A Send-Off

I met William through Karla. They were very good friends. Theirs was a friendship borne out of unfortunate circumstances. Short of saying, their friendship was forged in fire. I, on the other hand, was a friend by way of association. But nevertheless, he quickly endeared himself to me.

How could he not? He was smart, funny, good looking, and just about the sweetest thing. And he was the sweetest thing. He was as Karla describes him, “the perfect guy”. I couldn’t agree more. During the few times we went out with him, I would jokingly refer to him as my boyfriend. He never seemed to mind. In fact he would gamely go along with it, even though we both knew I could never be his type. I could only sigh and wish that William were straight.

So our loss was another team’s gain. There was nothing that could be done about that.
But yesterday, both teams experienced a loss. Being Black Saturday, it was made more black by William’s unexpected passing. It was meningitis, and it struck him down as quickly as it had come to him. No one saw it coming. And all of us who knew him, couldn’t understand what could be gained from it.

I couldn’t claim to be a close friend, out of respect for those who knew him really well. But he has touched my life, as he had countless others, and I could all honestly say that my life had been enriched because of that, no matter how brief it had been.
The whole Christian world celebrated Easter today. I woke up praying for some kind of Easter miracle—that somehow I would receive a text message saying William had miraculously survived, and he is well. Obviously, it was not to be.

This is the irony—No resurrection at a day we rejoice at its alleged possibility.

They say everything happens for a reason though we may not understand it at the time. No matter how much it hurts or doesn’t make any sense, all we can do is to trust that whatever has happened, it will serve a bigger purpose.

This is not a eulogy. I choose to believe that William is not dead. He is alive and forever young in our minds and hearts.

So goodnight and so long, William, sweet prince. You will be missed.

Faux Friendship

Is friendship really possible after the good of a romance has gone? And if so, how exactly do you begin to be friends without falling into the trap of being more than that? What would be the defining parameters? What can you, and can’t you expect from either side?

“Why don’t you call, when you say you will? Is it because I don’t belong to you anymore?” sings Rachael Yamagata. She sings my sentiments, but I also do know that I can’t oblige him to do that, or even be upset when he doesn’t.

“Why don’t you come? Don’t you miss me at all?” Rachael’s smoky voice wafts through the nebulae of my mind. He said he was due to arrive today, I look at my phone’s inbox to read his message to confirm, and there it is, a timebomb of a date. I waited for it to blow up, but the explosion, a message to ask me to see him never comes.

Has he forgotten? Was he just too busy? Or did he not want to see me again? But more importantly, why am I still waiting? Why am I worried that I won’t see him? If he is just a friend, then I would be fine even if we go without seeing each other for months. It wouldn’t matter.

But I am a liar. It does matter to me if he calls. I count the days leading to his arrival. I imagine what I will be wearing, his reaction when he sees me, the conversation we’ll have over dinner, the banter, the now chaste kiss goodnight.

Rummaging through things that are not mine, I see it. An email advising he won’t be able to make it for the appointment. His schedule is too tight. He is needed somewhere, someplace else.

Yet I need him here. And his place is as vacant as the memories that we are supposed to make. His absence is a hole, a tear in this precarious reality I conjure. His silence is loud and screaming.

“We can only be friends now,” I told him. “This is friendship or nothing,” I voiced an ultimatum. He complies, and I hate him for doing so.

I may have lied, but I lied for a good reason. I want something real with him. And what we had before, though he may argue otherwise, was far from real to me. “Just because you label this differently from me, doesn’t mean it’s nothing to me. It’s just semantics,” he told me before.

But I didn’t believe him. How could I? Intellectualizing this whole affair, he was. Semantics, my ass.

So I gave the ultimatum, in the belief that if I pushed him towards the side of friendship, then I would finally have something real, something honest. Something I can hold.

It is a lie. And sadly, it is only I who believe it.

It's A Matter of Choice...

I never quite understood how people can choose to be in a) a gray area and b) a miserable relationship, until it happened to me. Then the universe, as if to rub it in my face gave me this really beautiful song by Florence and the Machine.

I'm posting it here for Karla and all my other friends who share the same sentiments..dammit, can i actually get more cheesy than this?!

Cosmic Love

A fallen star,
Fell from your heart,
And landed in my eyes,
I screamed aloud,
As it tore through them,
And now it's left me blind,

The stars, the moon,
They have all been blown out,
You left me in the dark,

No dawn, no day,
I'm always in this twilight,
In the shadow of your heart,

And in the dark,
I can hear your heartbeat, I try to find the sound,
But then it stopped,
And I was in the darkness,
So darkness I became,

The stars, the moon,
They have all been blown out,
You left me in the dark,

No dawn, No day,
I'm always in this twlight,
In the shadow of your heart,

I took the stars from my eyes,
And then I made a map,
I knew that some how,
I could find my way back,

Then I heard your heart beating, you were darkness too,
So I stayed in the darkness with you,

The stars, the moon,
They have all been blown out,
You left me in the dark,

No dawn, no day,
I'm always in the twilight,
In the shadow of your heart,

The stars, the moon,
They have all been blown out,
You left me in the dark, (you left me in the dark)

No dawn, no day,
I'm always in this twilight,
In the shadow of your heart.

Questions and Quandaries

It seems that being in a gray area is a place that people at one point or another would find themselves in, whether they like it or not. And just as it is so easy to fall into that hole, getting out of it could be just as hard. If you’re lucky, you can pull yourself out in no time, but others can stay an eternity there without even knowing what they were in to begin with.

Relationships, particularly quasi-romances, are the most common of the gray areas that you can get yourself into. In my circle alone, at least three of my friends are in that place of knowing and not quite knowing the status of their relationships. And who knows, maybe there are more who just haven’t the courage to admit they’re clueless as well.

My good friend, Karla, (probably the only person in this blog who will ever be named) has even written quite a number of posts on her blog labeled appropriately as gray area. O., another friend who lives about a thousand miles from me, sends me text messages of her frustration over a current quasi-romance. S, on the other hand, has got herself a number of relationships of that nature. It’s a wonder how she can actually keep up with them and with herself. And then there’s me…well, we all know how my little romantic adventure (or mishap) ended. On second thought, things are not exactly, um, through between me and Hugh (not his real name).

The situation that my friends, and often what I also find myself in begs me to ask: Can dysfunction in relationships prove to be so attractive that we are almost compelled to prostrate ourselves to it despite the obvious pain it will cause? And why is it that despite that recognition, we accept it as a matter of fact rather than a matter we have control over, and therefore can actually change? Are we that desperate for love that we completely forget the harm we’re doing to ourselves?

Another point that I also wanted to make here is the apparent curse or gift that has befallen my friends. They share parallel lives with me. I know, I know that not everything is about me, and that it is completely narcissistic of me to think that. But hey, even my friends acknowledge the fact. O. and C. has actually told me flat out that they don’t want to be friends with me anymore for exactly this reason. Of course, they were joking. Or were they?

Maybe my friends and I are that bonded together that we’ve begun to actually share the same fate, which when you think about it makes it really romantic in a sense. But then again, it also makes for a really sad thing.

Whatever the case may be, whether it’s coincidence or providence that makes us lead parallel lives, the bottom line is we need to get out of the gray and start finding the light. I think we mighty deserve it.