its official...

I am a big sap. What else would you call someone tearing up over reading this:

Sonnet XVII
Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
`
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.


The last four lines just, ah, just kills me. Were that someone would read that to me; read to me and mean it, really, really mean it. Well, one can dream right?

here comes the rain again (or welcome to the tropics)

Have I ever mentioned that I love the rain? I find something rather soothing about it that catches my whimsy. Watching the rain fall and listening to its steady cadence seems calming somehow. And walking in the haze of a soft drizzle ( without an umbrella most of the time) evokes something oddly romantic to me. I also love the fury of a storm, all flash and thunder, the roiling winds, and the tap tap tapping of water pelting down from the heavens. It is in these times that I feel as though all the dark and fierce emotions inside my head are mirrored by the elements outside, as though everything I feel but cannot express are out there, hashed out by nature's display. I love it especially on days when I find myself in a weird mood, then the fury outside calms the tempest inside. But as much as I love nature's tempestuous show, I also love the calm after the furor passes, of looking out of windows washed clean by the torrents, of the sun breaking through the clouds, as though the world has been wiped clean, literally and figuratively, and starting again, on a clean slate, is somehow possible.

( I got caught in heavy rains this morning, and aside from getting totally and utterly drenched, I also had to wade through the flooded streets of the Metro. Still, I love the rain, hence this post)

I look in the mirror and who do I see?

I see me, plain ( well not so plain), not quite old, sometimes boring me. I am aware of who I am, how I look and how the world sees me ( or doesn't). I've said before that I am the kind of person who never wants to attract attention, but I'm not really that shy a person actually. Mostly, it's a reflex, a reminder of how I have perceived myself and how I thought and felt people saw me. You know how they say not to be too worried about how people see you because they're more worried about how you see them? Easy to say, harder to achieve. See, I've been overweight since I was thirteen. The summer before I was to enter high school, I grew taller and gained weight. Thus, when the school year began, I was no longer the gawky, thin 12 year old my friends knew, but someone with more flesh on her bones. Apparently, more than they were used to, as one  friend promptly christened me with a new learned word for her, that of a certain prehistoric woolly animal. A name which stuck through out high school, that every one thought was endearing (because I appeared to tolerate them calling me that name) but cut every time I heard it referring to me ( she's still my friend by the way, I've learned to forge an uneasy peace with what she had done and have long chalked it up to youthful exuberance, she was after all, prone to giving people nicknames, whether they wanted it or not, bully for me that she was popular and that the name she gave me stuck). It gave good practice for me as well, and I learned early on to ignore the snide comments and take the well-meaning phrasings from my relatives in stride. I grew a thicker skin, padded by insecurities and hidden behind the worlds I found in books. But thicker skin or no, words still hurt no matter what they say about stick and stones doing more damage. Invisible though it may be, words hurt and scar and maim. And for someone on the cusp of adolescence, it was really bad for my self image and confidence. Although I can not trace every insecurity I have about myself from that day in my freshman year in high school, I knew that that was when I started perfecting the art of drawing attention away from myself. For most of my life, my weight figuratively weighed me down. I went through high school and college carrying that burden so to speak, it colored my relationships with people and way I saw myself.

But as much as I could not trust how I saw myself, I knew that I had other attributes, that I was smart and that smart was way better than pretty. Although of course, most days, that gave me cold comfort. Being able to get into the choice university among my peers was also a very good boost for my confidence. I did manage to lose some weight in college but that never changed the way I saw myself. Then I entered law school and substituted the sleep I lost juggling work and school work with food and gained back all the weight with some more added. But by then I had started to make peace with my body, I was learning to be comfortable in my own skin, and loving myself. The confidence I gained complemented the thick skin I had retreated into over the years for me not to care too much about what people thought or how I thought they saw me.


I will be the first to admit that there are still days when I hate the way I look but then again everyone has those days. I now know what works for me and recognize myself for who I am, a reasonably attractive, smart, and confident woman. And although there are still days when my decisions are still colored by the hurt, overwhelmed, fat young girl that I was all those years, most days, I think, I'm just me.

glimpses

I was cleaning out my room, which in and of itself is an event given my personality, and I found an old journal. Well it wasn't even a journal actually, more of a date book where I scribbled little observations about my life as well as my schedule. I also found the notebook I used to scribble on in high school, when I was in the throes of my infatuation for H ( which by the way lasted long enough to affect my college love life, such as it was) . I reread every cringe worthy "poem" that I wrote about him and proceeded to tear the notebook apart. Closure in a warped sense I guess, and ten years too late I would say, given that I still can't bring myself to carry a conversation with the man without being a little giddy, I suppose it's always going to be that way. I wish there was some way I could exorcise A as well, but short of forgetting every little detail of my first European trip, I will just have to wait. How is it that the 15 year old me and the 30 year old me pulled the same stunt? Becoming enamoured of someone unattainable and then spending an inordinate amount of time trying to forget them. Is it because I have never learned my lesson from my experience with H that I repeated it with A? Of course, adult me topped adolescent me by becoming enamoured with someone who, although apparently interested and thus not entirely unattainable, happened to live on the opposite side of the world. What did I think I was going to get out of it?

Why do we choose who we choose anyway? Why do we love who we love? I mean I could have picked anyone else right? Why make life and love more difficult than it already is? Maybe I should have chosen J, gave a relationship with him a try, ignore the misgivings in my head, including the silliest one, that I just couldn't see myself kissing him. I used to wonder, but there just some aspects in my life that I can never bring myself to merely settle for what is there, being a bona fide fence-sitter aside. Why is falling in love so easy for some people and so apparently difficult for me? Or maybe because I have too much romantic notions floating around my head from all the books that I used to escape into in my teens that despite the cynicism I tend to project, the truth is that I have idealized the concept of love so much. So here I am, ten years after hesitating to dip my feet into the water, still unattached, still prone to being smitten with guys I can't have. Obtuse, thy name is M.

of falling in love and unbroken hearts

I don't think I've ever fallen in love, not really. Or does one fall in love even when that love is not returned? My love life can be defined partly in the following words : it never got the chance to bloom. Because you know picky, and convinced that she was not attractive enough, and prickly, and stand-offish, plus equal parts naive and oblivious equals zero forays into the intricacies of relationships .

Why do we choose who we choose anyway? And am I really missing something by letting life pass me by?

coming to terms with grief

I suppose people grieve in different ways, some cry their hearts out and move on, some drown their sorrows in mindless distractions, some choose denial. I have dealt with mine in my own way.

Four months ago, we lost our father to cancer before we even had the chance to fight back against the disease. My sisters and I deal with our loss in our own way, supporting each other and dealing with our grief separately. Mostly, we have tried to move on with our lives and find a semblance of normalcy, and most days, I do just fine. But the tears are always close to the surface, bubbling up at the most odd times, mostly when memory strikes so that I could be sitting at my desk and reading something and would find myself tearing up. As complicated as my relationship was with my father, I have become acutely aware of the rightness of that line I read in a poem somewhere, that  no matter what your relationship was with your parents, you will miss them sorely when they're gone.

I miss my father the most on days when I feel overwhelmed with life, because he always managed to ground me, to make me stop and think, and to gain a better perspective of where my life was going. I miss the fact that I could come home absolutely mad about something from work and he would listen to me rant. I miss the fact that he listened even when I did not. I miss him because he used to let me argue with him till I was blue in the face about whatever topic it was that caught my fancy.

Now that he's gone, I am learning to appreciate all that he has done for me and my sisters. The fact that while he nurtured us and made us believe in ourselves unequivocally, he never allowed us to have an overgrown sense of self-worth, to have airs and feel as though we were better than every one else. Thus, no matter what my insecurities were, about my self, about the way I look, I always, always, knew I had the smarts, that I was good at what I did, and that I could be whatever I wanted to be,  and that he would be proud of me no matter what I do or don't do, no matter how I decide to live my life.

It is not that my relationship with him was ever easy. I was the first born, bequeathed with all the hopes and aspirations and expectations of  first time parents. I suppose I must have disappointed him and mommy with some of the decisions that I have made with my life. But the thing with my father was that he let me decide. I regret that the last years of his life, the ones he spent with me, were tinged with resentment on my part, a fact which still gnaws at my conscience four months after his death. It was not that I neglected him, it was that there were days when I resented the fact that I had to be his sole provider when I was just starting my life.

But despite everything, I miss him and there are still days when the tears are much too near the surface. I guess there will always be days like those because moving on doesn't mean letting go and forgetting, but instead merely a dulling of the pain.

Think about it

I love this paragraph and what it says and I figured I should share:

open your eyes and see
that always we are taught ongoingness:
the same and turning leaf;
earth's rhythmic tilt and tow;
the soul candling into shadow,
before it flickers back to life - J. Neil C. Garcia