Teeter

I am Paul.

I like to walk.

Actually, I love to walk.

You probably have heard a lot of me from a girl who happens to be my woman. Remember when you once – maybe twice, no, make that many times – read of her giving up on her man?

Yes, I am that man. I give her a lot of reasons to break the preliminary cord that in time will permanently bind us unbreakably as one. I display weaknesses that may seem trivial to most of you but mean like larger than life for her. I retaliate by hurling equally non-cursing but hurtful words when she draws first blood. I show lack of patience as of late, allowing myself to get affected by some personal and domestic problems which shouldn’t come in our way as lovers.

Yes, I am that man.

And I love to walk.

The sun has concealed in the blink of an eye. Darkness fills the sky. Drizzles from heaven signal imminent doom for castle-makers by the shore today: Either gigantic sea waves from Poseidon wash your castle away or the merciless rain from Zeus will.

Walk Paul. This is the best time to walk.

And think.

Have I been unfair?

Am I unfair?

I hope not. I spoke to a colleague about the guilt that strikes someone who quenches in the fun but knows his woman is alone, frustrated by the fact that she can’t do anything to be with him. As I walk beside the shore, after the facades of crooked smile and forced wackiness, I know this as much:

Either I make it up to her, or I lose my mind, my heart, and my woman forever.

I’m actually hearing voices in my mind, especially considering I’ve been a carefree guy most of my life.

…If she’s too much whimsical, leave her.
…Women who don’t control their temper as well as they do to their words aren’t for keeps.
…There are a lot of women out there who can make me happy by doing things my way.
…There are a lot out there always available at any time, unlike her.

Sigh. 

Okay, I lied. Those aren’t actually the voices I’m talking of that resound in my head every time I mess things up. Those are actually words she said, or in some ways, made me feel about us after a verbal melee.

Do you remember the fragile vase I talked about in this page, serially?

She’s that vessel. I broke her, needlessly shattered her into thousands of pieces. And whatever happens, even if she’s the one who will mess things up, I will always take in consideration that because of my weaknesses that I displayed many times before, she can cut the string between us at any time. She can tire anytime. And she’s going to leave me anytime.

As I dove one last time, skin sun-burnt and all, I took a moment to think of one thing under the water:

I would love her to be with me in times like these.

With or without the beach, sunny Sunday afternoon or lonely Thursday nights, I want only her with me.

And if that means waiting for years before I can take her hand and eventually realize that thing in my thoughts, so be it. Right now, I’m going to hate myself every time we both screw our relationship up. Hurtful words, thoughtless actions – Nah. Whatever people may say, I still believe everything’s been my doing.

 
After I take a bath to wash the saline taste of seawater off my body, I take a walk beside the shore, one last time.


Walk, Paul.

The day is ending.

Someone a hundred miles away is crying.

And at any time, that someone in my heart can be leaving.

Broken Jars, Screaming Turtles, and Empty Promises

I looked like a bludgeoned warrior without any armaments. My hands were bloodied, my knees and legs gashed as well from falling from the top. My bones – well – felt like broken and almost my whole body had numbed. Nighttime was fast approaching; the cold winds of January nights still remind someone how cold Decembers could physically be. And obviously, with the cold night breezing icy winds on my battered and bloodied body? I wouldn’t make it tomorrow; I’ll have died by the time the sun rises.

Somehow, I felt like my prayers were answered; after about half an hour, I glued all of the pieces together. I realized it’s time to bring the fragile vessel home, intact, inside a container out of other people’s reach. As I was driving home, I began seeing the bigger picture: What caused the jar to slip out of my hands, fall down and crash into pieces? My carelessness is to blame. I had been a careless handler of things before, and try as I may with handling it with care, I shouldn’t have taken the vessel to the limits where it could be broken.

Somehow out of my folly, my carelessness prevailed. Sigh.

Now that everything has been glued altogether, it’s time to ask the look-ahead question: How can the vessel be prevented from breaking a second time around?

Simply put: Stop making your loved one expect for any castles in the air. Stop running about, telling your lady things she wanted to hear, and quickly forgetting everything about it. A fragile vase should never be exposed in the open again, considering it had been broken before. Having it glued together means one thing: It might the same to the eyes of beholders especially when painted brand-new, but a crack is still a crack. It may look as fragile as before, but in reality it’s actually ten times more fragile now than it was before. When shattered the second time around, the fragments may not be glued together anymore. If at first, it was already hard for me to glue the pieces back, the fragments might be smaller the next time the jar drops and breaks.

In other words, I’m currently safeguarding our relationship. Ground Zero it is – I’m trying to build an empire after a building collapsed and shattered into thousands of debris. The next time a collapse happens again, there will definitely be no more last chances.

Everything boils down to this: Go through hell-like ordeals – if needed – just to safeguard a relationship that’s starting to rebuild itself after a monumental failure and disappointment.

Aftermath

     I’m going insane.




     That isn’t an aberration; it’s simply normal. Sages say it’s typical for people emotionally active to feel like being on the verge of breaking down.

     When our relationship was shattered after hitting the rocky shore from the precipice above, I knew I had to pick up all the pieces together and try my best to put all of them back – one by one. Picking up a piece of broken vessel requires expertise, or else your hands would end up bloodied by gashes from the sharp edges of the vessel fragments. Since I’m not an expert myself, my hands were already a bloody mess after just picking a handful of pieces. Yes, I must admit: I’m not an expert in handling relationships. I used to be a chauvinistic pig before, making it easier for you to understand my acknowledgment. I never really was the type of man you would want handling a delicate situation in a certain relationship; I’d simply go away.

     This time, however, I finally grasped what my lady means to me – the most integral part of my world after God and my family. I fully understood it in the way that I knew I had to make amends and start from the bottom, or else I’d have nowhere to turn to. I chose this world, and I love it so much I’ll lose my mind if she goes away.

     And that’s where the insanity comes into play.

     Despite being wounded, my hands simply wouldn’t give up on trying to put everything back, even though the sun has started to set. Nighttime will soon follow, and I know that without light it would be impossible for me to do what I have to. I can’t carry the vessel with me; home is about a mile away, and the fragility of the vessel couldn’t stand other conditions as well. If I leave it broken overnight and come back tomorrow, someone else may come and fix it before I do, making the vessel his property. I’ve spent my life looking for the right, fragile vessel, only to carelessly drop it from the cliff above. Now I’m losing my mind as I try my best to glue them all back again.

     Nighttime is quickly approaching. God knows I need all the help I could get. Admittedly, I’m tiring up; I’m never used to doing this, but now I know I have to. This is for my long-term happiness.



     Yes, you’ve read perfectly, as stated above: I’m going insane.

Post-Partum Angst

      Our relationship was plunging headfirst down from the precipice of confidence and love. Somehow, doubt and mistrust crawled its way up, caught up with our relationship and flailed its arms and pushed it over the edge of the cliff. As it plunges down the rocky seashore below, I realized the intricacy of the situation: Only two things can save this relationship which, at first, was something of a crag for us when everything in this world seemed contradictory to us.

     Love is not one of those; neither trust. Not even confidence.

     As I was losing grip of everything I practically was living and fighting for, I realized I had to make a resolve just to save our relationship: I should be honest. And whatever happens, I should be humble enough to acknowledge that I caused everything to fall apart.

     And now that our relationship is heading down for its own destruction, I’m trying my best to salvage even just a part of it. I realized I can live with a part of our relationship still present, than not having any of it at all anymore.

     I put the blame on myself. You probably know the nature of men, right? Men always think about sex, don’t speak their minds that much, and tend to conceal some things even from their most beloved ones. My situation lies under the third premise.

     I have the tendency to hide some things from others, since I think it wouldn’t make any difference if they knew. But I was wrong. There are some things that I need to tell the person I gave myself to, and practically I came to thinking that she needs to know everything about me. This may flabbergast you, but I’ve been working on it for more than two years now. This hasn’t been the guy chauvinists look up to some time ago. What I am now and what I’m trying to be isn’t the same as who I was and what I had been. If I didn’t feel like letting people know of my whereabouts and activities, then they’d have to deal with it. I used to think that they’d have to adjust to me, or else brood over their loss if I tire up and leave them.

     This time, though, the winds have changed. A childhood friend hypothesized that maybe the entire jinx in the world that I had afflicted I now experience. It doesn’t put my lady in a good light, but what my friend said struck a lightning in my mind. I never recalled any moment long ago when I’d involuntarily bleed when I’m in mental and emotional pain. Before, it only used to be the physical aspect; when the sun is scorching hot, either I’d faint or I’d bleed. But now every inch of me simply cringe when something in us simply just doesn’t go as planned.

     I used to remember how reserved I was even when people dear to me would like to know what the thoughts I was keeping were. But this time I see myself in the mirror, trying all my best to be as transparent to my lady. And the funniest thing is that I find myself enjoying opening myself up to someone I’m willing to spend forever with.

     Not so long ago, I would definitely be unaffected when things don’t go right for me and a loved girl. I’d simply brush it off, sleep over it, and wait the next day for her to make amends – all of these despite the situations when I’m on the wrong side of the argument. This time, however, I realized just now how far I’d be willing to go just to be the one winning my lady over, whoever of us is right and wrong.

     As I’m making a personal renaissance, I still fail her at times. It saddens me when she proposes that we be apart just to escape the ‘immeasurable degree of bitterness’ she feels, and she has done it over the course of our relationship. It’s not that she doesn’t love me; I know she does, and I can feel it. Maybe it’s just her way of thinking it would benefit her most to start forming firewalls around her heart, so that the next time I’d accidentally hurt her it wouldn’t be very painful. What I can’t get myself to say, though, is the fact that when we fight, I also get hurt. I don’t actually need to gash myself (as I’ve done before) just to feel the pain; seeing my nose bleed and feeling my head in a spin are ways bad enough to make me feel how my subconscious has awoken and started feeling the pain.

     But then, as I resolved, I need to be honest this time just to save our relationship – just to have her still holding on to us. And as I become honest, I need to be humble as well to accept whatever she thinks would be necessary for a change. To put everything in perspective:

     I’m terribly sorry for my imperfections. I’m no superhuman, neither am I aspiring to be perfect; but I’m doing everything just to make her realize that just by having me, the word ‘perfect’ doesn’t need to take place anymore.

     I’m willing to do everything to bring things back to normal. This isn’t what our relationship is supposed to be, and I know she knows it as well.

     As our relationship plunges down the rocky seashore below, I made the last-minute effort by summoning all my strength, threw myself as well and tried to salvage whatever would be left in our relationship. As I near the shore, broken bones and gashes and blood and all, I plainly realized everything as if I never did before:

     I’ve got to pick up all the pieces together. After all, I caused this mess.

     As for now, a part of it is better than not having any part of it anymore… at all.

Premature Thoughts Pre-Luncheon Time Mode

Ever wondered why most compositions that are very heartfelt were written by people under excruciating pain, rather than contentment in life?

I actually pondered this question over the first time I hit the literary world, some nine years ago. At a young age, I’ve read books of Alexander Dumas, William Shakespeare and the Brontë Sisters; I’ve loved the music of Tom Jobim, Jonathan Butler, and Lee Ritenour. Yet the best of their compositions and songs were the most elegiac above others. One may get so carried away when reading a heartbreaker novel or listening to a mawkish love song, but who among us would know that they were written and played under adverse conditions?

As a writer myself, I could attest to that fact that my mind works under hard situations – the type of losing your mind at the brink of insanity. But hey, I would never want to experience those times again. I mean, granted, you’d have the most maudlin of the writings you could ever think of. But in exchange, you get a week – or even a month – of emotional distress that you would rather wish yourself dead instead of waking up in the morning and find yourself facing the same distress again.

Relationships help in making a person either a good or bad writer. The point is this: You don’t actually have to feel the pain in order to write something full of sense. You only have to make sure that the emotions are overflowing enough to stream over your subconscious, and before you know it you’re already making a good piece of literature.

However, one must take note – and sadly I forgot to – that relationships are like priceless earthenware that are bound to crack when trust is gone. It can be understood simply as this.

Suppose you bought chinaware worth your lifetime’s savings. You actually didn’t buy the vessel to market it; you simply want to buy it for the simple reason of falling in love with its antiquity. Would you test its fragility by playfully hitting it with a sledgehammer? Of course not.

Relationships, like earthen vessels, ought to be treasured and viewed as a fragile thing that can never be the same if a small part of it cracked out of carelessness.

Sigh.

I tested the limits of my earthen chinaware. I have said a million times before how my old personality would surface every now and then, but like I said I won’t take it as an excuse for my errors.

And now that I’m at the crossroads once again, I’m trying my best, not to buy a new one, but at least put it in a very safe place, out of anyone’s reach. Cracks in my earthenware are enough to remind me that I might be trying my best to be the best man for her, but my best will never be good enough. Somehow, what I have to do is pick up all the pieces, win her heart again, and wait for the time to come when she would again realize I am the same man she fell in love with more than two years ago.

Glitches in my personality will always play significant parts in how our relationship will turn out, and all I’m asking – if ever she’s reading – is her help. I can help people be the best they can, but ironically I can’t make my life any better without the help of a much loved one. At this point, I would like her to help me be the best lover for her. It may take some time, but I’m willing to wait.

…after all, if all else fails for us, I have nowhere to turn to. And I would never find another place other than in her arms; it makes me feel I’m home. Somehow, I know she doesn’t deserve an asshole lover like I am. But instead of making her find someone that suits up to her standards, I’d be more willing to change completely just to deserve her love.

If you find this post a heartfelt one, then you would know why.

Premature Thoughts Pre-Hypnal Hibernative Mode

After vain efforts to fetch sleep for about three hours now, I slowly opened the computer to jot down a few things I have realized while counting sheep to while the wee small morning hours.


I realized I have again consorted to my suicidal personality. Sigh.


I guess I have grown mad these past few days. I mean, suicidal on that note would also entail wishing yourself dead rather than facing the truth that you have wreaked havoc in a much loved person's life.


During my immature years I'd definitely think over jumping on a precipice just because of a failed reciprocation of a childish sentiment. Definitely things have started to change over the years.


And so have my feelings.


It's no surprise to tell you how much insensitive I have been; after all, guys have almost been the same throughout history, right? But then, resorting to change your ways should definitely make people affected hope for the best you can do to change your ways. And if they can not see the changes you've promised you'll do, then the problem starts to brew.


I've done the same mistakes for the nth time. I would admit that. But to tell you honestly, I would meditate on welcoming a nightmare if that's what it takes for me to get the hell out of this nightmarish reality that has been mentally and emotionally torturing me these past few days. Before I resorted to some immature pulse-slashing. Now? I hate to say this, but, welcome back, stress.


Or maybe I'm just dizzy.


Or maybe my head is just in a spin. Or maybe it's due to my diagnosed respiratory tract infection (I'm asthmatic, remember?).


As I check the clock, maybe I was right.


15 minutes to 3 in the morning.


Maybe I should simply get myself a night's rest.


I just hope I would not dream of anything about jumping off high cliffs. When it dawns on me, I might realize then how nasty that proposition would have been.


Anyway, I'll try to sleep. Time check: 3 in the morning.


Sheep counted: Bah. Just legions.


No nightmares for now. Bad dreams are good enough. Sigh.

Curiosity killed the cat.

Sadly, I am the killer.

Inadvertently, I killed the cat.

Sigh.

Remember when I ranted about me not being Superman? Yes, I am never a superhero in people's lives - let alone my woman's - but I never expected myself to be this worse an asshole.

Do you know how it actually feels like when you thought everything has become settled, then all of a sudden you find out something that your loved one didn't just take time telling you?

I was that 'loved one'.


Yes, I was a bonehead before; I never took women's feelings seriously. If I wanted not to make my presence felt in any way, then my girl would have to wait. If I chose to sleep at any time without informing her, then she would have to inquire about my whereabouts to my friends. That's how much of an asshole I had been - headstrong, insensitive and naive.

However, maturity and time made me a better person at the slightest way, and I realized in no time I was compromising my so-called 'standards' for the love and joy of a woman I never thought of falling in love with. Slowly, I started changing the old me: I stopped puffing my ego up like clouds of H Bomb explosions, I started considering other people's emotions and feelings, and most of all I began to possess the sensitivity I have sorely been lacking my whole life.


But then, for years now I still make mistakes subconsciously – I used to be a people's person, with male and female friends everywhere; I'm used to getting close with women and getting quite tactile with the best of them; and I usually forget what are the important information I have to tell my woman. Given, I'm trying my best to become the best lover she can possibly dream of. But my imperfections always shadow my sincerest efforts.

Sigh.

It's not like I am scapegoating; I take all the blame for the mishaps in our relationship. For my errors, I am slowly tearing our relationship apart. As I try to build myself up to be someone deserving of her love, past mistakes that resurface as of late pull me a hundred steps down. It really hurts to know that your gross mistakes might merit a loss of confidence from your loved one. But these statements might as well be the coup-d-grace of all the pain one can actually take in:




“...truth is, I'm already losing the zest I have for our relationship... I'll just force myself to love you again...”


“You can trust someone you don't love.. But you can't love someone you don't trust..”




The statements are true. If the trust is gone, why pursue a relationship for long?


Sigh. This is the start of a rebuilding process. I'm starting to rebuild her empire after the winds of doubts turned her tower of confidence into a thousand shambles. In the process I might incur another series of mistakes brought forth by my immaturities and imperfections, but I know she can understand.

I know all she needs is my help. If I don't help her in helping me become a better person, she might as well let go of me and start her life without an asshole who turns out to be just a face, and nothing more inside of him.

I know.

I killed the cat.

...but I'm trying my best to do this much: Not to take away the curiosity, but to take away the reasons why the cat would think she needs to be curious.


Help me God. I'm on the brink; I'm losing my mind.


And any time from now, I might lose her forever.