maeryn

"Life ran out of pill, but I need lethal doses of your bitterness. You can't leave me bare & barren."

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Living with Fears

June 1, 2007

Often times I find myself wondering why the world keeps on turning. Why everybody has to move on. And why we should worry about living a life at all. I ask myself why I can’t just stay in one place, watch the world move with its clock, and stand still. That’s the essence of living I suppose. To learn from the history of world, from the mischief of its fate, and the disappointments of people trying to survive for reasons undefined. Why can’t I just be like God? Someone who watches over the shoulder of another. Someone who feels joyful whenever people do right things and feel sorry when they stumble. Why can’t I simply watch the world whenever I feel the urge of not wanting to be part of it… of any of it?

Often times I feel so scared that I have no idea what I’m supposed to be frightened of. I imagine myself being trapped inside a burning building, struggling to sprinkle my body with water, holding my lungs to breathe. Sometimes it’s a murder scene and I’m the victim. I see myself with a knife plunged deeply into my heart, stopping it from pumping blood, stopping me from being alive. I scare myself whenever I stand near the railways. I see my body being pushed off the tracks, crushed by the speeding bullet train then gone in a glimpse. Sometimes on the train, I imagine one of the people inside carrying a bomb, the tragedy of terrorist attacks and I’ll be one of the victims close to the bomber, killed in an instant.

Often times I feel so alone although I am physically writhing to escape from a crowd of people. I feel alone that I think I do own the problems of the world. Alone that I want somebody to be there for me but can’t stand to share the pain with anybody else. I feel so alone every time I think about the moments I stumbled, when I betrayed a friend, when I forgot to keep a promise. I feel alone whenever I imagine myself in the future, spending the rest of my life with people without faces, people I don’t recognize, people created by my own mind to break free from the possibility of finding myself abandoned.

Today is one of those times.

Today I wonder why the world has to keep on turning, why I have to be part of it, and why I should worry about living my life at all.

Today I feel scared and I am not sure about the thing that I’m scared of.

Today I feel alone.

I am alone.

–Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Posted by maeryn at 5:07 am | permalink | comments[21]

LOST

I'm really exhausted today. Like something sucked out all the life in me. It seems like all hell broke loose and I'm kind of having this feeling of being so lost in my own little world, inside my floating little castle. I can't say I haven't come to grips with this kind of melancholic attacks. I know I have them every minute of my life.

I've been thinking 'bout my future, my acads, my friends (who by the the way are great yet sometimes so easy to despise), and everything that I have today. They are all blurry. Nothing is defined and nothing seems to last. Then I found myself scared and alone. It occurred to me, I may be all that I have.

I am in the phase of finding what I really want, like shopping for the most valuable things that appear to have meaning to me and reflect who I really am. Things that could give justice to my existence. To be honest, I am at my wit's end. I just have no idea how I am going to refrain myself from being so damn obsessed with certainty of things that I take hold of. Maybe i do not have the right to choose afterall. Maybe i should just believe that all these things are what I'm really supposed to have and that there's no room for me to decide whether to stay with them or not. (I just want to emphasize that I'm not just talking 'bout "people" here)

I am not the kind of person who makes friends so easy. I give others the impression that I can stand on my own and I am happy being alone. Well, obviously that's not the real thing. I am scared of being left alone. I guess everyone is. The only difference that we probably have is that I have accustomed myself to the feeling of emptiness. The only feeling I grew up with and the one that can never be skin deep. This is the reason why I treasure those very few people I can call friends. This must be the reason why I am hard to reach and why I usually hold back from letting other people know how I'm really feeling and what's really going on inside my head. I am frightened by the thought of feeling empty despite having them. I am scared to admit that people can never altogether accept who you are and they can always have the reason to hate your guts. I am scared of losing them. Then maybe I was wrong for claiming I know how it feels like to be empty inside. Coz If I did, I won't be whining about these and I should've kept my thoughts shut. The truth is, emptiness grows in me. I thought I learned to live with it.

I may be living a pretentious life. I may be smiling a lot. I may be throwing crack-up jokes all the time, but inside, I feel like a little girl trying to find the playground where she could actually fit in. In a place where she could play with the rest of the kids and lick their own lollipops and mess their faces with melt down chocolates.

-Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Posted by maeryn at 1:01 am | permalink | comments[28]

Teenage Troubles

I wrote this last year, everybody knows I'm a frustrated writer. Don't ask me to explain this one, di ko rin alam. I couldn't even think of a title, see. LOL.. Written out of boredom? Nah, constipation!

The mutuality in our hearts
is like two salts deliquescing slowly;
driven by reduced viscosity
you are farther away from me.
They say this is cyclic;
give heat,
what was lost will come back into form.
So I will let my liquified emotion
surpass its boiling point,
get rid of all I absorbed,
my feelings will return as a salt.
I'd stop from flowing
and I'd stop from following you.
Would you choose to be crystallized too?
be purified and start anew?
Or would you remain cold and fluid,
gliding on your surface without me,
not with your memories of me,
not with all of me?
For the vicissitudes of our phases
will forever be here,
this is only between
the two of us apart
and together you and me.

maeryn/October 04, 2006
=)

Teka, eto pa isa. Yey, may title na yan!

Mind Play

I dived into your thoughts
while you're in a deep slumber.
I was drowned by the enigma inside,
the unparalleled desires
intersecting with your
opprobrious memories.

Breathing was impossible.

Butterflies kept knocking
their wings on my stomach walls,
swirling towards an ultimate death.

I wanted to puke.

This is the regression of a soul.
An awakening moment of truth.
The battle of lies.

Avert my senses,
the fairness of the heart is gone.
This is all in the mind.

maeryn
9/21/06
4:05 pm

Posted by maeryn at 12:33 am | permalink | comments[41]

Ignorance

May 31, 2007

Last summer, i took Hum 1, my only subject that talked about literature (screw Chemistry!). My teacher asked us to read the novel 'Ignorance' by Milan Kundera. When i read the first part of the book I was struck with boredom because I thought the book was all political and I was not used to reading novels with tons of narrations. I didn't put much attention into it and just read it for the sake of the class. I am pretty sure I skipped most of the lines (hehe) or probably an entire chapter (oops!). But when my shocks-she's-brilliant-but-damn-sooo-terry instructor discussed it, I was all "whoa, I didn't know that!!!". So after the class, I re-read the entire novel, now, without taking my eyes off and i can say this time, there was more "reading-between-the-lines" stuff. I appreciate Kundera's writing the second time I read the book. The style was elegant and the story-telling was indeed exquisite. So I'll be posting parts of the novel that i liked later. Some of you who would dare (and care) to read this might think that I just liked the novel because there was this 'nostalgic' side in me who was partly lured in returning to her past. People might get the wrong idea that my feeling of "nostalgia" (from Kundera's point of view) is an absurd manifestation of wanting to change something that happened in the past. But there are other realizations that came in after reading this book; things much more profound than simply remembering things (on the contrary, i understood the concept of distorting memories, the natural detachment of an individual from the past). For nostalgia means something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. And that is something that all of us feel after leaving every chapter of our lives (with written details of the events, with the faces of the people we met and all the feelings we felt at certain point in our lives) as mere memories of the past. We are all ignorant of the things (or people or feelings or even the old personalities we had when the sliver of time we took from our lives is quite manageable) that used to be part of who we were, things that eventually evolved through time. We are all ignorant of the things that we left behind, even if we try to get back to it today, they would only be the faintly painted pictures of what we can call now as 'remains' of historical events of life, the fragments of the past.

I took these from different chapters of the novel and these are "some" of the things Kundera illustrated that made sense to me and the things that reflect the reality and the parts that i just liked. =)

*The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious, and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections. It is important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia (fr. Greek "nostos", return and"algos", suffering; suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return): that it is the most powerful in early youth, when the volume of life gone by is quite small.

Out of the mists of the time when Josef was in high school, I see a young girl emerge; she is long-climbed, beautiful; she is virgin; and she is melancholy because she has just broken off with a boy. It is her first romantic separation and it hurts her, but her pain is less strong than her amazement at discovering time, she sees it as she never saw it before:

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.

That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life there are windows now, windows opening to the rear, onto what she has experienced; from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these windows(…)

*When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings. The fact today's boyfriend bears a strange resemblance to yesterdays' makes him even more exceptional, even more original, and she believes that he is mysteriously predestined for her. (…)

*To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

Transfixed, she watched her shattered love, the most beautiful piece of her life, drawing away slowly and forever; nothing existed for her except the past; to it she wanted to make herself known, wanted to speak and send signals. The future held no interest for her; she desired eternity, eternity is time that has stopped, come to a standstill; the future makes eternity impossible; she wanted to annihilate the future.

She laid plans for her death with her usual practicality. (…)

Everything had gone the opposite of what she'd intended! She has dreamed of dying mysteriously. She had done her best so no one could tell whether her death was an accident or a suicide. She had meant to send him her death as a secret sign, a sign of love transmitted from the beyond, comprehensible to no one but him. She had anticipated everything except, perhaps, the number of sleeping tablets; except perhaps, the temperature, which as she was drowsing off had gone up. She had expected that the freeze would plunge her into sleep and into death, but the sleep was too weak; she had opened her eyes and seen the black sky.

Those two skies divided her life into two parts: blue sky, black sky. The second sky was the one she would walk beneath to her death, her true death, the faraway and trivial death of old age.

And he? He was living beneath a sky that had nothing to do with her. He no longer sought her out, she no longer sought him out. Recalling him awakened neither love nor hatred in her. At the thought of him, she was as if anesthetized- with no ideas, no emotions. (…)

*Josef took no offense; their ignorance suited him fine. Since the day he buried her, he had always felt uncomfortable when he had to inform someone of her death; as if doing so he were betraying her in her most private privacy. By not speaking of her death, he always felt he was protecting her.

For the woman who is dead is a woman with no defenses; she has no more power; she has no more influence; people no longer respect either her wishes or her tastes; the dead woman cannot will anything, cannot aspire to any respect or refute any slander. Never had he felt such sorrowful, such agonizing compassion for her as when she was dead. (…)

*Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings; neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We don't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.

I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding's starts: they don't have the same recollections, each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other.

Posted by maeryn at 11:47 pm | permalink | comments[19]

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About Me

[Maeryn]

Latin name meaning:Bitter

Popping pills soothes me even while they make me sad. I live for the bitterness they leave on my taste buds. And they let the world see that I am naked around them... and that I had too much of this barren life.

[Inside my Capsule]

Invisibility inundates my passionate and intricate world. Tragedy explains everything. I go alone as I watch my life pirrouettes in slow motion.