31 - At the Edge

 

Too many events lately squeezed my life dry. Different forms of loss plagued my 31^st year of existence. I had renewed hopes and strength to carry myself into finishing my graduate studies, but instead of all emotions set for a grueling reading and writing, my being was swallowed into a deep sorrow that shattered my core. Plus, I have to extend effort to shield myself from distraught as I need all the sanity to function well in front of my colleagues, and most of all, to my students.

I am used to broken glasses, cigarette smell, and alcoholic rage growing up as a child, and maybe the next worse thing that could happen to me will be at gun point; however, the sadness I now have is a bullet wound. When I am idle, I cannot read, I cannot look at the letters in silence as memories, events, stories, and recent affairs all come rushing down like floodwater from a broken dam. It even took me awhile to gather wits to write this short note.

Songs begin to hurt. I used to jam even to the heart wrenching melodies due to their poetry and tune, but now they pain me as their meanings burst into the soundwaves and pierce not just my ears but my heart. I have a rather stoic approach to life, and many see me as a killjoy because only a select few things and events make me truly happy. The rest is just matter obstructing my perception. Now, it is different, my rather dull and pessimistic take on life has been overshadowed by the crucifixion of my heart.

Never have I reflected so much on the crucial decisions I made in my life as I was always sure, and I was willing to work out the choices made not because of pride but because life is too short to be mistaken. You work on the things that were practical and pragmatic within the given situation. True that in life we take detours; but I do not have that luxury, and as much as possible, the course has to be clear rather than to be strolling around the abyss of possibilities. I do not want to be trapped in perpetual anxiety of a future without clarity. And neither do I want to sink in pipe dreams when survival is an everyday call much so with my continued devotion to teaching.

This time, the “what ifs” come creeping as if telling me that it could have been better if such did not happen. I did not even bother to have a what-if of my skewedly-hideous-with-a-pinch-of-redeeming-experiences childhood, and that is why I see entertaining the loathing with time travel is a mere helpless exercise trying to move the clock backwards. Working with what one has in the moment for the future with the context of past is all what there is. All the what-ifs I think most often are not existential as I entertain possibilities in work and even in my intellectual exercises, but the existential turn is creating this uneasiness within me.

The heart is exhausted but still wants to beat as it still yearns for the love that it has chosen. I remembered my Latin teacher that saying “delegam te” (I choose you) rather than “amo te” (I love you) is more profound as the latter is emotion while the former is a fusion of heart and mind. Animals can do the latter perfectly fine, but humans are those that continue to hold on to things that are slipping into the void with the hope of preventing a soul carried further by the current of river Styx. See how a human heart continues to pump even in the absence of the blood that made it glow before; and that is how choice drives a soul to a corpse - life to an organ.

Take the beating. Swallow it like a man. Hope. To live is to suffer. To suffer more just to gain drops of happiness as life is a never-ending labor.