sprained/ spared

6:48 PM A stroll at the Ayala Triangle Gardens.

It was the same decades-old sidewalk, paved in worn concrete; the same indistinct skyline glittered in its fluorescent fury; the same stillness of a transient city. It was, in many ways, omnipresent, unequivocal and perseverant. But, there was a sensation of astral interjection, a weightless freefall that unnerved, and I could not dispense the imbalance of my own senses.

7:23 PM Coffee at KopiRoti, The Columns.

In all its exquisite nuances, innocuous elements that define this milieu, the myriad of corners I have discovered and claimed; tonight they, the city, felt foreign. Like an entry on a dictionary, an item glassed in a museum. A distant memory of a treasured relic. The physical object intact, but the emotion it embodied a fading vapor in my vespertine memory. Unable to grasp, amorphous and fleeting.

9:57 PM Desierto Adentro (The Desert Within) Spanish Film Festival, Greenbelt 3.

Like a scene projected across a theater screen, it played and replayed in front of me, a reenactment of a reality that has ceased existence. The diaspora of semi-professionals, ranting and irate, cheery and half-drunk, the street-walkers and vagabonds, an endless river of faceless bodies, moving, morphing and meandering along the same paths I trace. Oblivious and obstinate in their own versions of reality.

11:54 PM Bus to Baclaran, Paseo de Roxas corner Ayala Avenue.

Amidst the disorder of this performance, a séance of statutory certainty, a silence pervades. Striking, arrogant and incessant silence. And within this silence, pain resided. Discordant fragments of a consciousness left broken and shattered, a lingering cut that refuses to bleed. It was a pain both from a failed history, and an unsure future. The terrestrial equivalent of purgatory.

This flux, a faux point of equilibrium, a balance achieved by immobility, felt oddly familiar.

Like being at home.

12:39 AM Redemptorist Church, Baclaran.

I recognize it because I have been here before. This state of static. The awareness of this pain.

And the seeming alienation of the city was due to the fact that it was but a catalyst, a reminder, of a deeper history. The environment was a mere exoskeleton, important yet not essential.

But pain never leaves us; it is a de facto of the human condition, an extant of free will. Pain ebbs and waivers, but it never ceases. We merely discover ways of tempering it, wielding it, creating voids to envelope it, and distractions to overlook it with. We seek methods of achieving a symbiosis with it, a balance that will make the pain bearable, livable, and palatable.

1:02 AM Coastal Road.

Experience taught me that when I become more cognizant of this pain, it means the balance has been threatened. Change then becomes inevitable, imperative, to define a new balance, an evolution and an adaptation. And when change becomes the determinant, pain is its barometer.

To regain the balance, the scales have to re-calibrated, and my plans revised.  I won’t find my way back home, but I can build a new home. A better one.

1:35 AM I cross Aguinaldo Highway. Home.

At home, there is peace from this pain. A temporal immunity necessary to persevere. The kind of peace that is imperfect, but genuine. It is never the same melody, but always the same harmony. Giving me the notes I need to complete my composition. Sometimes definite, sometimes obscure. But always generous.

It is a changing serenity, sculpted to the form that suits me, one that is appropriate to the present and relevant to my future. So that the pain returns to where it must be. A mere memory.

And the precession of balance can carry on. A new cycle. A new chance.

5:38 AM I awake. Time to get ready for work.

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05 October 2010

Walking.

Salcedo Village and thereabouts, Makati City

Withstanding pain from a sprained foot, and longing to be spared from personal enmity.