hypothetics

In answer to this post.

In the anarchy of ardor affairs, the choice of professing one’s intentions and emotions to another is always a decision replete with second-guessing and reservations. Self preservation prescribes a certain balance between tact and control that often laying out one’s cards objectively dismisses. Once you fail to keep your emotions at bay, and allow the other party a glimpse of a future you seek with him or her, the ball leaves your court. Vulnerability becomes the brand etched on one’s chest, where underneath a heart trembles in anticipation and anxiety.

Would you take a chance when lady luck is an uncooperative ally? Would you gamble your heart when the stakes are against you? Would you take the leap before a vast vacillating fate? Would you cross the line when retreat is inescapable? Would you commit in words what your heart has kept at bay? Would you heed the emotion when reason fails your path?

What if failure is an imminent foe? When its long-fanged seduction seeks only an absolute defeat? Will you still jump when you know no net will cradle you to safety? Will you bear your soul when all longings are as illusory as your dreams? Will you blindly seek redemption in the road where light escapes perception? Will you profess when the feeling is confirmed to be unrequited?

Nature has wired us the binomial between fight and flight. Passion and emotion, being almost as primal as one can get, defeats this very nature. Respect and self-preservation would prescribe us to refuse loss, by allowing the relation to perpetuate without letting our true and full feelings known. A means to emotional cowardice fully rationalized by anxiety and the possibility of losing face. The alternative of fight is almost entirely irrational. Professing one’s feelings when it’s confirmed to be unrequited becomes an almost egotistical assertion of courage. To say it against an apparent conclusion serves as the last words to the relationship’s death sentence. You’re tried, like pleading innocence to a decided jury. Weighing the options is a futile exercise as both scenarios seem desolately painful. Martyrdom against the self.

So you say it. What now? Do you expect an answer? A rebuttal perhaps, or an explanation? No. You stand your ground like a warrior awaiting persecution. You don’t expect an answer as most probably one won’t come your way. Instead, you face the fate that has loomed over your consciousness for weeks and months at its end. You bring the cycle to its closure. After this, there is no taking it back, no rewind button to undo the emotional transgression. The object of your affection might feel betrayed by your reprehensible concealment. A proud adoration betrayed by the meek heart, worn on a sleeve too frail and delicate to maintain the charade. Distance is asserted, and ties sometimes severed. A choice that will ultimately won’t be at your disposal. An audience to a fate pondered on the succeeding days. Then you move on, trying to dissuade a depressive episode. Rebuilding the hope that maybe next time won’t be as painful. A success measured not in a capacity to win over others, but the intangible tango of hearts seeking the complementary melody of another. Hope is the last spirit residing in your barren Pandora.

So you don’t say it. You seek solace in the belief that this is the mature path to take. A higher road where crossing a friend’s boundaries is absent in its vocabulary. That you might as well try to enjoy as much of the time as you have with the person, knowing in full that this too will fade. When a suitable partner finds your beloved’s attention, or when time defeats your bond as it expectedly will. You’ll later find yourself dispensable, a sacrificial lamb to another’s happiness. Cardia Bubonica. The slow death of the romantic heart, the seppuku in slow motion, set against a pace so glacial time only serves to perpetuate its painful end. Hope resides here where the memories afford us. We live on the present to ignore the eventualities, and dwell on the past when the worst has come to pass.

So which do you pick? The absolute irrevocability of confrontation, or the amorphous conviction of circumspection? The complete and exacting full stop, or the contemplative prolonged limbo? Is it more masculine to own up to your feelings, or to respect platonic boundaries? Will love still be a gift when the receiver refuses its translation? Will transcending the lines of friendship validate the emotion, or will it only create the breach that seals its downfall?

Knowing that what you want, you can’t have makes the fruit more appealing. And equally disheartening. Because as you offer your heart on a silver platter, the gaze wanders in search of another. This is a losing battle, with a defeat only held at bay by your indecision. That your elixir will never fill the thirst, and your caress will fail to warm the blood. That your song is not the harmony being sought.

Some questions will never find answers. It is as perplexing as it is taboo to express. So we deny the indecision, prolonging our days to prevent action. That maybe destiny will present us with options more agreeable to our hopes. That time is a false ally alleviating our tired travesties.

- 29 October 2009 Makati City



Original Image from here.