I failed. And soon got up.

I was an hour-and-a-half-away from home when my sister asked me to buy bananas on my way home. When I got home at past 8 that night, she was already in bed, sleeping. I put down the bananas on the dining table and went straight to my working table, where a desk lamp is on, the only source of light in the room at night. I turned my laptop on and started reading the PDF Files about cities for a quiz tomorrow. From where I was sitting, I can see my sister’s closed eyes. They seem heavy, with dark circles around. They seem to tell me that they are too tired.

My sister is on training for a call center in Makati. She wakes up early to travel more or less an hour to get to work at 7 AM up until 3PM while also maintaining another ‘part-time’ job in the previous company where she worked full time. She is attending the training for the call center, ‘just so she could have regular monthly income,’ just before she gets out of the country to work in Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi… yes, in the Middle East, in Abu Dhabi. What’s in Abu Dhabi? I am scared to know the answer.

I haven’t been asking her about Abu Dhabi. Through eavesdropping, I have known that she’s leaving in March and she’ll be there for only 6 months, but may extend depending on her work performance. I am scared. I am scared of whatever will happen to her there. I want to blame my parents for her leaving, but I can only blame myself.

I am extending my years in school because I failed an architecture course. I feel so weak. I feel so guilty. I feel responsible for every wrong turns that’s happening in her life – especially, not going to Law School, which was her initial plan. I know she will make a good lawyer, but I just robbed her of the opportunity to be one simply by being with her, by depending on her.

And that’s also what I am doing to the most important man in my life. Simply by being with him, I pull him down. That the things I thought were helping him were actually things he feels bad about.

I am not doing a very good job in anything I do. I fail in school, thinking it is more important to spend my time building relationships, making them stronger. But then, just as I thought I was building relationships and making them stronger, I was actually destroying it. As a sister, I have already made the biggest sin of my life – robbing her of her dreams. And for the only reason which makes me hold on to dear life aside for my big dreams, I am nothing but a failure.

What are left of me now are my big dreams. And I can only dream alone. For I cause no good to the people I love the most, who made me dream big, bigger than what I think I am capable of. In return, I gave them disappointments and I constantly fail to make them feel what I want them to feel… loved.

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,

without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.

Well, need i say more? For the lack of any other better words, or better skills in combining words such as this, I bow. For this may be mediocrity, borrowing words of someone else to speak for me. I am no Pablo Neruda. But I think in this poem, I am.

Four sachets of coffee today

For the last few nights, I had dreams of attempted murder and rape, of people wanting to take advantage or kill me. But for all those dreams I have successfully saved myself by running away. Without knowing where to go, hoping some place else could be safe... running as fast as my heart would allow me and I can only ask God to make it stronger this time, until I'm light-years away from danger.

The nights are becoming scary for me. And the moment I wake up, I feel restless.