The struggle goes on, for me you left behind, sometimes light and carefree, more often than not, heavy and laden with weighty problems and secret griefs. Sometimes, I am tempted to cross the street without minding the traffic, or take an overdose of sleeping pills, or simply get lost somewhere far far away where I can start anew with no thought for the past or the present. But it takes courage and strength to do those, and perhaps for all my fancy words, I'm still too much of a coward, too weak, without your presence.
I am deeply convinced that I am loser forever. People sympathize over the fact that I was always in black--for Tatay, for you, for Ate. And I am probably fated to wear black for other loved ones, if not in fact, then certainly in the realization of emotional loss, in the understanding that no man is ever really just one woman's.
E., R., G., V.--they are not the same anymore. They have changed much. In some ways I think we have all grown up though we never talk about it specifically; and even that, I sincerely believe, is a sign of growth. Exposed to different surroundings, faced with different problems, learning the lessons peculiar to each one alone, fighting a general but unspoken loneliness, seeking the answers to our very own personal doubts and uncertainties--can we help but grow?
We wake up each morning to the knowledge that there are no guidelines to living, that we have to seek our own shields, our own weapons, and that the future even then may not be ours to conquer. Every morning we have to caution ourselves against getting our feelings too involved--because we never know when things will end. And we don't want to get too hurt. As if there were ever such a choice.
At times like these, we have to put on a condescending smile and close the door to our inner selves or else we shall bleed red blood. You know how gullible we always were! Or perhaps, as Andres Cristobal Cruz warned me once, I must never make a mountain of despair out of a molehill of anguish.
Oh yes, the group still goes out. We laugh, we listen to jazz in some dim smoky place, we talk about life and existentialism and Indochina and all the latest news items over glasses of bitter, colored liquid, consume packs of cigarettes in cocktail lounges. There is fun all around, laughter, even a little flirting. But these do not comprise happiness, and since you left happiness has been a stranger to me.
From day to day, we discuss the personal inanities that govern our world, lend our energies to all the personal conflicts that continue to spice the time between the rising of the sun and its setting. The days roll by, like indistinguishable clouds, each one similar to the other--a continual waking and retiring, and sometime between, the tears shed for one's ineffectuality--while we cling on to songs like "MacArthur Park" and "Didn't We, Girl?" and recite T.S. Eliot and Rod McKuen like reckless, restless fools, as if our whole lives depended on how tightly we clung, as if our lives were nothing but vestiges of the reality we so desired way back in college.
You would have preferred that I stayed on where you found me, I know. Somehow, wherever you are now, I know you are a little surprised that I chose and preferred the sordid lures of the dirty city. I do want to go back where we met. But perhaps the time has passed for attrition. Perhaps the beauty that was then is past being recaptured.
I want to get out there, close to the earth and nature, close to you. But I also have a commitment I cannot turn my back on, somehow. Every day of my life, I am being torn both ways. Shall it be, for me, alienation or immersion? So many questions, and so many things to look for. Why can't life be simple for me, as it is for so many women I see walking around, holding on to their husbands' arms, possibly with an awakening growth around their middles and an ecstatic look in their eyes?
Every now and then, I wish to say "Hell!" to the world. What right has it to thwart so much in me that seeks completion? The search for a kindred soul, the need to defy everything that is hypocritical and phony in our society, the desire for nothing more than peaceful and quiet communion with the rains and the winds and the sun and all the elemental things in life, the dream of someday finding not anymore the meaning and value of life but simply a meaning and value for my life--these are desires that conflict, that cause so much anguish and pain.
Why must I, whom you left behind, wish now to go through the best and the worst only to realize that life is not a book to read nor a movie to watch nor a scenario script to memorize but an experience to live through; to give myself fully to every moment of my life and feel the heights as well as the depths; to see and sense the uncertainty in every step and yet take that step without hesitation, without rancor, without regrets; to know the tangibles as well as the intangibles and realize the difference between the two; to, as we progress through the years, build, demolish, and rebuild my own principles in life; to dream impossibles, raise problematics, size up existing orders, open doors, forge paths, search for truth, lose worlds, forsake dreams, and find them again; to continue to seek, despite recurring setbacks, "an ultimate meaning to one's existence that would make life worthwhile"; to battle with uncertainty and fear and the unknown and finally evolve a vision of living, pulsating, vital reality; to find ourselves after the grim years of growing up, suddenly integral--to really live.
Aldous Huxley says there are a million ways of arriving at salvation. Surely, each pathway is valid. And what matters to others if I choose to do it my way--to go through each moment with a smile of triumph, giving my whole self and soul to the movement of the time but keeping that one particle of myself to myself, still attached to the things that soothe if not cure, like poetry and art and beauty and literature and dreams...yes, dreams. What business do others have to preach to me their own equations for salvation?
Sad, isn't it? To be pulled in so many directions. To find no place carved out for me. To see so much that needs changing, to want to change them, and yet to know that one is neither big enough nor influential enough to do so. Then again, to want to leave the problems of change and activism to other people. To want nothing more than to lie down on dew-wet grass, close one's eyes, drink in the heat of the sun, the agony of inevitable twilight, the caress of the tropical wind against cheeks and hair. To walk barefoot in the park, holding somebody's hands, under a merciful summer rain, deep in the night.
Which one shall it be? Which one shall I choose?
Still missing you, even now.
___________________
___________________
18 September 1972
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