WE CAN FOLLOW THE SUN TILL THE DAYLIGHT IS GONE
we can gaze at the sky till the night is over
Before Parting
You haven’t fixed the lights yet. Where are you going? Her words entered my ears, fluttering like a million butterfly wings inside my head, causing my feet – or was it the world itself, I really can’t remember – to stop moving. I’ve already packed everything and was all ready to go – just needed to turn the doorknob in a clockwise direction and that would’ve been our final, irrevocable sign of closure – but something in the way she stared blankly through the window, in the way her line of sight sliced through that thick blanket of fog outside into some space in time I could not determine; something in the way she blew off that cigarette smoke into the air above her, in the way she brushed her jetstreamed hair to the side with the gentle flipping of her head; all esoterically magnetized me and pulled me back into her arms like I had an invisible chain unknowingly tied all throughout my body. Where are you going?
She kissed my neck and pushed me on the couch, locked her fingers in between mine and pressed her bare breasts against my chest, feeling her recently familiar heartbeat and warmth rushing out of her, flowing like amber against my skin; cold and hard, caging me in, as though permanently locking me in a spiraling embrace. Where?
Beautiful as the morning rays of light she stood up and walked to the front door, felt the knob with her fingers, as though fondling, and locked it back, just like how she did it the night before. The blood inside me rushed like a waterfall. So tell me, where are you going? She glanced at me for a while and slowly beamed a smile, and before I knew it, everything else around had leisurely faded into the background, and there she was hands all over me, naked as the day and dark as the night, her hair glinting like the stars in the evening sky, like crystals on the sea sparkling against the setting sun. I whispered into her ear.
I’m going in.
FML
My university probably has the strangest and most interesting modular system. With the exception of Medicine, Nursing, and Law students (I think), all students are required to bid for their modules at the beginning of every semester. There is no tedious enrollment system similar to the one you usually find here in the Philippines. Although Engineering and Science students already have a relatively fixed module calendar, they are still required to bid for modules that are not pre-allocated or offered by their departments/faculties. On the other hand, Arts and Social Science students are relatively free to choose the modules they want to take for a particular semester, as long as by the end of their tenure in university, they have met all requirements necessary to file for graduation.
Each student has two accounts for bidding: a Programme (P) account, used to bid for modules required by his programme/course, and a General (G) account, used to bid for modules required at the university level. Basically, P accounts can only be used to bid for core and elective modules, while G accounts can be used to bid for any kind of module. However, all bidding rounds that use the P account precede the bidding rounds that use the G account, so the later bidding rounds tend to be more competitive and wasteful. No bidding round allows the students to combine the two accounts. It sounds complicated – it really is complicated – but the system grows in you over time, and becomes easy to follow. However, planning your modules can be a pain in the ass if you’re an Arts student, especially if you’re already halfway through university and you’re still unsure of what to do in life.
Which is currently the problem I’m facing right now.
It was only during this semester that I declared my major – English Language. So far, I have 28 credits for my major. I’m already halfway through university, and I still need 82 more. I was thinking of getting a minor degree in Sociology but I realized how useless that discipline is. Last night I suddenly thought of getting a minor degree in Communications and New Media, and the thought of it made me so excited. So I finally decided to hit on my Excel to lay down my plans for the rest of my undergraduate years, with the help of an online modular tracking system. After finishing all my calculations, I realized that I still need 112 credits (which includes the 82 required by my major), and so I found myself in a very uncomfortable and grim situation…
112 credits translates to overloading two or three more semesters (out of the remaining five that I have) to meet all my major, elective, and university-level requirements. Even worse, if I want to pursue a CNM minor degree, I will have to overload every single semester, and by overloading I mean taking seven modules (the normal load is five). That would translate to seventy hours of work a week. Seven final exams to sit for. That would the worst, the ugliest suicide.
Overloading isn’t really much an issue for me (I did overload this semester I took six modules – and I managed to get decent grades, albeit below my expectations). What bothers me really is that I planned my first three semesters really badly, so badly that overloading has inevitably become a necessary chore that needs to be performed. I want to blame it on myself and on the fact that I took too many electives and very few core modules, but I can’t, because I really had to spend my first three semesters trying to figure out what I really want to do. You see, I was confused, unsure of what my calling really was. I did extremely well earlier this year, which finally made me decide on pursuing an English Language major, but my lackluster, less-than-stellar performance for my core subjects later this year only relegated me to the starting point once again. Made me question all my decisions, the things that I’ve been working for, that I’ve been putting my efforts into. The thought of getting a minor to pull up my CAP suddenly entered my mind, but after checking my progress (if I can still call it as such), I realized that it is too late for that option. I seriously fear for my life.
I should have planned more wisely.
I should have planned earlier.
You only get what you give away
You’ll only get it if you give it away
You only get what you give away, so throw your hate away
The Fall
I’ve never really felt what it’s like to love. You know, that feeling when you jump into the sea from the edge of a towering cliff on a warm and almost cloudless summer day, the euphoria that builds up inside you, rushing like a high dose of some powerful and addictive drug through your bloodstream. You know, that kind of feeling when the pull of gravity kicks in the moment you lift your feet off the ground, when even though it pulls you towards a hysterical and suicidal plunge, it exorcises your worldly troubles, your inhibitions, and frees you from the innumerable uncertainties of life. You know, that kind of feeling you are most likely to feel before your body finally culminates under the sea where still waters probably run much deeper, where the pain upon impact slowly fades and ceases to exist in the cold, like sunlight. Where the only thing you could do is to be tossed and turned by the undercurrents and be drowned in their aching silence, and the only voice you can hear is that of the waves on the surface, rolling like thunder, trembling fear echoing in the deep as they surge to their tragic end on the rock-strewn shore.
Perhaps it was just a fragment of our funny imaginations that we actually tried out things, perhaps curious to see whether something could be worked out between us – like a relationship or a weekly dine-out date, or a fortnightly fling – and although we did try some of them out, got to get together and know each other better, we never really thought of, and sought after, the things that possibly would have been in store for us in the near and distant futures. I did spend my days sincerely trying to figure out what I could do for you the next time we’d meet, to find a place where you would like to eat or hang out or simply stone around like jobless people who have given up on any foreseeable prospect of lawful employment. There were times I embarrassingly found myself staring at my pathetic wardrobe for hours figuring out what to wear, or gazing at the moonlit sky to pre-ordain painful images of what life could be once we’d finally go on separate ways – as in a chick-flick romance on a movie screen – hoping none of them would come true. And I did fail to realize back then, throughout this entire process of caring about you and us together, that I had finally become a victim of the very same trap that many others in this world have unknowingly trudged over and fallen into.
But I surmise and concretize, that that was all there was to it. I did relish every bit of emotion I could draw from it, had their strings attached to my heart, but I cut all of them off anyway, eventually. I did – always and fervently, almost crazily enthusiastically – long for the day that you and I would meet again, but in the end I classified it merely as a joke, a prank I made on myself, you know, because I’m just plain weird and I like to make fun of myself sometimes – just for the sake of it – and because I have a sense of humour that only I can, and have to, feed on. And you simply continued to play along, pretending that I had – for the lack of a better description – a special place in your heart, you know, because I liked it – the idea of it. We dined out together, we did our homework together, you watched my favourite movies with me, held my hand on our bus rides back home. Let me squeeze on your bed and hide with you under the sheets, where we spent nights together, kissing me, letting me hold you in my arms, giving me a warm embrace whenever I needed one.
It was as though – all clichédness aside – I never needed anything else in the world but you. You really played it like a game that you’ve played many times before. And you were quite good at it. To leave me hanging in the air just like that, not knowing what to do or where to go? Sometimes I wish I could just fall down completely and plunge into the depths of the sea, and never feel the wind brush against my skin and see the sun shine down on me again. But please, don’t get me wrong. I never loved you.
I never fucking loved you.
#350
Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. ~Kahlil Gibran
#349
Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly. ~Author Unknown
A Cup of Coffee, a Box of Doughnuts, and Today’s Issue of the Daily Newspaper
He took a sip and realized that he could have gotten the same cup of coffee on his hand – with the actual caffeinated concoction inside – for half the price on the other side of the x-ray machine. He gazed coolly at the forlorn glass windows, the morning sun taking its time to warm up the edges of his skin, as though it had just woken up from a deep slumber, reluctant to get ready for the long day ahead. So he, suffering from a lack of proper sleep, took another sip, and the thought of him spending unwillingly – however ably – resounded more bitterly inside him than the hot beverage running down his throat. Like the by-product of a chain reaction, he calculated how much he could have saved had he bought his box of doughnuts and today’s issue of the daily newspaper from the store where she goes to work (not her again, he thought). An aeroplane suddenly appeared from the far end of the tarmac, and then accelerated and lifted its streamlined body to a seamless morning take-off, his fifteen one-dollar bills magnified to the size of elongated banners and tied to its tail, ruffling violently as they headed upwards until they could no longer be seen. He then took another sip, took a pencil out of his attaché-case and started drawing circles on the classified ads section, while unreligiously digesting the contents of the front page and occasionally jotting down answers on the crossword puzzle.
He also realized that he could have saved ten dollars had it not been for the Hallmark farewell card he bought from the shop adjacent to hers, and uttered the standard parting words instead. G-O-O-D-B-Y-E. And it would have been given a more personal touch, he thought. But he wasn’t good with confrontations. He thought of manifesting his leave-taking in the form of a text message, or a ring – not jewelry but a phone call, he insisted, to relieve himself of the metaphorical ambiguity – but he wasn’t good with mechanizing words. He thought of giving her flowers and then vanishing like a bad-timed orgasm, transitory and bittersweet. But he would be spending money all the same. And nobody would want to be disappointed that way.
He saw a lady in uniform in front, holding a microphone close to her mouth, standing like a lamp post that seemed to have stood the test of time: hard, dim and dull and full of regret. The boarding announcement was to be made, and he was yet to finish up his first meal and crossword puzzle of the day. He took another sip, but felt no liquid sensation rushing in. He ran his eyes towards the bottom of the cup and realized that it was already empty; and before he knew it, he felt a similar kind of emptiness inside him, like a huge insoluble vacuum or void, incalculable by every means. This is the first boarding call for all passengers of flight SQ146… It didn’t take him long to estimate how long it would take to fill a fully-booked 747 flight with passengers so as not to be late for its designated time of departure… but this, this feeling welling up like a balloon of tungsten hexafluoride inside him, was something worse than the fear of death by plane crash that all passengers feel in any given flight, throughout its entire duration. In every sense of the world, it was a feeling that reason and logic could not possibly comprehend. Leaving a box of doughnuts half-eaten and a crossword puzzle unfinished, he stood up, took his bag and quickly ran away, for the cure to his demise, to the failure of his reason and logic, to the missing piece inside him, the source of his feeling of emptiness, might be on the other side of the x-ray machine.
212
catchy, sonically refined yet offensive, downright vulgar – my favourite song of 2011. what’s yours?
Me
My name is Rowland Imperial [IPA: roʊlənd ɪmpɛrɪjɑl] (yes, that's my surname, and no, I do not come from a royal family). I am twenty-one years old, I hold a Philippine passport, and I am a sophomore studying English Language at the National University of Singapore.
By some extraordinary chance or strange permutation of events, it has recently dawned on me that my primary goal in life is to become a successful researcher in the near future, with the field of linguistics as my academic focus.
I also hope to make society a better place for the current generation and the next ones to come, although I must admit that I myself am still trudging up on this long, arduous, and painful - not to mention daily - economic process of making ends meet.
I write and take photographs; both creative and technical skills that I am not really good at.
I put up stuff on this blog when I have the free time to do so. Enjoy.
WE CAN FOLLOW THE SUN TILL THE DAYLIGHT IS GONE 