in multiple caves, browsing

layer down, as my father coughs to sleep. i am running out of tributaries. did the fountains at my disposal suddenly call me by gushing upwards of at least 20 feet?

i was here three years ago, maybe anxious to call an old man who once told me not to fiddle with all the photocopies he has made one afternoon. i wanted to apologize, but for what?

could every tweet i had seen some nights ago tell me that i have to know more people? has work made it harder for you—me—to meet interesting personalities? why am i even trying to dig deeper when i could easily say i'm in the wrong place the whole time?


look at me write incoherent stuff while looking at a profile! smoothly whisper to myself, "sanity is ironic." this undoing doesn't actually rely on negation. believe your friends. as parallel as you would like to think your timelines are, acknowledge your delusion. "sanity is ironic?"

i glance at the bloated books i never bothered to open if not for the flood last year.

maybe all i need from now is contextualization and forgiveness. and a more constant changelog, bordering on the performative (because "normal" people have a knack for misinterpreting my intentions!).

but you—i have overstayed. i should believe my friend when they implore me to be cynical of what i have seen in profiles in terms of its reliability to represent a person. for my own sake.

Some predilections

- I've been meaning to delete my LinkedIn profile. Any profile I create for anybody's viewing pleasure, and of course my consent, will never represent me properly. Not in this gradually shrinking world I am trying to break again.

- I carry the monotony of home into every place I can muster being in.

- How about another limbo? I don't have extra space, or so I believe. It's not like mutuality is in
question here.

- Maybe everybody else regrets creating their social network on Facebook, another dystopia drably garbed with pale blue and dead white. It might as well be in neon.

- Too often do I have the chance to be immersed in work that I open a Chrome tab and type something that interests me at the moment (regardless if this will stick). In this case, it's the Subreddit for Netflix. This isn't unique.

On Sympathy

I don't know if I just lost a friend. If I have, I don't know if I could express this need to go back to the point before I may have lost my friend without sounding too cliché. Not a need to defy death, just a need to rummage for the last normal I can remember.

Losing a friend is a purgatorial experience—from blinking cursors to downward shivers to losing a lot of blood to feeling like a hologram at some mall atrium anyone can pass through.

Some of my writing

in Transit, Issue 6:

    something about the dread I had been feeling at home in 2012, being inadequate for anyone, eczema, and the interchangeability of certain items.

in Plural, Issue 4:

    something about a morphing Cory Aquino, my personal hatred for Vitwater, sleep being the cousin of death, and the song "Sana Dalawa ang Puso Ko",  split into three personas.

in Plural, Issue 3:

    something about talking buildings, self-pity in 2012 observed in a reaction to one particular photograph, fastfood at midnight, an encounter with university police and being eventually spared, and another photograph in 2014 of someone reporting for work.

More variations

In a state of vagueness—or the immediate three meters in front of me, mostly other people, a signboard asking me if I should stop and breathe for a while, imagined smog, backstabbers—I manage to slice through everything, just to take one jeep.

I realign my allegiances with other things, particularly forcing myself to get rid of certain self-denials, such as the face I now go by, the joints that hurt from time to time due to various excesses, or my hesitance to show my love to my family more often.

How much time will the hiatus take? I no longer have the luxury of locking myself in a room, carefree, with regularly scheduled meals; I have to deal with bills and other things to fix just to keep my daily life running as efficient as possible.

One of the last pieces I read reminded me of one of Allan Popa's poems. This tidbit is a ticking time bomb considering how much context I have withheld regarding this hiatus. This is me signaling to anyone monitoring this with hands up, except my hands are rapidly moving from side to side as if doing some absurd CrossFit maneuver.

Subterfuge

Whenever I am fortunate, temporarily naïve to impending tasks, I force myself into the predicament of listening to Go! by Public Service Broadcasting, or Every Other Freckle by Alt-J, even if the pilot of that particular A320 or Bombardier can only fantasize of being part of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, and would hate to man a Kamikaze plane. Perhaps the engines remind me of the level of responsibility in each flight, so it would probably be best for me to stay distracted, even when the FAs futilely remind us about our seatbelts.

Irrationale

As nurse to a dead blog, I should retain its purpose, even as afterthought, seemingly blending in a crowd of nothing.