jdbyln

[jdbyln]

Davao

21 April 2025

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[jdbyln]

Kill me if you must, because I have forgiven you long before we met, even before the first glances and the first words were shared. Kill me, please.

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I’m so drunk I feel like falling from my window.

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I remember everything. And that, in itself, is the most tragic thing of all.

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I booked a return flight for two reasons: 1) so it wouldn’t be obvious that I didn’t want to go back, and 2) I had an option in case I changed my mind.

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If it were the old me, I would have kept the sun from rising to keep you here. I would have told you I loved you every time you kissed me, every time you wrapped your hands around me on that warm July night. If it were the old me, I would have kept you for myself and never bothered about the world. I would have held on to you, even after you finished the second film on my bed the morning after, when you had quietly washed the dishes from the simple breakfast I made you, even after that hour-long shower we took together. If it were the old me, I would have admitted love, I would have made you lunch and dinner, too. But, I am no longer myself. Just as you are no longer you. We are different people from the ones that woke each other up with our hands playing with each other’s hair. Different from the kids that played under the sheets on rainy days when we said we would only talk. We are strangers now, not just to each other, but to ourselves, too.

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Here I am, staring at the black mirror in my hand after two full days of excitement. The fanfare faded, the sound of music no longer in my head, and the flashing lights are not there when I close my eyes. I guess we turn back to our selves when all the hype is gone. We stare at the deepest parts of ourselves, the parts we often forget to look at, and realize that there are things we never even considered were lurking there.

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I have never tried loving before. All my life, what I had considered to be love had always come from existing relationships. Outside family, the kind of love I came to know often started as feeling comfort in the company of people I have come to know by heart. These then resulted in longing, and then love. Some would argue that we long because we love. I wouldn’t dare say otherwise. Love is experienced differently, I guess. People like Roland Barthes have attempted to explain it, put it into terms that we could understand using stories and situations all too familiar. In the end, to love is to fear loss, because absence would be more painful then.

Back to my first statement: I have never tried loving. I always just did. Just recently, I was faced with the possibility of a relationship with someone I would consider near perfect. But love, I guess, did not come as I expected it to. I have thought about why I chose to walk away several times, and I could not come up with an answer. The first one that came to mind was that I feared changing the monotony of my life. It had become all too familiar and comfortable that I didn’t want anything to change. Then I have come to realize that perhaps my idea of love is different. For me, it’s been so marred that I associate it more closely with trauma to the point that I might have believed that if it doesn’t hurt, maybe it isn’t real.

This is just the beginning of something I’m planning to write more of. A fragment, so to speak. This is an attempt to explain why I am like this.

I do not know what love is. I am afraid to find out. What if I don’t want to be loved? Perhaps the answer is to stop trying.

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I hate the taste of alcohol, but I like how it numbs me and makes me more sensitive at the same time.

I have been drinking in the evenings for almost a week now, and I don’t know why. All I know is that the silence is loudest when I come home from work. Outside my window, I hear traffic, sirens, and the sound of rain when the wind blows it against the glass. Inside this box, I am the peak of rush hour, the raging conflagration, the onslaught of a typhoon. There are no words, only trembling hands and a head that aches as it waits for the eyes to shed a single tear. Crying would be cathartic, but i have lost that talent long ago. Perhaps all those years of holding back my tears has killed that part of me, while all those years of keeping my head up have turned me into stone.

What is the sound of loneliness? It is not silence. Silence pervades, but it does not speak. The sound of loneliness is a simple greeting, one that quietly wishes to be returned. It is a letter, a call one cancelled after dialing. The sound of loneliness is a request for company that often doesn’t leave the tongue.

[jdbyln]

Why does pain have to be the thing that makes me write?

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The silence these days is a sharp knife that is twisted in my chest in the evenings and pulled out as I breathe in the mornings. I crave air, and yet feel like there is not enough of it. I am frustrated enough to the point of screaming or crying, but I cannot. I have never allowed myself such things these days.

What does one do when all one has is silence? I have the urge to smoke a pack of red Marlboros and feel the breeze outside, watch it carry the smoke away. I remember feeling this way three years ago, and four years before that. I often had the lit end of a cigarette to light the way.

I figure it out: it is a longing that cripples. A quiet desire for something that was never within my reach. This is absence.

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Someone asked what I think about on my walks.

The answer is everything.

I think about work, the people in my life, my retirement in 9 years, my house, the laundry. I think about how the road surface is uneven, why the wires on power poles hum, or how the air smells different when the wind shifts. I think about how the pigeons live, how they meet other pigeons and where they lay their eggs. I think about how I broke a heart, how I cannot find it in myself to feel things I should, or why I feel things I should not. I think about war and how the world mourns dead palestinian children while handing guns to the murderers in israel. I think about the shrub growing on a concrete wall, about how life persists in spite of us. I think about trash bins and how some people are too stupid to look for them to throw their milk tea cups in. I think about why the sky is pink or orange or red at sunrise, why the air is cold when the firmament is burning. I think about how freeing it is to have such random thoughts, to feel so many things as I watch the sky glow brighter. Maybe that's what the walks are for.

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I breathe you in, deeply, until my lungs couldn't take any more of you, which I found strange, I have never taken in so much of someone before, my nose against your chest, your neck, and your chest again, as if it was my first time breathing, as if i was just given life, my hands wrapped tight around your warmth, i feel your lips, warm against my forehead, and i raise my head to meet them with my own, we press ourselves against each other, taking as much of each other as we allowed ourselves, only to pause and listen to our silence, our breaths, in unison, like the pounding in our chests we couldn't stop

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I am turning thirty next year and all I can think about is how I, in my three decades, have only fallen for two people. I sometimes have pleasant dreams about one, and nightmares of the other. Still, I wake up to the same feeling when I have either -- heart beating out of my chest, breathlessness, and the weight of tears that never come. So, I sleep again for another year and wait until. Until.

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