since the last time she saw my palm and that I can expect more success to come this year. It’s another perplexing thing for me, to have my life written in symbols in my palm. Who does it and how is it done? Is it someone else or do I do it in a level of awareness that I could never be aware of?
Saturday, July 3, 2010
There And Back Again
October 2007
Davao City
I entered my parking space wrongly, I was too close to the left side and I can’t open the door wide enough to be able to get out. I switch gear to reverse and release the brake gently, but I steered my wheels to the wrong side that the car’s rear end got even closer to the car parked next on the left. Oh, my God! One look and I know I need a miracle to squeeze my car out without scratching the other and another miracle to keep me alive as I feel I am suffocating and dying fast of my mounting anxiety attack. Take control! I paused and breathe. Breathe once more. Breathe again. Another careful look on the rear left … No shit, I will not be able to get out of this unharmed!
I just dropped Gabriel to his basketball game a few blocks from the mall where I am to shop for groceries. I told him I do not think I can already manage to park the CRV on my own. You will, you’re a fast learner. I learned to drive the minute I took the wheel. It took me five minutes to listen to the basic instructions, the next five trying out the gears and the last five mastering the highway. After that, I was zooming the roads with humongous twelve wheeler trucks covering the fifty kilometers distance away and back to where I started in an hour. My driving lesson went by without a hitch.
But learning to park is another story. Here I am already traumatized. I hate to have to make the call to Gabriel who is now on his way to rescue me, abandoning his basketball game and jumping into a motorbike. The driver to my right was on a wait and see mode, watching me through his window mirror. But someone, thank God, from the back lane came forward and signaled me on how to turn the steer to give my car’s wheels the proper position to back out of disaster. As Gabriel and the Good Samaritan pointed out, I am bad in reversing. I found a way out of my parking dilemma, now I look for a parking space with vacancies on each side or at-least on one side before I make the turn and park and each time I am careful not to miss the enclosing lines and learn to retrace my way in to get out gracefully.
Most people live their lives figuring their place under the sun. I did the very thing and found out most people will find their place under the sun, but as soon as we do, we’ll just go to find another thing. Sometimes, we never even realized that we are really just trying to find back what we’ve already thrown. Maybe not away, but rather things we’ve somewhat archived, set aside, somehow forgotten, but at the right moment, something always sets us to find the very thing we need and always when we most need it, either in the archives of our life, dusting in the corners of our secret life library, but not totally forgotten and still waiting to be found.
We don’t always know it, but we do have all the answers to our life questions, the funny thing or ironic if you will is they never come after the questions. Life plays us back in reverse, why else would they say that the only way to embrace our future is by understanding the past and yes, living the present.
I feel as though I am an old person trying out a new life for the last sixteen months. I brought myself to a new place, found new things to do, look at new people, dressed in new fashions, a new lifestyle. A tropical province, a new course in a new school, new neighbors in a new apartment block, half dozens new flip flops and new denim skirts, a new car, which I drove myself everywhere to. But after all these new things, I still feel the same old me, wanting back my old things, my old apartment, my old friends, my old clothes… my old life.
Davao City
I entered my parking space wrongly, I was too close to the left side and I can’t open the door wide enough to be able to get out. I switch gear to reverse and release the brake gently, but I steered my wheels to the wrong side that the car’s rear end got even closer to the car parked next on the left. Oh, my God! One look and I know I need a miracle to squeeze my car out without scratching the other and another miracle to keep me alive as I feel I am suffocating and dying fast of my mounting anxiety attack. Take control! I paused and breathe. Breathe once more. Breathe again. Another careful look on the rear left … No shit, I will not be able to get out of this unharmed!
I just dropped Gabriel to his basketball game a few blocks from the mall where I am to shop for groceries. I told him I do not think I can already manage to park the CRV on my own. You will, you’re a fast learner. I learned to drive the minute I took the wheel. It took me five minutes to listen to the basic instructions, the next five trying out the gears and the last five mastering the highway. After that, I was zooming the roads with humongous twelve wheeler trucks covering the fifty kilometers distance away and back to where I started in an hour. My driving lesson went by without a hitch.
But learning to park is another story. Here I am already traumatized. I hate to have to make the call to Gabriel who is now on his way to rescue me, abandoning his basketball game and jumping into a motorbike. The driver to my right was on a wait and see mode, watching me through his window mirror. But someone, thank God, from the back lane came forward and signaled me on how to turn the steer to give my car’s wheels the proper position to back out of disaster. As Gabriel and the Good Samaritan pointed out, I am bad in reversing. I found a way out of my parking dilemma, now I look for a parking space with vacancies on each side or at-least on one side before I make the turn and park and each time I am careful not to miss the enclosing lines and learn to retrace my way in to get out gracefully.
Most people live their lives figuring their place under the sun. I did the very thing and found out most people will find their place under the sun, but as soon as we do, we’ll just go to find another thing. Sometimes, we never even realized that we are really just trying to find back what we’ve already thrown. Maybe not away, but rather things we’ve somewhat archived, set aside, somehow forgotten, but at the right moment, something always sets us to find the very thing we need and always when we most need it, either in the archives of our life, dusting in the corners of our secret life library, but not totally forgotten and still waiting to be found.
We don’t always know it, but we do have all the answers to our life questions, the funny thing or ironic if you will is they never come after the questions. Life plays us back in reverse, why else would they say that the only way to embrace our future is by understanding the past and yes, living the present.
I feel as though I am an old person trying out a new life for the last sixteen months. I brought myself to a new place, found new things to do, look at new people, dressed in new fashions, a new lifestyle. A tropical province, a new course in a new school, new neighbors in a new apartment block, half dozens new flip flops and new denim skirts, a new car, which I drove myself everywhere to. But after all these new things, I still feel the same old me, wanting back my old things, my old apartment, my old friends, my old clothes… my old life.
Landing and Take Off
24 March 2010
HK Airport
I’m on the move again. I cannot remember the number of times I find myself sitting on the departure area waiting for my flight. Always going and coming, such is life that it has become blurry which way is going and which way is coming. No real place to call home, to call my home. Everything is imagined, hoped, wished for. Whatever reality there is I hang on to it, like it’s the only shred and thread of life that keeps me breathing, living, going, it doesn’t matter whether it’s towards or away. The plane now boards …
25 March 2010
Manila Centennial Airport Terminal 3
It’s past midnight and I am wide-awake listening to seas of conversations by people, strangers around me. There is something unusual in the way people behave in the company of strangers at airports. The stories are always the same, told in different ways, in different tones, in different attempts by the teller to place a certain degree of importance to the stories he or she is telling. But why, why do people have this insane urge to tell the story of their lives to strangers whom they have just met? We all know that the person telling the story is lying half the time, we know it because we do the same. We tell a version of our stories half imagined or wishing it is the way we tell it. We allow ourselves the delusion that our truth can be told without being wrong, because who is there to oppose our thoughts, our wish how things could have turned out. There is a universal understanding amongst strangers meeting in airports, to allow everyone their own version of a larger story that might have been told differently. And after we tell all the lies, we sigh an air of feeling right, justified within our rights to tell it the way we do. It doesn’t make sense, but there is certain pleasure being given that 15-minute of sunshine being right. And when that warmth and privilege is gone, we carry our baggage and get on our respective planes.
I go back to my original thoughts about not knowing whether I am coming or going. It’s not fair to ask where my home is, because I know where my heart belongs. It is sad, that most of us spend our lives away from the place we call home. I look at the faces of the men around me, quiet, I don’t know what they are thinking. They all seem sad to me. I wonder why and yet I know. It’s the same question of coming or going. Each time you land, you know that you’re bound to take off soon. Living on borrowed times is sad, nothing could be sadder than having to live under one sky, yet unable to touch your loved-ones faces or look in their eyes as you hear their laughter.
The man to my right wearing a red crew neck shirt has an amazing similarity to Silver. He was older, perhaps in his mid forties or perhaps early, it’s hard to tell with Filipino men since they always appear older than their age. I imagine my brother to look like him when he is older. I miss him suddenly. I always felt sorry about not being able to experience what I hoped would have been happy shared moments between brother and sister. All the things I imagined and wished for a big sister should share in feeling with her younger brother. How happy I imagine it would have been if he got married properly, I would have been there walking him to the altar in the absence of our parents. How excited I would have been to share the news of him becoming a father. How doting an aunt I would have been to my nephew and niece. But life didn’t turn out to be how much you perfectly dreamt it to be. It would seem to me now that all the world has conspired to make everything sad and regrettable for me and my family. All the wits and sense of humor that I’ve acquired or born with didn’t guarantee a well thought of happy and perfect life. It’s all in the thinking, but when it goes down to living the life I so perfectly plot, everything fell apart.
He looks sad, tired, calm. I feel the same way. I don’t know whether I am coming or going.
HK Airport
I’m on the move again. I cannot remember the number of times I find myself sitting on the departure area waiting for my flight. Always going and coming, such is life that it has become blurry which way is going and which way is coming. No real place to call home, to call my home. Everything is imagined, hoped, wished for. Whatever reality there is I hang on to it, like it’s the only shred and thread of life that keeps me breathing, living, going, it doesn’t matter whether it’s towards or away. The plane now boards …
25 March 2010
Manila Centennial Airport Terminal 3
It’s past midnight and I am wide-awake listening to seas of conversations by people, strangers around me. There is something unusual in the way people behave in the company of strangers at airports. The stories are always the same, told in different ways, in different tones, in different attempts by the teller to place a certain degree of importance to the stories he or she is telling. But why, why do people have this insane urge to tell the story of their lives to strangers whom they have just met? We all know that the person telling the story is lying half the time, we know it because we do the same. We tell a version of our stories half imagined or wishing it is the way we tell it. We allow ourselves the delusion that our truth can be told without being wrong, because who is there to oppose our thoughts, our wish how things could have turned out. There is a universal understanding amongst strangers meeting in airports, to allow everyone their own version of a larger story that might have been told differently. And after we tell all the lies, we sigh an air of feeling right, justified within our rights to tell it the way we do. It doesn’t make sense, but there is certain pleasure being given that 15-minute of sunshine being right. And when that warmth and privilege is gone, we carry our baggage and get on our respective planes.
I go back to my original thoughts about not knowing whether I am coming or going. It’s not fair to ask where my home is, because I know where my heart belongs. It is sad, that most of us spend our lives away from the place we call home. I look at the faces of the men around me, quiet, I don’t know what they are thinking. They all seem sad to me. I wonder why and yet I know. It’s the same question of coming or going. Each time you land, you know that you’re bound to take off soon. Living on borrowed times is sad, nothing could be sadder than having to live under one sky, yet unable to touch your loved-ones faces or look in their eyes as you hear their laughter.
The man to my right wearing a red crew neck shirt has an amazing similarity to Silver. He was older, perhaps in his mid forties or perhaps early, it’s hard to tell with Filipino men since they always appear older than their age. I imagine my brother to look like him when he is older. I miss him suddenly. I always felt sorry about not being able to experience what I hoped would have been happy shared moments between brother and sister. All the things I imagined and wished for a big sister should share in feeling with her younger brother. How happy I imagine it would have been if he got married properly, I would have been there walking him to the altar in the absence of our parents. How excited I would have been to share the news of him becoming a father. How doting an aunt I would have been to my nephew and niece. But life didn’t turn out to be how much you perfectly dreamt it to be. It would seem to me now that all the world has conspired to make everything sad and regrettable for me and my family. All the wits and sense of humor that I’ve acquired or born with didn’t guarantee a well thought of happy and perfect life. It’s all in the thinking, but when it goes down to living the life I so perfectly plot, everything fell apart.
He looks sad, tired, calm. I feel the same way. I don’t know whether I am coming or going.
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