I know it's been so long since I last updated my Blogger site. I've been stuffed with too much work up my neck, and I've been maintaining Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter a little more than I thought I would. I think I'll be writing here more often now, though :) Heehee.
Anyway, this particular entry is also in my Tumblr site. If you want to go there and see it from that page... go ahead. Hahaha! There's more to see there.
This is a blog entry I could have been writing in every day he and I would see each other—nowadays, at least. Then again, I haven’t seen him in the way I saw him tonight, and I want to savor the moment by actually writing a full-length essay. Pardon the incoherence; I haven’t written anything serious in such a long time. I think I should get back to this again.
***
Is it me, or have I seen him today in a way I haven’t seen him before?
It was the afternoon of a fair, rather humid weekday. I, with looks so disheveled and a mind grappling for the least bit of sensibility, was greeted by the sight of him dressed in apple-mint green, his attention at the moment fixed on his friend, with whom he was reminiscing good times with. My eyes weren’t used to him in this color, as he was one to be clad in black or white, or sometimes, he would be clad in that hue which drives bulls—and sometimes even the bull in me—insane. The color was refreshing to the eyes and calming to the senses, and I was entranced with the calm for a second or two before I finally stepped forward. I should have known that him wearing that color was not just a mere “last resort”, though I am aware that he is not aware of the implications I saw then.
I sat beside him and listened to him and his friend muse about years gone and past, and it was a rarity to hear him talk about the past in a positive light—yes, that was in a way quite foreign to me. For all the time I’ve known him, the past was treated with bitterness, such that even I began to detest his past in his place. Yes, after quite sometime of looking at what had been as something tantamount to tears and regrets, witnessing him recalling musingly on the people that once comprised his “present tense” was a surprise… a delightful one, actually.
He was alone with me after a while, once he and his friends bade goodbye for the day. As we left the campus grounds, the conversation was (again, surprisingly) trivial and filled with sheer laughter. Though we were mostly cracking jokes about each other and confusing each other to the point of idiocy, there was a profundity in those moments, or at least, a feeling that it was more than just a time to jokingly deride each other and slap each other silly. Call me whatever you want, but it was as though something in my soul was opened. For once, it wasn’t a confrontation but a conversation, an open exchange of happy thoughts instead of a muted, obscure charade of vicious doubts.
I noticed now that he would always meet my gaze, and look at me with clarity in his eyes. For so long, I’ve gotten used to him avoiding my gaze, and we’d usually talk to each other side-by-side, both looking out into some horizon, refusing to meet each other’s eyes as though hell would break loose otherwise. I thought that, because it became a mutual habit for so long, I would never get to look at him in the eyes again. However, he sends the shockwaves to my heart whenever he looks squarely at my face, at my face, into my very core. Suddenly vulnerable, I would usually look away, but deep within me, I enjoyed this new-found fixation of his eyes on me. Indeed, I craved for affection and this was something that brought the cravings back. Just as when I thought I would end up just seeing pain and hostility whenever I’d look at him, he managed to break that thought before I fully believed in it. It took me away, might I say.
The rest of the day, well into the night, was spent in mindless banter (and an impromptu lesson in Calculus and Accounting from me to him) amid McDonald’s food and relatively long walks in the busy evening streets. Lights were glowing from all around us, and a light coming from both of us was shining to the world. Yes, it was invisible, but I knew we were emanating something that, though no one would really notice it, we felt it around us especially when our hands would intertwine.
On this day, the part of me I’ve tried in vain to repress—the little girl in me, the carefree part of me that simply wanted a good time without having to be worried about looking ridiculous—was coming to the surface again. I thought it had drowned when I tried to kill it by getting used to his coldness. Now, the coldness is gone and warmth has finally prevailed, and I’m reaching out to the warmth like a vagabond in search of rain, a desert seeking rain. The long-forgotten feeling of safety in his arms and solace in his heart was coming back again, and it roused in me a merriment of violence and calm, a desire to laugh and cry, a want to just hold him through the night and be nonchalant to the sands of time.
Being with him today reminded me that, indeed, I am at home again. Only, this time, I would be home in his heart and I would be there to stay… and no one can kick me out of my home. Never again. :)
posted on Thursday, July 15, 2010 @ 9:33 AM
