i gathered from the news that the masskara festival in bacolod city is being inaugurated, so as the revelry goes full swing, let me share to you a letter i wrote once upon a time for a negrense lover.
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October 13, 2003
12:15 a.m.
Hinigugma ko,
Reading gives me enjoyment, but more than that, I love reading because after doing it, I get to decide whether or not I like what I read. My present dilemma is a different thing altogether: besides that fact that it naturally doesn’t give me enjoyment, I cannot decide whether or not to like it, either.
The day you reached the point of putting an end to our relationship, I tried and still try hard to win you back because I love you (and loving you is all I’ve learned to know and do since I met you), and I see that only by loving you will I feel that I’m alive and fulfilled. Still reeling a week into our breakup, I figure out that my purpose for attempting to be your lover again cannot be taken in a good light. Honeybunny, I’m being selfish, less because I want you back without having you castigate me for my discomfiture, but more because I want you back if only to make me whole again. You see, while you don’t believe me anymore, I truly, madly, deeply love you, and I need your love back because it inflames me to return to the mainstream. I realize how self-serving it is that I beg you love me again despite the terrible hurt I caused you, and that this begging feeds the greater love for self than that for you.
In my loving you, I offer a big deal of myself, less because you are my very first and only boyfriend, but more because on the balmy evening of May 15, 2003, in between sobs and tears that copiously cascaded from my eyes, I gambled on my destiny by giving true love a chance. My decision paid off: your love invariably humanized me in many-splendored ways I could not enumerate. What matters to me is that the second time I love (you don’t have to zero in on the first time, because it was unrequited anyway), the whole world is upon my feet. Your starry-eyed visage, your gentle voice, your kisses, your songs, your loving, your caring, your sincerity—how can I lose? Today. I can only wax nostalgic, because these wistful memories cannot deny the reality that I lost my beloved and our dreams and our love, quite due to my own doing.
There you must be, fists clenched, teeth gnashing in seething rage as you crystallize venom-filled words with which to slay me far more virulent and fatal that the suicides I contemplate of committing, i.e. hurling myself onto the biggest vehicle to screech along and performing death jump from my stargazer-friendly apartment rooftop. I don’t resort to any, since just imagining how puny and loathsome I’ve become before your eyes renders me dead beyond ways bearable. You, the love of my life, the song I celebrate—how can I take this yoke that is upon me? But then, I come to think, how can you take the yoke that is upon you?
This is why I’m gravely confused whether or not I should ask you yet again to take me back. To beg for forgiveness is out of the question: I’m largely at fault, and severely culpable that I can endlessly shear my hair and throw ashes in the air in my plea to be pardoned by you. To ask to be your lover again is an entirely delicate matter, and I get embedded in grief deeper then ever. For the life of me, I know I love you and I love you more today while this crisis wreaks havoc and, in the frightfully unpredictable days that drag on, I love you is that sole condition I’m absolutely certain of. Nonetheless, I’m uncertain if you can still wear the faith you have as my beloved, even as my love grows for you one wonderful day after another. I’m a pain in the neck out to cause you constant heartbreaks, as someone successfully fished in trouble waters when he helped you decide I’m a flirt and cannot be trusted with.
To ask to be your lover again and fail at length may prove dreadful for me, but in hindsight, you may be better off me. I envision happiness that’s always farther away with me around you, and the many good things to last you a lifetime if I wave goodbye. Now it seems to me that the greatness of my love for you swells into the proportions of letting you go, if by that I give you the best opportunities to reap what you deserve. I’m always thankful for your coming to touch my life, and for letting me love you, in which case I am made to feel that I’m deserving of you and your love.
Lately, I’m reading (hence, this letter’s prelude) as a therapy for the sadness that our breakup wrought in my system. While I’m at it, I remember Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince and associate my beloved to the prince’s rose; the loveliest roses this part of the earth, yet their beauty is a shame because no one can die for them. My beloved is a rose unlike any other rose, because it’s he I love, it’s he I care for, it’s he I’ll die for. I wish your treat this analogy as an honest feeling that can be reasoned with.
Even now that I’m hopelessly like a liar to you, to lie is the last thing I like you to think of me, so I admit I’m optimistic that things will be rosier for our relationship the moment we patch up. I long to wake up from this Kafkaesque nightmare, because I miss the very person who gives fuller meaning (and the only one to do so) to my life: I don’t want us to suffer or wallow on loneliness forever, to wear Bacolod masks of sugar-sweet smiles just to feign that everything is better. I hope to be your lover again, and chase your heart to the edge of the universe, and court you till the last strand of my dying breath.
Ang naga-palangga,
Sweetcarrot
awww.....
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