I was relatively happy. I'd just come from a reunion with three of my bestest friends--Maris, Bianca, and Nikka. I needed this break. We all did. We hadn't been able to see each other as much, what with them going to medschool, and me having to go to the office every single day. Day before yesterday, we met at Trinoma, ate a Japanese lunch in Oki Oki till we burst our tummies, then went to Bianca's house to get singing, guitaring, and drumming to Rockband. We were too tired to go home so we decided to just sleepover after having a pizza-dvd marathon.
When we parted ways, I felt trashed--the way I did before we met up. I was walking my usual, on my way to the GMA-Kamuning MRT station. But while walking I noticed the emptiness of my surroundings. The one or two people who passed me by might as well have been ghosts. The streets were quite empty save for a few cars and buses. Dead leaves were rolling over my feet. Empty.
Then I realized the emptiness wasn't coming from this external space, but inside me. It's that same feeling that crops up within me from time to time. I feel like I can paint/write/run...do everything I want, but at the end of all this movement and activity, there's only stagnation.
Empty. Is not the word for my surroundings. My mind was simply describing the state of my soul. And when I tried to reach down deep into this "soul," I couldn't find it either. There was only that void. I wonder if others feel this as well. Or others see this in me that's why they treat me in certain, unpleasant ways, like I'm not worth a second thought (or that's just Self-pity rearing its ugly head in my depressed state).
Why, when all is quiet and peaceful, there is not actually peace but emptiness? The vacuum of space may very well be just a reflection of our lives. We move in orbits within this nothingness of existence. Sometimes our orbits might intersect, but the time is too short to form any real ties. In the end we go our separate ways.
Is this always the case? Will God go His separate way, as well?
I wish I hadn't thought of these things. Events in the past few days may have precipitated this agitated post.
Maybe I was burned out. Maybe I wasn't sure about myself anymore. The ups and downs of my moods have always been hell to deal with. I know I will feel better again. But it comes to a point when what I feel doesn't matter anymore. I just want answers to these (seemingly) unanswerable things.
4 comments:
sadness also passes. but knowing how you feel when you feel it counts for a lot. i was also inexplicably sad for many years when i was younger, so i can relate with what you wrote. i guess one of the gifts of being a writer or artist is that one can at least transform the sadness into beauty... :)
That's true, Les, that's why even if our being artists makes us sometimes too sensitive, I wouldn't trade it for anything else. :D
As a 5-year-old, and onward, I'd be hit with what I'd call "the gray Sunday afternoon" sadness: dread of the coming week, fear of separation from my parents, nameless guilts. Reaching menarche gave me confidence that the body had its reliable continuities, and I also purposively "remade" my self-image, as only a naive adolescent can dare do; the transformation (illusory as it may have been) from fearful child to self-confident adult stood my in good stead from then on. I also arrived at the realization that those inchoate but real apprehensions -- melancholia, as the Romantic poets called the condition -- were the font of my writing: I had to talk to myself to fill the gray chasms. That's why we write, Anne: to throw our voices across the abyss, and hear the echo...or perhaps the voice of another, if one is lucky.
That was beautiful, Ma'am Rowena. Yes, sometimes we strain our ears to hear the echo. But we might be missing the voices of others as well, which I think I tend to do when I am fixated on my sadness.
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