Dear James

A YEARLY REVIEW

It's been a year, almost exactly.
This time last year, I was starting a new job in a career that I stumbled upon accidentally a year before - a profession that I never saw myself taking part in.
I was smoothing out the frayed and wounded edges of my heart. Blowing away the smoke that emitted from the fissures that had been left upon it by an almost year long trip in a foreign land and which had clouded my eyes, my view, so that I had not been able to see the rest of the world without regarding it with a bout of cynicism that was on its guard like a rabid dog.

So what have I learned in the past year?
*Ship happens.
As a pastor at a worship service I recently attended says - and he's put it down into words perfectly - "There are ships that we bring with us as we sail on in our journey through life, some ships, you cannot take with you and simply have to burn. Hence - ship happens.
*Love - that preconceived mythical creature doth exist.
Self explanatory. Occurs in relationships, whether said relationships be familial, romantic, cordial, professional .. Er, better to leave out that last part, after all, it's what got me here (practically deported) in the first place.
*Faith restores the human spirit.
Prayer helps. Talking. Sharing secrets with that Eminence, that Source of Power and (yes, you may now dare to say it..) Love. No need to read The Bible, The Al-Quran or other books of faith that your religion or church require you to in order to be faithful. Simply go by the truth of your heart and offer it to That which you believe has created you.
*Give it a chance.
Whatever - or whoever - it is that first pops into your mind when you read this line. Give it a chance.
*Never underestimate the power of a place unvisited.
Even a taste of experience in a place that you have never been to not only feeds but nourishes your soul and makes your eyes gleam with enlightenment that, unlike any of the most expensive beauty products or perfume money can buy, will never wash off.

Now I am no longer talking in terms of 'this year', either that which has passed or that which will come, but I am talking about Today.

Today I am sitting in a casino on a Saturday morning in August as my lovely boyfriend plays a few hands of poker with a friend of his; both hoping to win what would help in their pursuit of happiness in the coming days, and gambling that in their hands which they can afford to lose.

But when you're in the process of finding your happiness and your peace in life, then you realize that you will need to give up all the things that hold you back. Your reservations, your anxiety, your doubt... It's a good trade, isn't it? It is useless to hope to ever get rid of fear. Life is a gamble. Why everyone wants to be fearless, I have no idea. It teaches you what is truly important to you . There will always be flashes of fear that will follow us every day of our lives here on earth. But let them be flashes and not our driving force.

I wish everyone the happiness that we all deserve.


Sasha

What It is to the Core

It's 1.48 AM and the night is cool. The window's open and the nighttime...it has a voice. And it speaks to me. Its whisper penetrates the window screen and brushes past me; I can feel it.. on my arms, my nape, against my ear.

I am listening to Caetano Veloso singing, moaning out "Cucurrucucu Paloma".

And though I understand not a word, my soul can't help but sigh in direct response to this person's crooning out for a lost love, perhaps, I don't know; like I said, I don't understand the words as they are in Spanish.

... And the flow of my blood sings along.

And instead of crooning for a lost love, it seems to be crooning instead for lost days. When innocence was pure and unwavering and solid as a mother's love for her kid.

My last affair was a loss of innocence for me in itself.

And sometimes I can't help but think about it. In retrospect it seems so distant and far-off. Fuzzy, like paint drying on the walls of my bedroom. It's tough to say it out loud, even though there is that mixture of apathy and acceptance mingled with it: He used me.

And yet I don't know what it is, ego or pride that keeps me from believing in it totally. At least, all day everyday. Because there are those moments that you just know. You are jolted by reality and accept it: He didn't love me. He wanted to use me because I have beauty and youth and brilliance and I am a novelty to him. But he will still marry her. He wanted me because I was like nothing he's ever seen before.

And to think that I thought God was giving me a sign... "Sasha, this it it, and I have used a bulldozer to knock him into your path. But here. Here he is. Take him or leave him."

I didn't know that God wanted me to pick Leave him.

But I know better now. That's why I don't compromise anymore. Especially when it comes to men. I am still finding my voice when it comes to my writing. I feel I used to be better at articulating what I felt before, I sounded a lot smarter a long time ago. When I was younger. Before I had lost so much innocence along the way, getting by what life was throwing at me.

But I want to believe this all serves a purpose. And I do, when I have my bearings around me. When I'm not injected with the crazies.

But yes.

I love.

I was borne of love. I will die for love. I love my people. I love my country. I love my planet. I love my passions. I love my frivolities. I LOVE MY GOD. I love.

Maybe that's all there is to me:

... I love.

New Directions

So now I'm starting things all over again.
I have worked since I was eighteen years old.
And it's only been these last three months since I've been back in Manila that I have stopped being a work mule and have just started to have fun.
I tell you - that my fun is no longer fun.
That I have been out all night and all day and in my craving for fun, I have forgotten my search for happiness.
I have short term fun and I am doing nothing as yet to work on my long term happiness.
Let's face it - my grandmother isn't getting any younger. And yet I leave her most nights in search of these "fun things". Drinking. Celebrating with friends. Forgetting that I have not yet done anything in these past few months of my life worth celebrating.
I am now in training once more to be a Radio DJ at a local radio station - at last, at least a step in the right direction.
But what about everything else?
In my crusade to prove to everyone in Brunei - not everyone really, but simply the man who is the main reason I have been sent back to Manila - in my crusade to prove that nothing I am is diminished by what I have gone through in the past, I have totally and completely forgotten what matters.
So now I am going to slick my hair back (with these long curly locks, good luck with that!) and I am going to once more begin my search for balance. Go down that road long enough, and I know I will finally find my happiness once more.
All it takes is one small step.
The right one.

THAT Year in Brunei

You have to think about it though.

Didn’t it work itself out perfectly?

The year in Brunei. From now on until the day I’m old and gray, April 2009 - March 2010 will be known as “THAT year in Brunei”. For those who are unfortunately visionally impaired, I’d like to reiterate the emphasis on ”THAT”. 11 months to be exact…like Life. Exact, random and oh so spontaneous, but at the same time right on the dot everytime - only you would be able to see this not as you’re going through it but when you look back in retrospect.

I read my writings from each month of the past year and I am amazed at the speed and the intricate beauty of all the circumstances, misadventures and fated things that happened. Even the previously personally conceived weeks of so called boredom. But only the wise know that even in the quiet weeks, fate is working and certain circumstances await to pounce on you like rabid bulldogs unleashed after days of imprisonment. Whatever it may be… like childhood, like highschool, like your first real romance, no matter how long it went for, it always seems it had gone by in a blink.

Not to say I’d do it again.

Like that snap and ill-fated relationship with Mario (sorry I still just have to giggle noncommitally whenever his name comes up) .. I’ve learned so many lessons of importance to equip me for the highway of life ahead of me which wouldn’t have come to me if I hadn’t done the the things I did, and if things hadn’t happen the way they had. I cherish everything and am in awe of everything but at the same time, I am also too relieved at watching all that I’ve gone through and looking at it now from my sideview mirror.

Certain things don’t have to be repeated. Only certain people know what happened. Only a handful know something resembling the truth. And yet only you know, at the end of the day, what has truly transpired in the year of your adventure in a foreign land.

I promised a friend of mine that I would write a book on this one day. Before I left for Brunei a year ago, countless people kept asking me in coffee shops: why don’t I write a book based on my family? They were talking about the Nava clan, my mom’s family and the captors of my childhood and my heart. And now, people are asking me to write about the Rahmans. Those behind that part of my name which have been shrouded from me as if behind a shadow or a passing cloud for most of my life.
But you know.. a light has been shed upon them. With my own eyes, I’ve witnessed the miracle of people and lives and heritage unfold before me. Unfurling like a leaf reaching out to touch a raindrop falling by the grace of God. Mischief, adventures, misadventures, personal catastrophes, and happy celebrations of Life that make up this glorious family that I was unknowingly born into.

On that day, I finally decide to push ahead and write my autobiography, the pages will be so colorful from the richness of characters and exploits that make up both sides of my family, of my friends - of the people who have made up my life, those I’ve already met and those I’ve yet to meet - that I’m afraid it might resemble her very own Majesty the Queen’s float at a Gay Parade.

Needless to say, I’m done talking in definitives. Life and things never pan out the way one plans it anyhow. It usually pans itself out in a more fascinating way than you could have imagined.

And I don’t want to write about Brunei as if it’s a casket being lowered onto the ground. It’s not. It’s a trophy and a portrait hanging on my wall, making me witness to the glory of God’s delight in my life. “Do you see how full it is?”, they seem to say.

And of course, my answer would be - always be - Yes.

I do.

I told my friend Izzy, one day I bet I would make a lot of people in Brunei famous. And we would laugh at our own private joke.

But at the end of the day, you know that you were supposed to go down that road. That there was no avoiding or escaping it. And that you never in a million years would have wanted to anyway. These were people who you were supposed to meet, and love, and contend yourself with, and know, and write into your own personal history books: some because you know their roles in your life weren’t played largely enough for you to remember their names after time has passed and the others, most of them - no matter how short or long the time you knew them - because they have personally contributed to the lessons you now know and as well as to the color scheme of your life.

Regardless, or, to be more precise, in direct response to all the events that have transpired… If I had not gone on a whim to attend my sister’s wedding last April, and en lieu of that had not accidentally stumbled upon the chance to spend my year in Brunei:

Ah, safer and smoother and smaller would be my heart.

The September Theory

I fell in love with a boy who eventually became my first love.

Fell out of love as another boy broke up with me, leaving me to experience my first painfully sober heartbreak.

My grandfather, who I lived with for the first 15 years of my life, died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest. Silently, I began to celebrate the day he died as his birthday in Heaven.

It is a month where something always happens. And those somethings usually consist of happenings I'll most likely remember forever. Good or bad, nothing escapes September.

It is the annual, month-long era of: finding love... losing love...births...deaths...and now apparently I could add reincarnation to the list.

A few days ago, imagine my shock when a boy I'd loved (as only a twelve or thirteen year old can, ofcourse) popped up once more on the grid from out of nowhere.

I stared at the pending Friend Request on my Facebook inbox page, disbelieving.

Ivan Bacungan.

The name held its own myth, history, legend in my mind. If our parents generation had the Beatles to grow up with and be constants in their own adolescence, I had Ivan to bring me into mine.

He was the first boy who introduced me to romantic frustration, secretive glances, butterflies in the stomach, butterflies in the chest, butterflies everywhere, weak knees, the beauty of hearing a song publically dedicated to you playing over the school speakers, the confusing and unexpected ability to cry during love scenes in chick-flicks, tactics at inducing jealousy that would make Sun Tzu sob out loud...

Most importantly we are talking about Ivan Bacungan, the boy who made me first aware of the fact that I carried a poetic license.

God, I can only imagine how many notebooks I've kept hidden dusty and forgotten in my closet that are filled out with rambling and endless poetry about him.

After gradeschool graduation nearly nine years ago, he moved out of the Philippines into the U.S. and completely disappeared. No one has heard from him or about him since.

...Until now.

A flooding of mutual friends' messages came pouring in on his wall and mine and everyone's excited about his reappearance. In the initial excitement I felt like I was part of the LRT crowd at rush hour, trying to keep afloat, as I felt myself being squashed and carried by the current of the crowd rushing up to greet him.

Life is so definitely unexpected.
And it has an advocate in the month of September.

September never fails to stump me and make me realize that no one ever trumps it. That it's Life job to constantly keep changing the game plan. No time to step up to bat? Well, too bad because this curveball is headed straight for you. Awake yet?

So to September, I will close my exposure and love letter to you with the last update I'd typed into my twitter page:


"Being found by an Ivan Bacungan in US Marines uniform gives me the the heartiest laugh and the weirdest expression and the giddiest stomach."

Disappointed? About what?

Last week, while spending time with my girlfriends and enjoying a thoroughly enchanting conversation - in the middle of practically punctuating every sentence I made with his name, he appeared from out of nowhere.

I ended up having to spend almost the entire night one table away from where he and the girlfriend sat among friends, with her throwing herself all over him.

It was good that my chair forced me to face the other way.

It was just...different. You know?

Like...I was expecting something more.

More of him.

And I came to realize with a dawning look that he wasn't any less of himself.

He had just grown (or not grown, in a way) and has become a totally different person.

He probably told the girlfriend everything, which I don't really mind. I hadn't gone anywhere cheap with him anyway.

It was strange.

But it was the way I loved him.

It wasn't anything physical. I didn't dream of, you know, heated...exchanges, you could say... between us during midnights in any case. I don't know. In the nearly eight years spent being in love with him, I truthfully just never thought of wanting him that way. Ever.

Which is quite funny when one comes to think about it. I want a lot of other men that way most of the time.

It's just...

I wanted to share my soul.

And I wanted to look into his.

That night, it's like my world had tilted back into place. It had been revolving around the idea of him and the desire for him for a really long time. My world - perfect and infuriating and beautiful in every other aspect - had always been set askew by him.

As if Atlas indeed, had a hard time shrugging him off.

But that night... That night, I looked at him when he came up to greet us.

And I waited for that same sound of knocking at my door...and I waited.

By the end of the night, I'd just realized almost as if in a breath - the door was closed.

And it was now closed to him.

Finally.

Thank you.

To the gods, to the Universe, to mountains... thank you.

So This is Me.

There's this theory that everything happens at random. Life is random. Deaths are given at random. Animals procreate at random. Events in history occur at random. People choose their passions at random. People meet at random. Car accidents fall at random.

Somehow, I can never get behind that idea.

But when I think about all that love's brought to me...

What am I struggling for, if it is not meant to be?

I can't take a step. But I can't move on. I can't let him go completely. But I can't pull him in. I can't seem to be given a chance and I can't seem to make his chance known to him. Not in the theoretic or intangible but in the:

Come sit here a moment and I will tell you that I love you. Come down and meet my eyes so that you can see it for yourself.

He used to be a Man.

And now whenever I catch glimpses of him, in rooftop conversations, at surprise parties under the blue moon - where the blue moon drinks most of the vodka, and at a midnight cruise into the terrible ocean of forgetfulness and remembrance at different hours...

I can't help but be pulled apart.

Mostly by two things.

ONE, by a grevious and otherworldly sense of loss.

TWO, by a calm and egregious peace that I have moved on.

Be who you Are.

Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

Parker Palmer

If you were a film...what would you be?

At lunch yesterday, I was with Aisha and Nina. They were talking about something which didn't interest me and out of the blue I murmured into my pasta:

"I feel like a noir film."

Aisha looks at me from over her glass and says, "How does a noir film feel like?"

"Bleak. Your outlook is the color of a bruise - everything's hopeless. Like you're trying to walk underwater, it's slow and impervious to you."

"What is?" Nina asks.

"Life."

I looked at Nina and managed a slow grin, perhaps to change the subject. "If you were a film you'd be a war flick." Just to rile her up.

"Thanks."

As Aisha watched us, I turned and jutted my chin out in her direction: "I know what you'd be, Aish. You'd be a documentary - on the Discovery Channel!" Nina and I finish together, grinning.

"That's perfect!" Nina agrees with me.

"What about you?" Aish asks me, exchanging a quizzical look with Ninz.

"Easy. I'd be one of those biographies. You know, like my own E! True Hollywood story. Something flakey and conceited like that! Only I would be the one interviewing myself." I mimic how an episode would go.

We look around us and laugh.

Then Aish suddenly stops chuckling and turns to me. "You know what. I know what you'd be."

Ninz and I look at her.

"You, Sasha, would be a series of short films."

"Hm? Short. Like a cartoon?"

"No, a series of short films. You're different from moment to moment. You have to get that first before you can guess what the whole flick's about."

"Sasha, Je T'aime, anyone?" I said after a moment, because I wait for Nina and Aisha to stop nodding to each other, laughing and exclaiming how A just gave the perfect description.

.....

What can I say? Bipolar anyone?

I live in moments.

And don't the world know it.

(well.. and don't I love it.)

Cartoons' still got it.

"Let go of what kills you. .

and hold on to what keeps you breathing."

- Spongebob

In case you didn't know.

I suppose people should learn from this.

If you have to hear Madea say it out loud first in order to realize its truth then you have to recite this to yourself every morning right after you dream and before you wake up so that this message becomes a rule engraved in the armour of your chest.

It's an innate knowledge that you're already born with.

But some people refuse to listen.

So I hope that this reminds you why you're here.

It makes Life so much easier.

Everybody has a Theory.

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it.

- from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert