pennycorp - Tumblr blog

pennycorp · 9 years ago

Photo

I spent the last few weeks by myself. Instead of the standard beach trip, my closest friends had gone to the mountains to do trekking. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't wanted to go when the plans first came up. And I'd have had a great time.

Still, I'm not really a "mountains" kind of guy. No, for me it's the beach. The ocean. The sun and the surf.

And I needed time to myself. I was on the verge of a new phase of my life: I moved out of the place me and my ex-had rented for the past 3 years four weeks ago and decided to move to Makati. Alone. And as the weight of that decision, that commitment, settled in on me, it got me scared thinking of the future and having to deal with starting over again.

And I needed to clear my head.

The depths get murky sometimes and that I need time and space once in a while to stay in the game.

On Saturday afternoon I loaded the stuff I wanted to take into my backpack and set off on the eight-hour drive to La union, the place where I first fully experienced my life as a locus of powerful, and not-too-easily-navigated, crosscurrents. I needed to be there with myself, my thoughts: thoughts of my future, my past...but especially, of him. I arrived at downtown around 9:00 PM, and decided to rent the room that we had last year during my birthday. I put the key in the lock, turned the handle, opened the door... ...and found myself staring into a roomful of ghosts. Memories assaulted me with a ferocity I wasn't prepared for. Sounds, words spoken and left unspoken, feelings as familiar as my own breath, but not as matter-of-fact, all came back to me as I walked in. A heaviness threatened to settle in, and I wondered for a minute if I should have come here alone. But these ghosts were mine and nobody else's; anyway, the haunting was part of the reason I came. I needed to deal with those ghosts: phantoms of other possibilities; memories that trail off into dead ends; wishes for square triangles; and the chimera of The Endless Summer. If you're a "beach" kind of person, you understand how the salt-and-sea-life smell can sort of take you away. I spent about an hour walking up and down the shoreline, transfixed by the beauty, aching over having been away too long, remembering. How does a person live with, and own, the choices he has to make when life presents him with a prepackaged, limited set that doesn't really meet the deepest longings of the heart? That's what I was here to think about. I'd been deeply in love with him for years. To be the love of his life, to grow old with him, loving him, making love to him...contemplating these things filled me with joy and heartache at the same time.

And yet when I try to look forward with starting over, as I dreamed about my future.. of someone i want to share a home with.. I am aware.. there would always be in that house an empty room, a place where I spent time alone and lonely.. and I understood that that room would always be empty. I also understood that there would be a nameplate on its door, designating the space for someone who would never live there with me. I had come here for two days to remember, to regret, to love, and to make my peace with that.

Saturday night, I decided to walk by the beach far away from all the chaos.

And I stared off into forever. The night was black. A full moon shone down upon the water. The tide called to me with its hypnotic, incessant song, as I watched it kiss the shore and fall back, over and over and over. The song "Beauty and Madness" repeated itself endlessly on my playlist. I thought about that first time hearing it and smiled. The fire I'd lit flickered in my peripheral vision, and if I'd had company, they he might have asked me about the streaks that the fire illuminated. The ones running down my face from my eyes. It was the song, really. That old fucking song, and the memories of first hearing it when we were just starting out, and the memory of us-- for almost 4 years that had led up to our bitter break up last month. But it wasn't only those memories. There were so many others, and I'd been soaking in them. All week long, I'd lived him. I'd lived us. I'd traveled back in time. Back to the Endless Summer. Back to my earliest, scariest longings for him. Back to our first days together, and on through time to the current ones. I'd been us all over again, at all our ages. And with every memory, I looked at him intently. I listened to his words carefully.

And I loved him through all those memories as if I were living them for the first time.

And I felt him loving me. More clearly than I'd felt it the first time around. Soaked in all that, I tried to make sense of the road that lay ahead of me.

The desperately rational part of me saw long odds, dim prospects, and no realistic way to guarantee that we had a future together that in any way resembled our present. But life without him was unthinkable. So why did I keep thinking of it? Why did I keep dreading it? Why did I keep assuming it as the default inevitable future? I knew there had to be an answer for me. Some peace for me.

For us.

And I knew the answer lay in those memories. Rich and inexhaustible, tenacious as himself, the memories had accompanied me every hour I'd been here. Branding me. Marking me. And there on the shoreline, on the final night of my stay, a quiet understanding came to me as I gazed out into the shorelines in La Union. I'd walked into the room we had rented last year during my birthday. I decided coming here again, few days before my birthday was a good idea. To remember with love...and then to release. To go back home and enjoy his love until our lives diverged, and then to let him go. For his sake. So he wouldn't have to figure out what to do with me as he moved into his future. A conventional future that had no room for me. Over the two days that I'd relived my memories, though, I got a better look at him than I'd ever allowed myself before. The time didn't flash by. I could slow things down. Replay them. Live in them again. And I discovered that my memories had pull. Even more surprising was that they had intention. They weren't interested in merely providing a mental playback of my life with him. At first, I'd resisted the conclusion they'd been urging me toward. Not because I didn't like its contours or content. No. It was because I wanted to be responsible, and loving, and to do the right thing, and I'd been stubbornly committed to believing that what he needed was a return to the conventional life. Pressuring him to carve out a space in his conventional life for me felt selfish and self-centered. I didn't want to keep dragging him back to me if and when life called him forward. Called him away from me. But as I stared out into the beach, the things he'd been saying to me over the last year rearranged and repeated themselves in just the right order and at just the right level for me to hear them.

As if for the first time. As if I'd never heard them before.

And when I listened...

I understood that preparing for us to drift apart wasn't necessarily an act of love. It was an act of self-protection. And I understood that--just maybe--the highest love I could give him would involve summoning the courage to trust what he'd been telling me. “Because i don't want to lose you as much as you don't want to too..”

I played the words over and over in my head as the sound of the waves against the shore soothed the anxiety that was trying to rise up in me. This night, this concentrated immersion in him and all he meant to me, brought me to a point of decision.

It was time to decide whether his words meant anything or whether I'd always think I knew better. Whether to soldier on in monster-slaying mode, or whether to risk getting hurt for the sake of trusting a promise that as yet had no shape. A promise that was as essential to my life as it was to his. I took a deep, cleansing breath of the salty air. And then I went to that mental door, the one with his name on it, the one through which I'd been so frantically anticipating having to shove him and my memories of him. It was standing open. And, oddly, the room was still empty. But it seemed like a different kind of empty. A waiting kind of empty. I closed my eyes as the deepest aches and yearnings and hopes I lived with swirled to the surface of my consciousness. And a conviction broke through the swirl. There aren't any monsters under beds. There's only you, and the roads you walk, and the choices you make. And you are loved throughout all of them. And you are asked to love throughout all of them. I don't know which part of me that internal voice was, or whether it was someone else, or whether it was just something convenient my subconscious tossed up. But it was as clear as a bell, and it felt like some kind of final word. I took another deep breath, and my mental eye looked up at the nameplate on The Door of that room. This time, it read "E&I. Room Reserved For Part Two." I opened my eyes. Nothing looked different. But everything was. I breathed in once again. Deeply. Gratefully. As I exhaled, years' worth of fog dissipated, and the diamond-hard clarity of the night brought this place home to me once again, giving me an opportunity to experience it--at last--with an unclouded mind and a heart free from crosscurrents and cross-purposes. I grabbed handfuls of sand and put out my fire with them. Then I picked up my belongings and began walking back toward the transient that I was renting. It was time to go home.

0 notes

pennycorp · 9 years ago

Photo

I’m learning to let things go. To stop fighting so hard for things that aren’t happening, to stop trying so hard to win everything and everyone. To stop conforming to a society that’s never content, that always expects more of you, that expects you to be everything all at once, a society that looks at you based on what ‘goals’ you have accomplished.

I’m slowly learning to take it easy. To stop being so hard on myself. To stop trying to check every box or every item on my bucket list. I’m learning to put all my lists away. To slowly have faith in my life, that I’m right where I’m supposed to be and right where I need to be. I’m slowly learning not to run away every time. I’m slowly learning to accept myself; with all my uncertainties, with all my insecurities, with all the chaos that’s happening inside my mind.

I’m slowly learning that it’s okay to get attached to things as long as you know that they might not last forever. As long as you’re ready to let them go when they’re no longer yours. As long as you’re ready to release them instead of possess them.

I’m slowly learning that I don’t have to get everything I want, that I won’t always be the best person or do the right thing, that I may sometimes be the reason why I pushed something away from me and I’m learning to be okay with it.

I’m slowly learning that the essence of life is change and letting go is part of it. I’m slowly learning that letting go is not a bad thing. That letting go may be a blessing in disguise.

I’m slowly learning that God wants me to let go too. He wants to understand that no matter how hard I try, it’s going to be his call at the end of the day. That no matter how badly I want to control things, I can’t. That no matter how hard I work for something, it won’t always be mine if he doesn’t want it to be. I’m learning that it’s always going to be his word above mine and I’m learning to love him for it.

I’m slowly learning that sometimes you have to let go of everything you’ve known, everything you’ve believed and everything you’ve ever loved so you can truly live. I’m slowly learning that letting go is not the same as losing hope. And this is giving me all the hope I need.

0 notes