Fury

Once upon a time, I had a small apartment in Manila. The living condition was bad--but good for a cloistered inexperienced writer. A thin plywood of a wall separates my room from another, where a family of four lives. My daily alarm was one of two things: the loud noises from the television set; and on really bad days, the strong reek of fried fish (the smell I hate the most). When it rains, I am properly sheltered, with cockroaches and lizards and everything not-so-nice as guests.

It was a ramshackle of a place. But with a few clothes, a dinosaur laptop, and my head, it was all I have. It was what I can afford after running away from home to claim my so-called independence.

The room was good enough for one person. Having a guest is okay, granted that we won't move. The only saving grace was a small bookshelf beside my bed, which holds my prized books. My writing desk was placed in front of a miniscule open window. The view wasn't inspiring: rusty roof tiles and the grey polluted landscape far farther away. The ambiance was far from a writer's idyllic retreat. But the writing was sublime. In this god-forsaken poverty-drenched spot, I found my freedom and my voice as a writer.

Ten hours a day, I made stories, typing words after words, creating meanings, making secrets only me and my other half understand. Nothing stopped me, not hunger nor the beckoned of the bed. That was my bat cave, my small four-corner writing paradise.

The silence then was warranted, bearable, pleasurable even. And the noise, though in multitude, always disappeared in the countless string of words. I never had that life again.

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I want to write something to appease myself, or rather, to find an answer. I am the type of writer who solves everything while at the process of writing: the loophole, the missing device, the hidden emotion. The act, which is my other half, is more technical; its process too fundamental to create disambiguation in the mind.

But things have been looking down lately.

There is, within me, a fury that never fades, a constant tension that seeks no explanation, no words, no reason, no meaning. It exists, a lava of repressed thoughts and emotions, of weird unexplainable passions, coiling, swirling, reeling, teetering to explosion.

But then it disappears, only to appear again sometimes, when I'm alone with existentialist thoughts, wondering why life ended up being as it is, why moments never matter anymore, why people became hard shells of nothingness. Sometimes I know what's happening. Most of the time, I don't. I am trapped in a vicious cycle of elucidation and evasion: it comes, it lingers, it throbs, it fades. It burns.

I turn to books, to writing, to lunch with friends, to movies, to everything I used to enjoy. I want to find the core of that fury and snip it out so I can find value in my current reality. But things never look up. Its looking from my balcony and watching hundred other windows, wondering what lies within those small estates, and realizing after a great deal of wasted time, that people's inner turmoils are secrets I will never understand.

Most of the time, I just want to stop thinking and lie on the floor, wait for the world to move, leave, fade; wait for the world to disappear and suck me in. (Shit, I'm becoming damning sentimental.)

But sometimes, like today, I assume that fury roots from a hundred unwritten stories; people's baggage and emotions occupying a spot in my psyche. Lives that never found fulfillment in my paper because I'm too occupied to write them, or rather, I'm too confused to find its essence in writing.

Stories that haunt and conquer, suffusing, until our pain becomes one. - 1/6/2014