Dykconstructions

Ugh.. Such a Sucker for Endings

Posted on December 24, 2006.

“Happily ever after is only possible on a day to day basis.”–
Can’t remember

“Happiness is a choice. Not a tagline.” –Dana

 

My best friend, Dana, who I fondly call “time travel girl” airs
her view on Christmas and year enders. She wonders what all the rush and fuss is
all about when, really, the year just rolls on over and doesn’t quite stop. It’s
like the craze over how people thought the year 2000 would usher in Armageddon.
It’s like all this shenanigan about a disc world resting on top of ancient tortoises
standing on giant elephants held in place by serpents, when, really, the world
is round not flat and such edges and things do not exist except in myth and in invisible
meridians in our heads.

 

Flashback to this really cheesy movie that I cried watching,
where a lover brings his girl to this border that divides one state from
another so she could be at two places at one time: her dying wish.

 

We’ve become such suckers for stories and moments that make
time seem infinite, Dana and I. I hate that she taught me the poetry of 11:11,
and now I’m obsessed with it.

(11:11’s)

She hates that I taught her the concept of
synchronicity, because now she can’t stop finding it everywhere. All the while she
cautions me with my overacting and overactive mind to stop reading meaning into
everything. “Some things are just chaotic and should be taken for what they are,”
a recap of a hard lesson from this ‘Year of unintended consequences’ as another
friend aptly dubbed it. Time knelt down on one knee and in a solemn, painful
genuflection, the year was knighted with the title. The sword almost swiped off
its ears, mind you.

 

I took ‘time travel girl’ to this secret ritual place where I once saw the
longest rainbow I’ve ever seen in my life. Looking at the cliff-side view of
manila’s skyline at night beside an acacia tree, we say under our breaths: the
edge of the world. Its still there. Its a cliff to hurl our woes in,
cast our prayers to. While breathing in wet grass stirred with Christmas air, what
I call the smell of loneliness, she calls the perfume of quiet. What I call my desire
for the impossible and my ignorance of how to quit, she calls the eternal
dreamer in me that believes that hope wins out and the impossible can be had.

 

The edge of the world: we can even capture it in pictures
and make them our phone’s wallpaper. The built in ‘moment camera’ in our heads.
Our ‘ritual detector’ goes off and bleeps incessantly while we (over) document a
lonely tree snagged and bound with Christmas lights.

“A dozen pictures of the same tree in multiple angles, d’
you think its enough?”

“Well, now it feels like a celebrity, don’t it?”

 

Invisible meridians,
but they’re there.

I share the history of the place with time travel girl: how I cried finding God
there, first acknowledging the air vitality globules as angels bearing
particles of enlightenment. Light: the more we keep on acknowledging it, being
grateful to it, the more we keep on seeing it.

 

Seeing the view of the rooftops as a metaphor for the
craters of our lives, we realize: the highs give us vantage point, while the
lows carve out a magnificent view that we will watch in nostalgia with as we
look on from the heights.

 

We go back to the the history of the place:  how I asked my first girlfriend to be with me
there, sitting in the middle of the lawn picnic style in a blue neon mat even
though there’s a glaring red “no admittance” sign just outside. So what if all
these damn priests could be watching, I wanted to kiss her but I was too
chicken and so I lied and told her I dropped a ballpen, and while she looked
for the non-existent pen in the sea of green blades, I caught her off guard long
enough for a hug that ended up as a cuddle. She said ‘yes,’ and we proceeded to
finding one of the happiest years of our lives together until the whole thing fell
apart. (When it ended, I also came back there to throw my curses to the abyss.)

 

My mentor in hypnosis, the most evolved man I know, lives
behind this place as well and he too loves the view of the lights at night. To
me, they look like bejeweled holy Hindu elephants. He considers the view a metaphor
for inner and outer states: subjective and objective reality. You can look at
the glass to see your face’s reflection, or you can look at the window to the
vast outside world: choose.

 

*The cliff is perspective.  Dana and I sat in silence for quite a time,
knowing and understanding each other’s quiet as only old friends would.She was already wearing the
purple Nepalese invisible cloak I gave her for Christmas. After
the moldy wooded bench we were sitting on gave out, we thought it a sign to end
our solemn mecca of breaking and entering. On our way out we pass by
my hypnosis mentor, the one who reminds me of an ancient tortoise.Squatting to squeeze out the
gate, certain body parts awkwardly snagging on the moist metals, we exclaim it’s
harder getting out than in.

“Oh god, can’t there just not be a metaphor for
everything?!”  she quips.
“Well, I’m just grateful for yoga.”

 

Fast forward to a late Christmas eve, catching up coffee
session: I tell a circle of close, trusted friends, that it is friendship, more
than our consuming romantic loves, that bring us back to ourselves: the slow
steady fire versus the rapture of burning out. Friendship is the miracle of
misery plus misery equals happiness, stupidity plus stupidity equals
brilliance. It’s about going through the costly and impractical “detours” –yes,
a euphemism for getting lost—and not minding ‘cause heck at least there’s
good conversation along the way. 

 

Such holy transmutations. The mystery of the infinite
loaves. (even better than the revolving fruitcake!) It couldn’t have come from
us. We only brought so much food and we didn’t even wanna share them in
the first place! Eitherway we ended up fed and full in an unintended
feast. (Hmm. Is this why I’m getting
fat??)

 

Back to the edge of this page: an illusory ending, when
really there is none. Only me deciding, ‘Ahh, it is enough.’  “Surrogates are the real thing, you know,” I tell my support
group, my surrogate life partners. The
more you acknowledge and feel grateful for it, the more you see it.

My
friend the time travel girl says ‘what’s all this fuss about Christmas and year
enders when really, time just rolls right over and never stops.’ In writing, this device is called ‘bookends.’ It hopes to give
you deja vu, because really, I’m just repeating what I said in the beginning. But
oh, so much memory and so much longing and so much friendship and so much love have happened since
then. The end is the beginning is the end. The edge of the world just shrugs and rolls right on over. Was
Columbus or Magellan terribly disappointed or happily surprised? For my friends
and i, however, though boy, how we like flirting with the idea of it, we’re
just grateful for not falling off the edge.

 

“This year, this year, we are humbled,” my friend,
the time travel girl says. In the ceasing of this year, rightly dubbed the
year of unintended consequences, we sigh , show respect, and genuflect.

We honor the invisible meridians—useless if not for the break-in rituals and forgotten if not for the lines of shared memory. Today, however,
at this moment, I am in two places at the same time.

 

 

 

 

December 25, 2006
3:30am

i looked at the dictionary and *unintendedly* meridian means:

Meridian a. relating to noon. 1 noon 2 line of longitude
passing though poles and cutting equator at right angles. 3 zenith

 
Zenith n. point of heavens directly overhead; fig highest
point, climax; acme.

(hehe.)

 

*picture not from the actual place to protect its identity. no, you can’t know where the secret ritual place is. it’s
mine. mwahahaha.

*Thanks, emer for the term “the year of unintended
consequences.”

Make A Comment: ( 3 so far )

3 Responses to “Ugh.. Such a Sucker for Endings”

Comments RSS Feed

Where's The Comment Form?