In My Past Life I Was A.....

chel tamayo was a Successful Gladiator in a past life. http://quizme.stvlive.com/pastlife/quiz.php

In My Past Life I Was A.....Oh yeah. I always knew there was a reason why I chose Tomb Taider for my thesis...(aside from the, uh, babe factor of course)..but there you go, i was a succesful gladiator in my past life...

Chinese Water Torture

Chinese Water Torture You can throw me right now in the middle of the Pacific and I’ll float. Guaranteed. Even if I do not know how to swim. For the past week I have drunk enough water to fill up our huge water tank just so I could start working already. Goddamn medical requirements. I could actually hear myself sloshing with every move. I'm the human jell-o. Come on take a bite. I jiggle. I am green. Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la.

Follicle

Follicle I just gave my brother our semi-annual haircutting sessions yesterday. For every six months, I moonlight as a barber giving my brothers a trim or a new style, for free. I honestly do not know what brought that on because ever since my brother came home from Singapore late last year, I’ve been giving them these haircuts because they’ve been too lazy and too cheap to go to the barbershop.

I watched hairs fall onto the ground, then swept and gathered to throw away in the trash. I watched my brother brush off the bits of hair that got stuck into the folds of his t-shirt, his neck, and arms because if he won’t, then he would have to suffer the itchiness it would cause and he would have to undergo the agony of scratching it till it goes away and his skin would be raw by then.

How you could set the time by how long your hair or nails grow. It’s the most latent way of telling us that time had passed and how. My hair now almost reaches the small of my back. Scrutinizing it, one could see the ends split, needing a trim badly but I’m in no hurry to cut, unlike some other people. Have you ever realized that that wear and tear in our hair are a life’s worth of pain resulting from the harshness of the elements and not taking care of it properly?

I prefer the discretion of it against the tic-toc of the clocks that are strategically hung around our house. I feel that somehow, like the curse of the Deathwatch Beetle, I’m doomed every second that passed by. Those cuckoo clocks that cluck every hour (yet sounds like a Banshee wailing to my ears) announces another fraction of my life gone by and that I will never capture again.

Immortality. We all crave that do we?

Like the hairs that are cut from us and the nails that we clip that are swept and thrown represents the years in our life that is now lost.

So we take precautions in to prevent these damages. We try to live cautiously.

I have a friend who still can’t cross the street at the age of 22. Even I, when I reached my 21st birthday realized that I am not as invincible as I think I was when I was younger. I became more responsible, for myself and for others and in return I became more frozen. I tried to retreat in the corners because open spaces have this big potentiality of getting your heart broken, or becoming disappointed. The bigger the space, the bigger the risk.

But I still think that we should do something that we are most afraid of, even if it paralyzes us or worse, kill us. Everything in this world is a risk even if you think that you are safely ensconced in the security of your house. Paralysis can be cured with therapy and conditioning but death. Death, we cannot do anything about it but at least we could earn our bragging right in the afterlife, wherever that is.

Being frozen from far too long is a risk; we may get stale. Then it would all be for nothing.

I told Karen a few days ago that we humans tend to survive without actually living and having said that out loud, I was horrified at the thought.

Tomorrow I’m going to the salon. I’m going to have my split ends trimmed.

Footbridge

Thousands of people ride the MRT every single day. Maybe more than 10,000 purposes and more than 10, 000 destinations from 13 stations, whether purposely intended or the result of aimless meanderings from 5:30 am-9: 30 pm.

I do not usually ride the MRT whenever I go to Makati. I prefer the frenetic commute riding the LRT, masochistically bearing the sweaty, odoriferous, and noisy trains instead of the zooming Metro Star Express. As convenient (and clean) the MRT is, I am afraid of getting caught in its granite maze of stairs, escalators interspersed with shops, restaurants, and thousand of pounds of metal rail tracks and thousands of voltage of electricity.

Did I say the word destination? Destined. Destiny. From the Latin word destinare meaning ultimately. But do not I extol the virtues of existentialism in my daily life?

It was an uneventful ride, really. I knew where I was going, what I’m going to do when I get there. But getting there was a whole different story.

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a stranger for a minute or two, then suddenly finding yourself drowning with both feet planted firmly on the ground? All of your instincts are telling you to run away and never look back because if you don’t, you would find yourself in trouble faster than you could say heartbreak and deeper than the Y-incision of an open heart surgery that could kill you if handled by an unskilled surgeon.

That is what my gut feeling told me when I saw you approach while I was waiting for the train to arrive. Did our souls somehow recognize each other, which is why you’re face seemed so familiar? I was so sure that I’ve met you before (I just don’t know when and where) that I knew that I could reach out and trace the contours of your face and kiss you fully on the mouth without any words exchanged. Was it the way your backpack was slung casually over your shoulders or the shy smiles that we bestowed upon each other for what seemed like a million years? I don’t know. I don’t care. All I knew was that I intended to keep on drowning for as long as I could.

You could have chosen to sit not beside me but you did. I could have let other people sit between us but I didn’t.

For 10 stations, we sat beside each other. I was leaning towards you, and your hands lingered on my knee, leaving indentations on my skin as if there were no fabric that bars our skins from meeting. I caught you smelling my hair, lingering on my nape, your warm breath tickling me. I reveled in the feeling. Passengers who sat across us would think that we are lovers, sitting so close to each other that not even the merest sliver of shadow could ever pass through. They would never know that we have exchanged not one word but this connection is better than any words ever uttered. Every station that passed by signals the end of this clandestine encounter. But I knew that if we alighted on the same station, this was fate, spitting at me in the eye and kicking at me in the teeth. And we did.

At the escalator, on the way up, we were again side-by-side, like the stiff groom and bride getting nailed with rice as they were marching on the aisle. That was the last sign I was waiting for. Why I turned away and did not ask for your name or number, I would never know. I’ve reached my destination and so did you. I never knew which one of the numerous exits that you took but as I was crossing the footbridge, I looked back, somehow wishing that you followed me. But you didn’t.

Did someone conspire against me so that my appointment was moved and that I rode the MRT instead of the LRT?

The return journey was the most difficult of all. My usually relaxed and bouncy steps were replaced by the heavy thud of my sneakers. Instead of climbing the stairs (which I usually do for exercise), I took the escalators. I did not want to drag myself, loaded with disappointment and regret. I bumped 9,999 other people but I might as wheel have been in a solitary confinement. Each time the train stops at a station places more and more distance between our bodies, but not our psyche, that much I’m sure of.

Every door that slid open and closes sounded like a death knell. Heavy and unforgiving. No more second chances. Never had I been more sorry to reach the last station of the MRT. The sky was dark and the rain was threatening to fall, but this time I did not mind it. Yes, let it rain. I hope it washes off the acrid bitterness and caustic longing that lingers in my gut.
Thousands of people ride the MRT everyday, and somehow it was so inevitable that I found you. Only to lose you at the end of the line.

Strung-Out

ust came back from Robinson's Place. I'm supposed to be tired, but am not..Have you any idea how difficult it is mobilizing 20 people at once when you're at the mall? Scary. Some relatives of mine are here right now, from California, taking a three week vacation. We haven't seen them for years and years so everybody was eager to play "welcome wagon."

Somebody had this idea that we go bowling (which we did rather horribly) and eat out, then hit the bars of Malate. Can you imagine that with 8 adults and 12 people with ages ranging from 13-50+? I didn't think so. Luckily, it rained so hard so the 'gimik' was out of the question. I'm just so tired playing the Tourism Bureau (playing the human map to everywhere else that they wanna go) these past few days, I just want to hit the sack and sleep for, like, days.

Tomorrow, they want to go swimming and i dont even have a decent suit...don't this people ever rest?

- - -

I'm so pathetic. I hate acting like a lovesick fool. I thought I was beyond this crap. Long-distance relationships (even if it was just the pseudo-kind) suck!!! I cannot believe how I'm eating my own words, I'm starting to choke on it. Poor, disillusioned Chel; acting so high-and-mighty, pretending she was in control. It was so big of me, telling people how to run their relationships, when in fact, I'm more clueless than them...maybe even more vulnerable so. Just look at the poem that I posted... Somebody please shoot me!