Whoever you are, please identify yourself. I don't mean any harm, but you seem very intent on visiting my site every hour of every day. If you are an ordinary surfer interested in exchanging links, I'd gladly oblige. If you are The Stalker--well, well, well. I've met you at last.

Want some dish served Klingon-style?

So I continued my resignation which I previously retracted. I don't know if I should be happy or not but all the beautiful words seem to float about the moment they know that you're leaving. Upon revealing it to a colleague based in New Mexico and passing the baton to him, he said "I'm sure gonna miss you." And all the appreciation he lavished on the way I handle heated meeting conversations across the Pacific among three cultures at 8AM every Tuesday.

I find no issue in a 50-year old American engineer repeatedly telling that he will be missing me and eagerly saying sure that I will keep in touch with him. Anyhow he's not the only American who said that to me. Different cultures, different meanings.

Anyway.

Heard Love Spit Love's "Am I Wrong" on a taxi radio last night while going home, and item #2 on my Could-Have-Been list came about. So is this blog going to be all about the CHB's I have in my life? No. And God willing, hope the wife does not find out. But Item #2 has been there since high school but after she turned me down in that afternoon beside the Transport Studies building underneath a papaya tree, she degenerated like Isabel Granada's career. Healthwise, appearance-wise, and probably, intellect-wise. I digress on the latter because she is completing her graduate studies in economics. She might have won it but she lost me. I lost her too.

I don't know why or how, but it seems like the people who wronged me met the dark sister of their fates. Like that womanchild now five months pregnant courtesy of a married man. Like that hesitant kisser now under the curse of singlehood. Well. I need to move on. 

And now for the ultimate, 246-million pesos question on the 6/42 draw: where will I go gymming? I'll miss the in-house gym we have in our office, and how the weights have responded to my body. Plus the fact that that membership is free. The new office that I will be joining does not have one, and I forgot to state it during the salary negotiation. Erghk. I'm looking at Slimmers' World in Pasay Road just near Dusit. The plus is I can go there straight from the Laguna office on commute. The minus is I've heard they're not that good in helping thin people transform into beef.

And then there is this 50-peso a session near our apartment, called TaraGym. Like Tarajing Potpot (was this a movie in the '60s?). It has a badminton court called TaraCourt on the first floor. Guess what the name of the owner is. Har har. Gold's Gym and Fitness First may be within the budget later on but I am not a star to consistently maintain--and invest in--a bod anyway. But a friend said that may motivate me to go to the gym often so that what I paid will be sulit.

Some people may scoff at why this is what I am worried about and not the stock options, car loan or housing assistance perks that the new company offers. Call me mababaw, but the benefits of the new and the old are comparable, but this time, with an almost 2x the compensation I was getting from the old, I am more purchasing-powerful. It's the little things that I'll be worrying now. Laptop? None, but I will afford to get one.

By the way, I am posting a new profile pic. It's not me. But I hope I will be, someday. Now let me in on my worrying. It's the object of my motivation.

18 JUNE 2004

A young man walks behind the steel railings across Tower Records in Glorietta. His hand swipes the wooden trimming with his hand and takes a deep breath. He contemplates about a friend who has gone to another country and has never written back. An escalator brings in people from outside, out of their offices to inhale the artificial fresh air of the mall. He stayed there for a minute or two, watching and being watched before proceeding to the bookstore behind him. An actor from a local reality show and his mother sip coffee at a cafe opposite him.

Eight days ago he was with his best friend talking about going to another country the next day, over the steel railings. His friend is waiting for his wife, who later will be introduced to him. An hour ago they were walking within the Ayala Terminal towards the newly-renovated department store. His friend was grateful that he knew the path, else he would go down from the station and walk in the harsh afternoon sun.

They were supposed to part at Tower Records because he will proceed to Powerbooks at Greenbelt to search for a photography magazine. It was really an excuse to be with his best friend until the last minute before going to the United States. He was strangely ashamed to admit that he will definitely miss him by tomorrow. The last in the circle of his friends who have gone, have or have not heard of again.

He would change his mind and go to Tower Records to read Alan Lightman, and finds that his friend is still there, hands over the steel railings, waiting for his wife. He joins him and his friend talks about how he hates the waiting game that his wife plays on him. When the wife finally appears and was introduced, they part and he proceeds to the bookstore.

In this world time is a straight arrow but scientists were able to establish the existence of tunnels that can go back to a specific point, technically known as wormholes. Everybody can choose which point they can go back to--the last minutes before friends part forever, the kiss and the embrace of a forgotten lover, the wisp of tobacco from a grandmother's breath, the first ray of sunshine after a monsoon.

The arrow of time is like a personal railroad track, like the young man, every person can choose to go back to the terminals he has laid down. These people would go back time and again to the happiest events in their lives and would be contented with what has happened, while others go on straight ahead willing to go back someday through the backdoor of time.

The young man would be at the railings, stare at people coming in, take a deep breath, at exactly the same time they parted. A Monday later his friend finally writes a letter to him and he was happy. Finally, he said, another terminal that I can go back to, closing and reopening the letter, like the moment he received it fresh from the post office. The smell of ink wafts to his nose as it did when he first opened his friend's letter.

In this world everybody is permitted to go back to a previous time, their heartbeats slow down but their minds grow to maturity, for every travel they make bears a new perspective to the events that previously took shape before their eyes. An ardent lover writes the same letter of courtship to a woman who did not remit his passion, in the hope of finally reciprocating his love. But in this world, in the tunnel of time, he was the only one who came back.

The woman proceeds to marry an engineer, bears two daughters, and graduates at the Ateneo Graduate School of Business, but keeps receiving the same letter. The lover whines at the unrequitted love but chose to go back at the exact moment when he writes exactly the same words on the same perfumed stationery. He traps himself in a capsule of happiness that only existed in that point in the arrow of time.

In this world, the heart remains a child. It wants to come back to the terminal of its choice in the tracks of time, as soon as possible. A balloon, a lollipop, a toffee right here, right now. Its revenge is in the form of a sulk. It seeks the laughter of its woman, the tenderness of a forbidden kiss in the stairwell, the tightness of a friend's parting embrace.

This world is a subway full of people who want to go back at their own schedule, in their own cabins, to their chosen points in time.

Such a small world. Callalily forwarded a mail today from her friend working in a cigarette company who's been consistently e-mailing her everyday. I didn't notice until today that one of the recipients was a chillingly familiar name.

Six degrees of separation down to two.

She was one of those that made it to my Could-Have-Been list. I caught her with a smile during our morning stretch exercise back then, to the tune of Rick Astley's "Together Forever".

How appropriate. Just how I always feel when I see a could-have-been on Friendster or on the street, at a fishball stand in UP or in Mang Jimmy's. Music just seems to fill my head--Dionne Warwick's "Going Out of My Head" or Mark Sherman's "Changes in My Life." Yup, even the soundtrack from Beauty and the Beast.

A pair of red hearts would throb on my eyes plus a bigger one on my chest complete with a thump thump sound effect as she puts on a toothpaste-perfect smile with a bling bling flash to complement my thump thump. I would run slow motion to her and we would get rolling on a lawn, or on the beach. It is always picture, no, movie-perfect. As perfect as Sharon Cuneta and Gabby Concepcion's. Or Kris Aquino and Rene Requiestas'. As in the 80's.

Awr, it's becoming cheesy. We sang at the karaoke (called minus ones--no videokes yet). We went out on an excuse. We had it mutual, to the point that I was already introduced to her parents. It was a forbidden relationship though, and I had to give in. I know I really liked her and I know she liked me too. Even if we were already far from each other.

And now she's married. Could have been my surname on the dash after her last name. Could have been the mother of my children. Could have had a different soundtrack aside from Depeche Mode's "A Question of Lust." Could have been worse. Could have been better.

I'll never know. It won't be and never will, not in this lifetime.

You might have drifted here by accident or by invitation. Either way I know the universe meant for us to meet and that is acceptable. You might be the one who took my life in my previous incarnation but I will not care anymore. Go on, come in. The litmus paper of emotional integrity will stay blue in the face of acidity, and that is me. You cannot put me down. My body will blog.

In the utility van of life I'd rather sit beside the driver. I do not know how to drive but someday I will. It's easier to come out without an obligation to be the first to open the passenger door first, nor an afterthought of others stepping down in the name of consideration and courtesy.

They call it the death seat. Now that's good.