Inside are a handful of new places, a handful of old friends, and less than a handful of words because uploading pictures exhausted the literary crap out of me.
Sunday morning and I’m listening to sad songs. I just finished with a book- a novel that whimpered its bleak ending into me, resting heavy in my chest. Sunday morning and it rained last night. I didn’t bother opening the drapes of my bedroom’s window to let the morning in, and the air in my room sags with yesterday’s weight. Sunday morning and it’s Mothers’ Day, everyone is composing odes to their mothers and posting sunny photos of celebratory brunches, I just had a petty spat with mine. I am right, she is wrong, but she’s miffed that I know she’s wrong, so our conversation dances on the fraying edges of nerves and flirts with ill-disguised hostility. And as much as I want to, it is hard for me to swallow her attitude as a Mothers’ Day gift, when she seems intent on staying on the offensive frontline. Sunday morning and my mirror decides that I should look like a troll today, and self-loathing swings his legs happily as he stays perched on my shoulder. Sunday morning and I wanted to cheer myself up, only to discover my precious stash of Matcha Kitkats has been unrepentantly demolished without telling me. Great, all I have to do to get more is to fly to Japan anyway, no sweat.
Sunday morning and I’m listening to sad songs.
I wish somebody could turn this day around and cheer me up, since it seems like I’m incapable of doing even that for myself today.
I had the worst case of insomnia last night, it was one of those nights when sleep came in shorts and stops, and you do not so much as sleep but more of try to grasp at the ephemeral fingers of drowsiness as they flit by. It was terrible. I gave up trying at 4, powered up the MacBook, and started writing without a single clue as to where I was going with it. At 5, just as I could hear my dad shuffling to wakefulness next door, I realized I have written a semblance of story. But to be completely honest, this isn’t so much a story as it is a marriage of fiction and (vulnerable) non-fiction. Some parts are made up, some are not. But then again, aren’t most stories a little of both?
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I like to wake before you do, and watch you for that precious few moments of slumber. It always amazes me how we all sleep the same on the outside- the subtle rise and fall of our chests, the smooth crescent of our eyelids, the gentle curl of our limbs, but yet if somebody could open us up on the inside and peer at our dreams, wouldn’t it be something to see how vividly different we sleep on the inside?
I wonder if you ever found inspiration from your dreams, whether the words you write have ever stemmed from lingering traces of your own dreams. I always thought you must dream differently from us normal people, that you must dream in vivid technicolor and lush details, that your extraordinary dreams are what gifted you your mastery with words. For what other reason can there be, that although you and the rest of the world, and I, share the same 26 alphabets and sew them together from the same spool of language, you can always make yours steal time, consciousness and reality from people whenever they open one of your books?
I savor this moment every morning when I can try to look my fill of you and let my awe spill unfettered over your unconscious form. I do this so that by the time you’re up, I can rein it in and not let you see how much you stagger me on a daily basis. I hate that I am in awe of you, mainly because I am in love with you. Those two don’t go together, for one always destroys the other in the end. And I’m so scared that if I don’t try to control that streak of admiration in me, it would curdle love into an insubstantial hero-worship. Then how would that make me any different from the thousands of girls out there, who still send you perfumed letters in envelopes sealed with lipstick stains?
I am not so blind as to to think you are as in love, or even in love, with me. I am a novelty to you for the moment: a wholesome wide-eye girl-next-door that still carries a cardigan in her bag, so many planets away from the chain-smoking, anorexic looking and kohl-eyed girls you used to run around with. You are fond of me, and you may, if I dare let myself hope, even really like me to the extent that you would consider at fleeting moments to be love. I know that, and I don’t blame you if one day this comes to an end, for I had come into, or more like rushed headlong into, this with my eyes wide open.
You’re an artist. I told myself I would never date the artistic type because they make shit boyfriends as they are self-centered and they thrive on pain. Pain always seems like the ideal muse for most writers, if you realize. Most of the most famous and celebrated prose are written on anguish and heartbreak, of death and grief, and of incurable depression. You hardly see cheery novels seeped with goodwill and sunshine winning any book prizes, or frothy quotes of happiness being passed around on Facebook like a battered Playboy in a boys’ school. It’s always the sad stuff.
You’re not any different from my expectations, actually. But what my expectations didn’t warn me about was how the curve of your smile can hook my stomach into a flip, and how that intensity that pulses in your writing and fences you away from me, is the very same intensity that bleeds into the way you love me and make me feel like I am the anchor that holds your soul to your corporeal self.
I wonder if that is why you always date the girls that give you hell. When you told me about them and their stories, I thought you were a masochist. Why else do you go for the girls that cheat shamelessly on you, abuse you, use you, and dismiss you? Then I thought perhaps you needed the pain to be able to write the way you did, you can’t write about breaking if you never broke, you can’t write about death if you never felt your own faith shrivel away, so you deliberately opened your heart to the ones with claws, just so you could observe the way it bled in the aftermath, and share it with the world.
And I had thought if that was the way it takes to keep you, I would try. I tried to be curt and capricious, to swing from turbulent moods and practise atrocious manners. I tried to be one of those girls you used to date, but I couldn’t. The one time I flung the plate of breakfast you made for me to the floor, and watched the china shatter and the scrambled eggs scramble even more, I saw your eyes shutter, and I immediately hated myself. I wanted to wrap my arms around you and kiss you, and breathe all the apology and regret I had felt into your mouth just so you know I really didn’t mean it, and that I only did that to, ironically, please you.
But then you left for a day and didn’t come back until 2 in the morning. You slid into bed and wrap your warmth around me, and I turned to you fitting perfectly into the gaps of your body. We pretended that the morning did not happen. But what you didn’t know and couldn’t see was that my eyes were raw and bloodshot from crying the whole day because I thought I had lost you forever.
After that, I never dared to pull such a stunt again. I figured there must be a reason why you chose to approach me out of the legion of girls at the book-signing session. And if that reason is the fact that I am different and that I am an experiment, then I will hold onto that reason for as long as I can, until it expires.
I keep a book of quotes from all the books I’ve read. I have been doing that since I was 15, and the notebook has since been filled with disjointed snippets from everywhere. Some are almost a page long while others could just be made up of less than five words. It’s a torn and tattered looseleaf notebook. I don’t write in the book anymore ever since I got an iPhone. Now I simply type in the quotes I read into the Notes app on my phone, but it is admittedly less satisfying. I still do it though, as a way to keep a piece of every book I’ve ever read with me.
You’ve pestered me endlessly to show you the book, and even once tried to peek in it when I left it carelessly on the kitchen table. But I got so agitated that my outburst startled you quite a bit, and you promised not to do it again. I know you thought I was afraid of showing it to you because I was afraid you may think the quotes I’ve chosen or the books I’ve read are trite or juvenile. You had reassured me countless times that you would never think that way, and that what I’ve chosen are lines that resonate with me after all, and who are you to judge the words that speak for my heart?
The truth is, it isn’t that. The reason why I cannot show it to you is because most of the quotes I’ve written inside, came from you.
And I’m so afraid that you would then find out, even for all the plays of aloofness I put up, and how I strove to be so different from the fans you have, that who I truly am is wrapped up so tightly in you, so much so that my own personality has been reduced to the frame that frames yourself. I am terrified that when you know this, you would leave, because no writer can derive inspiration from a lackluster rendition of himself.
To borrow from my collection, “I am afraid to tell you who I am because if I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and that’s all I have.”
So for now, I will be contented with these precious few moments of watching you in the morning, in letting my true self show.
