a bunch of dreadfully common-looking flowers

After a conversation with a friend following his online hiatus, I knew this day would come. I snapped a couple of times before this, but this very moment led me to embrace, once again, one thing in me that I could not shake off yet. Not anytime these days.

For the past days, I had been conditioning myself to a self-inflicted sickness. Today: fever and an unappeasable stomach. When you think of something unpleasant, you attract it. It is more likely to happen than praying for those that mean well to you.

so i deactivated my facebook.

and intended to deactivate my twitter but it is as good as deleting the account, so i did not.

as they say don’t do something you’ll regret.

anyway, i’m starting my summer project on monday, April 4 and it ends May 13. i hope i can sustain the whole thing.

1. Never write nor talk when you’re angry.

2. Don’t disclose everything. One of these days, you will feel it used against you, somehow.

3. Understand that some people will ask you how you are in a very casual way. And then oppose everything you say thereafter.

4. Some people love to be listened to, and most of them do not REALLY know how to listen.

5. Someone will always be better than you. In every sense of the word “better”.

5.1. And there are people who think they are better than you, and that’s a different story altogether.

6. Don’t over-think. The what-you-see-is-what-you-get mantra is the bitch you can agree with in ze boring, real world.

7. Most people are not comfortable being emotional. Either you just have to feel sorry for yourself for noticing. Or feel sorry for them. Eventually.

8. Do not watch every movie you are told to watch.

9. Some people will not like you. Be it.

10. When you have to console yourself, put your right hand on your left shoulder. And your left hand on your right shoulder. It’s the do-it-yourself-hug.

10.1. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t expect so much from yourself.

11. Laugh in every mid-sentence when you are tempted to lie, or tempted to tell the truth.

12. Beware of that defining moment when you are told to stop. Because you will believe it.

There is an absence of quiet in the afternoon and slants of light break through the curtain, and I hear the sound of piano from the troubled rehearsal  of voices from my neighbor’s yard, the rustling of the leaves of the tree in front of my window and this anxious thought that the man walking down the street might be someone I know, or used to know.

Because there is an absence of quiet in the afternoon– I search back all the ease of silences I may find in empty shoe boxes and in the smell of the old sweater I brought from home. I try to reread the letter I made to a friend who died, and I find myself deceived by how little I know. How little I know of him.

When there is an absence of quiet in the afternoon, the hems of the curtain move hysterically, murdered by the daylight. When there is an absence of quiet in the afternoon the voices of the choir become more and more unknown to the sound of the piano, and I to myself.

For Augus, never failing to make me laugh

Remember when you told me how you made matchsticks in the factory. I asked too many questions and you told me every time, my boyish enthusiasm and your static compulsion for anything that had something to do with making, creating, doing something with your hands. I told you you are a very interesting  man and you just smiled.

So I lent you my copy of  Lord of the Flies to which you never read as I would find out soon after. You lent me your favorite action movies to which I watched to help me understand you better, thinking I could only like you better if I understood what you liked.

The carpenter that you were, you shut your mouth every time I told you something, as if I was instructing you to build a house for me and you were already thinking of how long it would take you to. I thought if you were listening.

I wanted to be honest with you, my carpenter. All I really wanted to do was to read you. But before I could have ran the circle to make that point, you lit the matchstick, smoked your cigarette, and walked away.

Your hammer, you forgot, was with me.

Who can, better than you, tell that I have already lost the whim?  Now I think it impractical to over-analyze, shrug the idea off my shoulders until it got me thinking that even dreams are transitory. I can’t pretend but I can convince myself that something can only last until I don’t want it.

I

Expectation is a brute streak of hope.

And Confidence is the rawest feeling you can give to someone you love.

One built a family.

The other left school, swore he’ll never come back and now he is back like a drooling, mad dog. Gayer than evah.

The other one self-destructed, turned faat and boring.

…or I lost myself to a few steps away–from an obsession of feeling, of imagining, of lurking–to anything that thwarts, moves or pulls; now that I can forget everything, and relearn only when I want to understand again why I am here, where I am going; and know that I’ll go back to feeling, imagining, lurking–to anything that thwarts, moves, pulls. Again.