Not Just the Coffee

Good thing the 7-Up can was empty, else a good portion of the table cloth would have ended up soaked in the sweet, chemical-rich liquid. Still, the knowledge that it was empty escaped me for a split second and, in that wink of a moment, my heart walloped so hard I felt like wanting to reel from its aftermath. I sat there, steadying myself, awed by the Pacquiao-like (but painless) punch my heart had thrown against my chest.

I am easily startled. A handful of people at work know this and have taken to sneaking up from behind me and shouting "boo!" or "hah!" quite often, making me do any, or all, of the following: jumping, shrieking, shouting an expletive or two, and, always, that hard thump in the chest.

It could be the coffee.

Or not.

I am aware that it's natural to be startled when, well, we're caught off-guard, but lately, the intensity of the pounding in my chest whenever it happens has made me notice that it has, indeed, gone from natural to too much. A friend and I talked about it after the 7-Up episode and he agreed that it can't all be just the coffee (I like mine light on the caffeine, anyway, I mostly order mocha-flavored ones, except for those occasional really drowsy times when I have to force myself to be on the go, then I'd request for an extra espresso shot).

Perhaps I've built my wall piled too high with rocks that when it crumbles because I forget to stand guard, it crashes really loud and hard?

(clip art from clipart.com)

Just breezing by to say...

that I'm celebrating my blog's first anniversary this month!

Here's to more (and, hopefully, better) entries and more time to write them!

Arrggh!

And, yes, more bloggers to stalk!

Yey!

The Art of Curbing

You probably know how it is, when that tiny wail clamped inside your chest balloons into a huge lump of painful, ear-splitting screams. For some of us, it's easy to let it out. Never mind that the odds of being heard by the people two doors away are ninety-nine to one. It's as easy as one, two, three, scream! Then it's all over and you feel a thousand times better where it used to hurt like needlepricks.
For the less fortunate ones (namely, the repressed), shouting is out of the question. The thought of it just never comes, simply because it's not the natural instinct. We probably never learned the trick as children.We feel the gargantuan pain (and we're talking physical pain) shooting up from the chest to the throat and we push, push it downwards so that the effort makes breathing difficult that tears start to well up in the eyes. But we don't stop until we know for sure that we've dug deep enough to bury the scream. And, with it, the pain.
And then the tears never really come.They have retreated, pushed down, as well. And we think, what a feat it has been, what sweetness in the strength of temperance, one more victory for the taking.
Then we sit there staring at some grey wall, wondering when the scream will surface again.
Some person sees us and wonder what we're looking at.

I do not know what to make of this

A glass door crashes down to the floor and shatters into countless pieces.
I fall with the glass door and land, somehow, on top of it. My whole body is pierced by glass bits.
There is a sharp pain on my right elbow and there, a sizeable, triangular shard of glass is lodged.
I cry.

I find myself in the hospital, seated on a white couch. Someone, a man garbed in green, plucks out, unceremoniously, the chunk of glass from my elbow.
Incredulous, I look at the man, then at my elbow. I can see the bloody flesh inside. There is a hollow, a gap between my arm and forearm.
There is a piece of string sticking out.

Thinking, memory

Thinking does things to a person. It turns the mind into coils that, in turn, mesh into chaotic swirls that lead nowhere and, so it seems, have come from nowhere, too. And so you are driven into thinking even more, until you reach a place that’s precariously close to the brink; madness is there, lurking somewhere.

Memory is somewhat similar, but with a tamer air about it:

When the mind wants to remember, it gropes around for something to anchor itself on: a landscape, a scent, a face, a texture. A person afflicted with nostalgia, for example, finds himself probing into the recesses of his mind to trace the origin of an overwhelming smell of, say, roses, which has suddenly come upon him, one gray afternoon. He then follows it into traversing certain pathways. Along the way, he picks up images that interlace into a picture, even before this “trip” is over. A few steps before the final image, he suddenly thinks:
ah, yes, I remember.

By The Way...

Janis Joplin was the eldest sister of Joni Mitchell and Aimee Mann.

Tori Amos and Sarah Mclachlan were their cousins, and Loreena McKennitt was the aunt everyone shunned and feared (but secretly respected).

And Carly Simon must be somewhere in their family tree.

This wouldn't really make sense in real life (the chronology wouldn't stand half a chance), but, hey, you do get my point.

Right?

Thanks!

Aimee Mann Wishes She Had a River She Could Skate Away on...

Joni Mitchell must be the elder, milder-in-temperament sister of Aimee Mann.

If I were to put their portraits side-by-side, they would both be smiling: Joni Mitchell's would be wistful and Aimee Mann's would be sarcastic. But both smiles will be sad, that I'm quite sure of. Both will have a look of (faintly feigned) smugness about them--hey, they've both been there (wherever or whatever that may be), but Joni has emerged wise, knowing she's alive and has to make the best of things, anyway; while Aimee came out angry, struggling against her walls, realizing she's alive and that she has to live with it, anyway.

And so they wrote songs, and these songs were things they've said to each other, long, lonely conversations they've had on those nights when they held vigils under a watchful moon, or on those grey afternoons when there was nothing one could do but to keep one's mind company. They must've had grand times, laughing at the rest of the world because they knew that they knew more than the others did. But they must have argued, as well, oh yes, 'cause one of them was angry, don't forget, and one of them, wise. I'd like to think that it was Joni who usually won, but Aimee wouldn't have given up without putting up a fight. It didn't matter that she realized Joni was right, after all. It just wasn't in her to show that she agreed.

No need for a title (or: Do they sell these lines anywhere?)

The weird thing about getting what you want (and want so badly) is that there's always something else you have to give up. You have to let go of one thing, to make room for another. We are never completely happy, and it makes us even unhappier when we try to come up with ways to be happy. (Hmm. Three HAPPYs there, in the last sentence).
Why am I so fond of parenthetical statements? A few years back at a poetry class, one of my poems was on the hot seat and my professor, poet and scholar Chingbee Cruz (her first book is out, by the way), commented that I had a penchant for asides (in parentheses) and that I liked to quantify things. Why is this? she asked (all I could give for an answer was a shrug).
Yeah, yeah. I know I didn't have to enclose the last sentence in parentheses. But what the heck.
There's something so cute (and quirky) about smugness and sarcasm enclosed between two parallel lines curving toward each other (look closely-- don't they seem STILL moving closer together?) CLOSELY and CLOSER. (Hmm. Same root words.)
Just a curious question: Why in the world would a band call themselves DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE? (If there's anyone out there who can give me an answer, please raise your hand. Thanks.)
I started this entry with a somber tone, and I had every intention of sustaining the seriousness to the end. But somehow, I shifted, somewhere along the way (or somewhere in the FIRST paragraph, would you believe it was THAT early).
I jumped.
Yeah, I did. (Try it, it's nice.)
It seemed trite to continue in the way I began. I mean, happiness? How many people have written about finding JOY and FULFILLMENT (did I spell that right?) and CONTENTMENT and all those BIG words pointing at approximately the same meaning that we all keep hoping would turn into something tangible, but remain abstract, anyway? (Long sentence, that one.) We turn ourselves upside-down, and our minds inside-out, and still, we remain just about right, somewhere. And that makes us restless, makes us wonder: is this all there is to it? (Am I back at where I started?)

STONE

The smoke from my cigarette rises to the glass table top, forming rings of grey, undulating into bigger circles, centripetal waves, ephemeral, disappearing into the waft of a sibilant breeze, reminding me that I can, must, blink or else I'll turn into stone.
Stone. Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt has, in her Little Black Book of Stories, a short story called "The Stone Woman," which is an understatedly poignant tale of a woman whose grief turns her into stone. Jade, Agate, emerald, lapiz lazuli, ruby, diamond, quartz... How beautiful she must have looked, what splendor, how glorious it must have been to be something entirely different from, or, to be only an image of, what one used to be; to sense nothing, feel nothing, be nothing.
To be stone and not be. To not be anything but stone.
I have long ago taught myself, little by little, to close myself into a bud whenever I feel the threat of pain. People have called me hard-headed, stoic, cruel, stone-hearted. I have been misunderstood as being unfeeling. Heartless, even.
It's a trick, you see.
Consider: a fist clenching into itself; a dancer curling her body into an imperfect, human (but, perhaps I am being redundant) circle; a hand gripping an object it does not want to let go of.
Pain or no, turning oneself into stone is a skill that can be learned, an art that can be perfected. Grief is an unnecessary catalyst when one has mastered this craft. Because it is a craft that one has to go back to learning again, and again, if one is to be an expert at it.
I am slowly getting there. Just a few more polishes, and I will be the stone-woman I have always wanted to be.
For now, though, I must remember to blink. For now.

Once I Browsed

Consider the contrast between these two journal entries:

May 18, 2004
I do not remember exactly when my fixation with twilight began. The waning light of day and the lowered tone of the wind have such cathartic effects on me. It is perhaps my brooding nature and melancholic proclivities that find an affinity with this time of day, when everything mellows down to a quietness which calms even the most fiery of souls. The equilibrium between light and dark fills me with a sense of reflection. Dusk finds me in my most pensive state.

July 20, 2005
The rain is falling and it is awfully dark outside. It’s two fortyin the afternoon and yet it seems like twilight. There is a congruence to the words twilight and gloom.
Loneliness is a terrible thing. It makes the soul shrink unto itself, like there’s nowhere else to go except inwards, and one does not know what one will find there. Lonely. There is a sense of finality in the letters, as if there is nothing in between them, not even shadows. Just nothing.
Nothing.
The word sadness is altogether different. It seems incredibly mundane, when placed beside loneliness. Sadness is something temporary, like a thunderstorm on a summer’s day; one is sure it will go away, even as one basks in the middle of it.
But loneliness. It is twilight, and then the darkness that comes after twilight. It goes away, but is certain to come back. Daylight obscures it, but only for so long.
It is part of, if not the, landscape.
Loneliness, I have to confess, has become one of my favorite words.