#andkarlsaid

[andkarlsaid]

Mali ‘to

Kinakabahan na ko kasi imbis na mukha niya ang nasa isipan ko, letrato na nating dalawa ang tinitignan ko. Nakaakbay ka sa akin sa letratong iyon. Kitang kita sa letrato kung gaano ka kasaya noong gabing iyon base sa ngiti mo. Ako naman ‘tong si tanga, hindi alam kung ano ang gagawin kung ngingiti o tatakpan ang mukha. 

Kinakabhan ako kasi ikaw na napapanaginipan ko sa gabi. Ikaw na yung taong nakikita kong paulit ulit sa imahinasyon ko; na magigising ako ng sa aking kama ng umaga, katabi ang isa taong mahimbing ang pagtulog. Noong siya ang nakikita ko, nababalot ako ng lungkot. Pero noong ikaw na ang nakikita ko, napapangiti ako. 

Shet, mali ‘to.

Kinakabahan ako kasi alam ko mali ‘to. Maraming tututol sa atin. Maraming bababa ang tingin sa atin. Gusto ko na itong tanggalin sa isip ko kaya sinusulat ko ito. Pero walang nangyayari. Habang sinusulat kita, mas lalo lang lumalakas ang aking kutob, ang aking kaba na baka gusto mo nga ako at baka gusto na nga kita. Hinihintay mo lang ba ako? Kasi kung hinihintay mo lang akong lumapit sayo, baka abutin ka na ng siyam-siyam. Hindi ako makagalaw. Tuwing iniisip kita napaparalysa ako. Kung hindi naman, pakiusap: wag mo kong lalapitan, wag mo akong ngingitian. Sinabi sa akin ng mga kaibigan ko noon napakahirap ko daw tantsayhin. Ngayon ko lang naintindihan ito, ngayong nahuhulog ako sayo. Layuan mo ko. Isa akong bombang ilang segundo nalang sasabog na. Masasaktan ako, masasaktan ka.

Kinakabahan ako sa ‘yo. 

Kinakabahan ako sa sarili ko.  

Kinakabahan ako kasi baka tama ako. Kinakabahan ako na baka kaya lagi nalang tayong nasasawi ay dahil para sa isa’t isa pala tayo.

[andkarlsaid]

I open up to people easily.

Spend a few weeks with me and I’ll gladly place myself on a table for you to dissect and observe. But no, really, I will gladly cut the stitches that I’ve just sown and reveal myself as if what I’m showing are constellations that are not known to man. Sometimes when I get too comfortable, I even tell others things that people have asked me not to tell anyone. I give myself to other people as if what I am and what I have to offer to other people is a common commodity. I’ve told people my secrets, my fears, my thoughts - even the most random ones - to people I’ve met for a few times. Perhaps this is because of the inane desire to make myself sound interesting to other people; but I’d like to believe I do this because it’s my desire to make other people feel like I trust them, that they mean something to me because they really do. 

I do this because I was once told by my teacher that one can give without loving, but one cannot love without giving. 

I know this, and I live by this. But my teacher never told me that loving and giving yourself wholly to other people are things that are always reciprocated. That not all things, contrary to what others say, face trade-offs.

And before you know it, it’s too late. You’ve given yourself to other people, giving away the constellations and the paradoxes within your system, only to realize that they would not just show theirs to you. And turns out that what you give is not a common resource. You try to stitch yourself up as quickly as possible but you know it wouldn’t do much help anymore because there’s nothing to save anymore; and even if there is, people can already see through you. You are leaking through the parts you left open and whatever remains of you drips on the white-tiled floor like spilled milk.

I am an open book and it’s a disease. I give too much to the point that I forget that I don’t get anything in return.  I am afraid that if they read my contents, I would find myself back on the shelf; left to collect more mounds of dust.

[andkarlsaid]

dearest mother

Dearest mother,

               Dry my tears with the old saying that “everything has a purpose”. What was once the growing light at the end of the tunnel has suddenly been reduced to a mere dot; a blip in the code, a scratch on the surface. The hope that I had to wring out of my system – the hope I once had for me and my siblings – has been flushed down the drain. And now this time, I really feel like I have nothing to give.

               Mother, my hand shakes as I am writing this. I lost my appetite. I haven’t even tried to close my eyes, but I already know that I won’t be getting any sleep tonight; especially with the thought that I will soon have a father that wouldn’t understand me and my needs. I would soon have a father that my siblings have blindly chose for you. I cannot blame them, because no ever really knows that a wolf has been dressed up in sheep’s clothing until it decides to take it off and swallows its prey whole. But I have looked into his eyes, Mother. They were black. I did not see the courage and care that he promised my siblings, I only saw a void. I never knew I could see so much darkness in a wolf’s eyes, Mother.  I don’t know what he’s going to do with me and my siblings, and I don’t know how to prepare myself for it. Do I hide? Do I have to play with his rules? The rules that don’t apply to him at all? Do I smile and mask the writhing pain on my loins as he violates me and reduces me to a mere object? Do I buy myself a bulletproof vest for me and my siblings just in case he decides to shoot when one of us commits a mistake? Do I ask for a little consideration? Do I flee?

               Mother my knees dangle and clank like silver spoons held by weak hands and strong arms. I try to raise myself up, but I only tumble like a lonely puppet. Am I a puppet? Did you make me a puppet? These thoughts are pounding inside my head, making me more nauseous than before. Am I angry? I don’t know. But I am writing to you anyway because I don’t know how else I could make sense of these things and get these thoughts out of my system. I don’t expect you to respond, because I haven’t really done anything worthwhile to stop them from marrying you to him. And I am sorry. I truly am. I’m sorry for hurting you when I was still in the midst of learning that I actually had the capacity to control things. I can’t say that I have learned this completely, but I know that I know more than before. I still wish I knew better back then, mother. I am sorry.

               I am also sorry for my siblings, old and young. They do not know how naïve they are, and I wish I could blame them for that, but people who aren’t really open to these things won’t really ever listen. So, I guess there really isn’t much that I could do. I am also sorry for my siblings that have listened and have had the same thoughts as I; but after seeing what has happened, have decided to flee from our family. I do not blame them, I really don’t. But I know how much this breaks your heart. My heart breaks for you and my siblings who have fought and died for what was best for you. I am so sorry, Mother. Not all of us knew what we were doing.

                Mother, thank you for listening still. I’ve had the same problems over and over, and we have failed you a hundred times, but you are still there. We have been so caught up in our problems and our needs that we have forgotten to ask yours. Nevertheless, you have always been so generous. Even if the sky begins to gray a little more and this sinking feeling that I’ve had continues to deepen, I am still cradled by your silence, your beauty and your essence. 

I am scared. I am sorry. I thank you. I love you. 

But please, I beg of you, will you do me this one favor? Will you tell me again that everything has a purpose? 

[andkarlsaid]

two cups of coffee on christmas eve

warm hands. warm hearts.

we walked towards the plaza where they served our favorite cup of coffee. We never liked overpriced coffee, you and I, because we always thought that good coffee shouldn’t be glamorized, and that if anything, it is the high that one experiences when one intakes caffeine that should be looked at such high regard. Coffee was our addiction; it was our drug that we didn’t have to take in secret. Coffee made us feel alive; coffee made us feel things more intensely than we could ever feel. We loved coffee, but we both knew that coffee was best when the holidays arrived. It was the season for peppermints and toffee nuts, and we always loved that

We sit on one of the chairs in the plaza. I ask for your order, you said the usual: one peppermint latte with 3 extra pumps of vanilla. I ordered an Americano with five pumps of cinnamon dolce. I take the order. We sit on the table. We take a sip of our coffee, and we just sit across and stare at each other, silently.

Two cups of coffee on Christmas eve, two people waiting on each other.

Maybe it’s the coffee, but I swore I wanted to kiss you. You look so beautiful in your red beanie and your black hoodie. I try to open up my mouth to see if what I feel will involuntarily bring out the words I always wanted to say to you; that I love you for quite some time now.  

But the words don’t come up. And you looked at me like you wanted to say something as well. But before you start to speak up, my phone buzzes. My girlfriend calls. And she says she’s already at the plaza looking for us. And when she found us, she places a kiss on my lips. You say hello, and you say you were just about to go home anyway because your family’s been waiting for you. We say goodbye.

Goodbye.

I wish it was you I was kissing on Christmas eve.

[andkarlsaid]

coexist

In the midst of raging waves that are strong enough to tip over whatever object attempts to sail across, a captain tries his best to keep the boat afloat. Not to fight off one strong wave after another. The captain pulls the oars in and rolls up the sails to prevent the strong winds from accompanying the raging waves in its said mission. The captain then attempts to steer away from these waves, clutching tightly to the wheel and hoping that the ocean would calm and permit him and his mates another day - another chance in fulfilling whatever quest they had set out for.

In all the years he has spent sailing, the captain knows that the secret in getting from one place to another through the ocean without acquiring any casualty is being able to coexist with the waves; recognizing that while the ship is not of the ocean, it is, at the moment, existing with the ocean in the same environment.

Perhaps this is how we must recognize and treat what we feel - to know that while we feel them, still, we are separate from them. Because perhaps the reason why we are unable to stop ourselves from feeling the emotions that we don’t want to feel anymore is because we have spent so much time fighting them off - denying it, bottling it up - rather than letting ourselves experience it. Yes, these emotions are ours, but we are not theirs. Perhaps we need to understand, for example, that pain is not what we are; and that in order for pain to pass, one must learn to exist with the pain due to the ability to recognize that pain has no hold on us. We must learn to recognize that it is not something one fights off or denies, but rather something that one can and must learn to live with. And since an emotion such as pain is separate from one’s self, one cannot eliminate pain- the same way that pain cannot eliminate you. One can and must learn to live with the ache, the strain, and the heaviness - until the feeling of experiencing it isn’t as intense as that of before. 

Until it doesn’t feel like pain any more.

Avoidance has never been a form of cure. I know that now.

But I also know now that some things aren’t meant to be dealt with. There are some things you just have to accept. And there are some things you just have to let pass.

I once read somewhere that one must see a woman the same way a captain sees the ocean - beautiful, but at the same time, a force of nature. Perhaps this is also how we must see the things we feel. And perhaps we are to be with these emotions the same way the captain and the ocean are to each other – just coexisting.

Because while the ocean holds such unfathomable beauty, its beauty could also be the cause of his destruction.

[andkarlsaid]

Candle Wax

It’s 9:52 am, and you wake up to feel like your legs are made of soft rubber the moment you lifted them off your bed. The sunlight leaking through your window reminds you of the kind of light cast through the flashlights of policemen in search of a criminal at the middle of the night. After wiping off the sleep from your eyes, you realize that the sunlight has actually been in search for you and your legs that somehow feel like they are made of rubber. The sunlight hits your soft rubbery legs and they start to melt like candle wax. When you wonder why this is so, why all of a sudden, your legs feel all limp from all the walking you know you never took - you notice that it’s because you do not have a single bone in the lower half of your body. You cannot make yourself stand, because the moment you do, you will only find your face firmly pressed against the laminated floor; with no means of escape from the sunlight that seems to melt you legs further.

This is what it feels like. To wake up, and realize that you have not and cannot make decisions for yourself. You crawl towards the mirror in the hallway outside your room. As you prop yourself up in front of a mirror, you begin to notice how slouched your body is. You reach for your back, reaching for your spine, and realize that the reason why you cannot manage to hold yourself upright is because you do not have a backbone as well. Your torso begins to feel like soft rubber. And the heat brought in by the sunlight begins to melt your lower back..

This is what is feels like. To wake up, and realize that you cannot even stand up for yourself and what you believe in.

Sunlight leaks further into your window and finds a way to leak through the holes of your roof. As you continue to stare at your self in the mirror in sheer terror and distress, you begin to feel an ache at the side of your head. You reach for your temples to massage them, to get some sort of temporary relief.But as you begin to press the side of your head, you feel you fingers push deeper, and you begin to feel a strange sensation in your head; like your brain is being pressed together by your fingers. You panic and you lift your fingers away from your temples, and you see that they have left dents from where they have been placed. You begin to understand that the sensation of having you brain pressed by your fingers is not just some hallucination brought by the melting of you legs and the slumping of your body. You realize too, that you do not have a skull. A bone in your head to hold you brain together. Your face begins to sag, and after a few minutes, you cannot bring yourself to lift your head up anymore.

This is what it feels like. To wake up and realize that you have been letting everybody and everything into your head.

As the sun reclaims its pedestal in the sky, you see yourself melting completely. Melting you like candle wax. That’s when you realize that you do not possess a single bone in your body.

You begin to understand that the reason why you cannot make decisions is because you haven’t a single bone in your lower body. You cannot make yourself move towards the path you want to take because you cannot even make yourself stand. Hell, you cannot even manage to hold yourself up, because you do not possess a backbone. You cannot make yourself yourself stand for what you believe in. You cannot defend yourself. And you let these thoughts from other people get in your head because you do not have a skull.You had let them way too deep in your head. that you cannot even think for yourself anymore and who you want to be.

All this time, the people the you have surrounded yourself with have made the decisions for you by pointing out what, according to them, is right and wrong. You did this because you wanted to spare yourself from the of having to find out for yourself. That is why now, you blindly follow to what you think they would do. This is why you don’t have bones in your body: because you didn’t give yourself the chance to grow them. You have been so used to people carrying you around in your litter. You had let them define for you what happiness is. You had let them dictate to you what you believe in. You had let them create you. You never even knew that you were the only one who had the ability to actually make you. You’re a puppet, always moving to where the strings pull you. You are made of wax, melting in the presence of the heat brought by the light that revealed you for the fraud that you are.

You’re a fraud. A person who’s never actually existed. This is what it feels like. To wake up, and realize that you are a fraud.

[andkarlsaid]

"What's the thing that scares you the most?"

When he was asked this question, he froze for a few minutes. He looked outside the window as if he was waiting for a signal to tell him that the coast was clear and it was safe for him to talk.

“Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I find myself thinking of what would happen to me if I jumped on the roof of my apartment. I would die of course, but i cannot help but wonder, what happens after i die? Do i get to see heaven? Will i go to hell? But what if, upon hitting the ground, with my body all sprawled up like a puppet after being put down by the puppeteer - i only see the darkness? What if upon hitting the ground, i do not see myself floating away from my body? What if there is no other side? What if this is the only life i get to live? Honestly i do not know if it’s the thought of dying that scares me. But I am sure that I am not scared of being sent to hell in eternal damnation and I’m certainly not scared of being sent to heaven for whatever good that I have done. What I am scared of though, is that possibility that if my body hits the ground, all I’ll ever see is nothing. That there is no second life and that the chance that I have been given to live has already passed. I am scared of possibly having to accept that all I ever had and all I’ll ever have will only be in this life that I have now. No, I am not scared of the possibility that I may have not lived my one and only life to the fullest; I am scared that this is the only life I’ll have. Does that makes sense to you? Because I do wish there is something more. I do wish that there is another life, and that the only heaven and/or hell that I’ll get to experience is not within the parameters”, he says while moving his arms, encompassing something invisible, “of this one”.

“ I just wish there is at least another realm of reality that I could live in. At least another life I could live, not just this one. Or rather, just not this one.”

[andkarlsaid]

But you still destroyed me

How does one deal with bruises?

I accidentally slipped off our staircase. I landed on my right arm and found myself writhing in insurmountable pain, already thinking I’ve acquired a fracture somewhere on the right side of my body. But luckily i wasn’t because even if bruises that resembled the color of twilight started to appear, I was still able to move the parts of my body that were painted with the said color. So these bruises started to appear right? But what do i do with it now? I wanted to get rid of them, because i hate seeing them. They remind me of my carelessness and this somewhat unbreakable curse of me screwing everything up and hurting myself in the process. What’s worse is that I often catch myself pressing on these bruises, as if i want these bruises to turn darker, until they no longer remind me of twilight but of midnight.

It’s as if I’ve learned to love pain. I know i’m not supposed to, i know i don’t want to - but i cant help it.

And what’s probably the worst is that it reminds me of the time i fell for you. When I fell for you, it was like the middle of the day. Everything was so bright. The sun was hanging above the sky, illuminating everything. It was like that when I was with you. Everything seemed so clear. I knew what I wanted because I was able to see. 

But as I felt us reaching the end, it was like the sunset, I could feel you getting cold. And when you said it’s over, I felt the sun drop and I felt the winds blow.

But somehow, these bruises remind me of twilight. And twilight best reminds me of you.

Because it was that time when i thought I was falling into the net that was your love for me, the net that i thought would save me from the hard concrete that i my body was about to collide with. It was that time when i landed on that net, and saw it break the instant i made contact with it like heavy fingers on highly strained strings of an overly tuned guitar. It was that time when i found myself kissing the concrete instead of your lips.

And yet, even after the fall, as I was lying on that cold concrete - I still found myself admiring the parts of me that broke. With all the blood and the broken bones, I was a work of art, a painting with the concrete as my canvas. 

In all that damage I’ve received, you turned me into something beautiful. But you still destroyed me. 

These bruises remind me of you. They remind me that losing you destroyed me and created me at the same time. And while all that pain gave me something, I still lament over the fact that I had to lose you to be like this. And I can’t help but wonder what I’ll be - what we’ll be - if we stayed together. Would we be the same as before? Would we become worse than before?

Or would we become something that’s much better?

I don’t like to see these bruises anymore. These bruises on my right arm, on the left side of my right knee, and on my right ankle. Because they remind me of the bruises I’ve acquired when i fell on that cold concrete. And remembering it feels like pressing on the bruise until it turns darker and darker.

I want to get rid of them. Because i want to forget. Because remembering hurts much more.