Frankendee

I’ve taken to too much musing again, of late. I can tell, from the collection of cigarette butts in my bathroom bin, and within that other one I keep outside our apartment door. I remember a few years after college, when my lola—Mommy, we called her—saw me smokin’ smokes atop that itty-bit of stairs fronting our old house in Sto. Rosario, she said, nagyoyosi ka pala, masarap mag-isip ‘pag naninigarilyo no?, and—with apologies to non-smokers and everyone else opposed to its effects—I can’t help but agree.

Smokes + musings they go oh-so-well together, don’t they? And it is so much better if you throw in a couple of your bestest friends, a few rounds of beers, a cool night breeze, and then you’re probably set for a well-remembered, fun episode. In the lonesome regions of my bedroom however, with cobwebs hangin’ down from the ceiling, with its paint peelin’ off the wall, with dusty blinds thumpin’ onto my window’s metal panes, broken only by the sound of an airplane takin’ off for the last flight of the day, with the clock tickin’ by ever so s-l-o-w-l-y, ahh, musings (and a few smokes now and then) only provide the invitation for one to go a little loony.

Or—the burning itch to write.

And such that I’ve already fed my crazies so much—with fruit and cheese, and inebriated it with bottle upon sweet bottle of red wine, because by golly, my cuckoos are way too chic—I will simply make them go on a diet. So that I can nourish my drying well for writing, ‘coz it’s been achin’ for some lovin’. With my forced staycation, I had also stumbled upon a new book to draw inspiration from, parallel to the fact that life, my life, is an never-ending fodder for the writing muse.

When I started this blogspace, I bought a small black notebook to jot down little life stories I wanted to write about. Largely, and perhaps inevitably, they are intertwined with how I define myself: dreams, habits, lists, home, health, friends, poetry, work. It’s a bit self-centered, but then honey, read the blog description, I had indicated that this is all about me.

Or not. The first few times I posted something here, I was really anxious about revealing my feelings to the world. But then again, through the many years I’ve kept this blog, I realized that only a few have read it in its entirety (down goes my ego), and for the handful who did, I’m glad to have been told that it amused them, it made them go awww, it kept them going. Ah, does that make me part of a symbiotic relationship? I feed my muses as I write, and when someone stumbles upon it, I help drive away their lonelies. Yup, I’d like to think I may have helped a lonely soul, or two.

Writing—and sharing how I feel—gives me a sense of meaning, of being. It helps me encapsulate a particular juncture in time, when the words team up, they get together, have a party. They toot horns, shout hooray, and I celebrate with them—as only I can, because we have worked our asses off just to get here, so happy we are that we’re finally done with our work.

But writing also forces me to think of a beginning, of a middle, and of an end—to this tale, to my litany, to this method in my madness. And you can very well say that I over-analyze, over-contemplate, over-whatever, ayysweetheart, that’s just the way the way I am, was, will be, I can go on and on in my head in circles, but then again writing compels me to put a stop, a period, a pause—so that we can move on to the next line, to the subsequent chapter, to another story. They are much more exciting anyways, and I know ‘coz I’m spinning the yarn and it will be one of a happy ending.

And now that I had forced the thoughts out, now that I’ve emptied my musing purse, that I’ve gone the length and then back, all the while watching the smoke flit float away, just to see to it that the well’s full again, that the land’s blissfully drenched, let it be written that the monster has been sated, if only for a little while.

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Pictured: Bugs, an ink illustration