Solitude and Send-offs

There are days when all I want is to stay in my room. To read poems, stories, essays and wait for the silent click to come. It has never failed me, this ritual of finding something, some beautiful line,some song, an image to send me back here, fingers trying to keep up with these little birdies whirling in my head. I can spend a day in this small space with nothing but biscuits and some juice, just these letters, words, melodies grasped from kindred spirits sustaining, prodding me. Read a hundred books, write one. In my case, it's read anything until it comes and forms into an entry.

Sometimes solitude comes in the most inconvenient time. Preparing for a night-out with friends, I looked through my window and saw my mother's neighbor, Mang X, walking and suddenly comes this need to write something out of his present story. The once comfortable negosyante now commuting to work, sold his car, and part of his business to help his siblings in the US pay some debt. I wanted to make sense of this cycle, that in writing I could get past my pity and find something else in his story. Maybe a sense of redemption, that here's a man fighting the blows of life, and handling it well. How he tells his present ordeal in a straight, non-emotional fashion, it's just another phase, he says, his optimism and his belief so strong that something infinitely better is already taking its form, waiting in the wings for him.

But instead, I go out sighing at these lost thoughts.Hoping to remember them sometime, like now, a few weeks later,this cauldron of vivid composition now only a weak soup, palatable but unspectacular. It's the tension of catching these inner voices before they flee, a door jammed between solitude and company. A choice between silence or the chance to bear witness to the emotions in other people's stories.

- 0 - 0 -

And here you learn, how being human is synonimous to propriety. Choosing one over the other, because it is what is proper and right. So you go and meet up with friends you've not seen in years. And there you sit in a square. An invisible bonfire shrouding your perfectly typical dinner at a trendy restaurant. Confession time, each throwing an ash of experience, some recognition of what the years have brought to the table. The beer, and the air, the novelty of baring something to someone who knew parts of you that's gone, kaput. You exchange your newness, I am this, have done this, regret this. How about you? Your turn! to regain a small sense of the past coming to meet what is now.

You return at half past two. A beer and too many conversations to fill a diary. You close your eyes and now you realize whatever thoughts you lost coming out, they've been filled in by your friend's voices. And you wait, you know one day you'll find yourself doing the ritual, closing your life for a day, in that little room, typing up those voices.