A year.

2011 is yet another year. A number. It was not quite the life I expected to be in all honesty.

I specifically remembered the time I wanted to be in control of my life. Also, to regain the zeal of seeing the light of every dawn. The jollity of each forthcoming day. The subtlety of every midnight hours. Being able to sleep regular hours. Inadvertently, the more I wanted to be in control, the more out of control my life went. I lose sight of things but in some ways it wasn’t as damaging as I thought it would be. If it were that easy to let certain ideals and passion slip through me just like grains of sands through my fingers, perhaps it was worthed letting go after all.

And then, death. Seeing my mom crumble at the sight of my grandma onto her deathbed was quite a life-altering experience. I didn’t know whether my tears were of regrets or of sheer sadness. Watching death lingering around the corner wasn’t an easy experience. I had to handle the distance of being in camp. In some senses, this gave me this profound sense of hope. Through a resilience and awareness of the fragility of life that gnaws at every soul each day, we amass a courage that spurs the need to live life back to normalcy. I could tell it wasn’t easy for my mom but it means that it won’t be easy too seeing my mom go when I make it at her age.

There are episodes that reveals me as a character that I would despise myself. It sucks really, that certain events that would shape me as an adult are the very experiences that has damaged me inexplicably. Was this what people meant when I hold on too much to a some values I live by? I want to be in comfort of who I am, and in the comfort of how people feel at ease of who I am. Things weren’t as easy as I thought. I am not growing any younger. In my defense, I am less bitter than what I could have been. Very much, less. Too much I appear happy to conceal, but I believe, this was the more convenient alternative.

Of distances and spaces. Its not really sad if you are distanced to people who were once your confidante, your talk-cock kakis, and having to see who was once your secret-keeper moving to some other individual. Emotional distancing. This is a fact of life and honestly, its easy to re-patch if you know the means to (and do it like a mature individual while at it–afterall, you’ve shared the worst of times). What is really sad is the internal emotional distancing of myself. This is usually fazed by the worst choices I made. It’s really sad when you don’t identify how things makes you feel. What was once the core of my jollity has been rendered to spaces in parenthesis; sidelined and sometimes forgotten. Perhaps this is loneliness speaking, making everything inside me devoid of sensation.

Of late, she asked me this which made me doubt my personal affection towards her. “Do people fall in love or do people fall for the notion of being in love?” Is there really a dichotomy? Being devoid of it inadvertently spurs the heart to fill the void, telling the mind that we need (or want) to be in love. Why do we see the need  compartmentalize things? How could we investigate the genuity of love anyway when the thought of it only doubts the individual in question.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad this year. But the bad has made me feel sick of things. It made me a more scared soul behind all this facade. I want to return to life of normalcy, the ones that I’ve always been used to. But my mind is telling me its not worthed it. Again, is it worth going forth with things in life that would distance me from my usual self? Is it comfortable being someone new that you wouldn’t know?

A year it has been.