ZEN Bitchin'

On the surface, I wouldn’t strike anybody as someone cheerful and perky. In fact, I know that it takes me a while to warm up to anybody. At the few social gatherings I attend I would be what people used to call a wallflower–I would talk to the few people I know and speak only to those who spoke to me. I was never forward. In terms of being funny, well, I know a few people whom I would call funny but I don’t think it applies to me. My attempts at humor–the successful ones at least–seem confined to word-plays and some attributed to my askew manner of observation. Some find humor in my social awkwardness, while still some would think of my humor as wry, if not bordering on the sarcastic. Otherwise, my humor is largely unintentional.

But very few people know me past the bright eyes, the impish smile, and the laughter. Very few people know that I have this great capacity for melancholia. It’s like there is a well deep within my chest, or ample belly, that continuously taps me on the shoulder, like an insistent beggar of my attention. It is this well that I constantly turn to when I tire of the world. It allows me to wallow in its darkness until such time I am ready to emerge and face the light of day. In a way, sadness nurtures me.

When I started blogging in 2006 (in Friendster) I had no idea how my blog was going to be. I didn’t create a new persona that will allow me to vent (like a ventriloquist’s puppet) because venting was never my problem. All I wanted was to exercise my writing muscle with my observations of the world around me: the people, the events, the places, and so on. Plus my feelings on the matter. My blog would be an extension of myself: warts and all. I had a momentary dream that my blog would be read by millions (rendering me able to become an arbiter of opinion on everything) but I knew that this was unlikely. I (including my views) was never popular so any extension of this ’self’ would never be popular. It’s the simple fact of the fruit not falling far from the tree.

I would also explore the depths of this well whenever I wrote my stories and poems. Although when my literary arm takes over, the well takes on a new name. It became the abyss. Very well. The abyss was the bowl of ink in which I dipped my pen whenever I was writing. I would dive into the darkest recesses of my self, propagate the spaces inside my head with ideas I commit to paper (or whatever medium was on hand) and I would emerge from the experience unscathed. The arrangement was perfect. Or resembled it so much that I hadn’t planned for the day when the inevitable happened. There is a quote, whose source escapes my mind at the moment, that goes: ‘Each time we look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at us’.

How can I explain it? Perhaps, it was bound to happen. I felt it start, however, last year, as I lay in a post-anesthetic haze in the recovery room of the hospital where I had my gallstones (and gall bladder) removed. It seemed that my body was one big pin cushion riddled with pins. Each point corresponded to a site of pain, but the sites were too many that the pain melded into one almost-tangible shell that lay just beneath my clammy skin. The shadows on the ceiling looked like gnarled fingers reaching to me in my bed, where I lay sweating and writhing from pain. I tried to call for help but my throat were filled with sand and gravel; I almost choked on the dust alone.

After that, everything changed. Nothing was the same for me. It seemed that the surgery removed more than my stone-filled gall bladder. I walked around, met people, worked, ate, drank, fucked, smiled, slept, exercised but everything felt perfunctory. I thought I wanted to experience and taste everything. But I quickly found everything (people included) to be tiresome. A few months ago I had a spat with my mother over something she said (which I would normally let pass) that didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t speak to her for weeks. I was surprised (and frightened) at the ease with which I managed this. My anger, which I usually managed well, was becoming a force that was too strong for its existing restraints (decorum, self-image, and pacifism).

Which brings me to my current predicament. The well/abyss deep within my body is gone. In its place is a void, a nothingness that feels more terrible than what it previously had. No light can penetrate this. No sound is carried off into this darkness. Everything just disappears into it. Misery, anger, disappointments. Words and promises. Inspirations. All gone.

One more thing: I think it’s getting bigger.

I think it would eat me up from the inside, until nothing is left of me.

My disappearance. Unnoticed. Unlamented. Forgotten.

A perfect ending. If not, something I deserve.