retrograding to the pits.

I have decided to construct a spot in my psyche to refer to that place where memories reside. I call it the pits. The word itself connotes something dark and deep. Ideally, it’s a place where you dump the memories you want to forget and yet, these are the same memories that you also want to remember. Sometimes, I don’t really want to remember anymore, because parts of these memories are the same emotions that I want to forget and yet, the same emotions that I also want to remember.

Happy memories don’t belong to the pits. I have yet to construct a special place for them. In Language studies, naming or ascribing labels is a matter of relevance. Meaning, if I have a name for the place for relatively bad memories, then it must really bear something in my everyday functions. Maybe because going back to the pits is the one of the definite things that can pull me down in so many ways.

The other day, I thought I was already fine without you. But guess what? I’m still not over it, not over you. I’ve always asked myself one of the most generic questions after things end: why can’t I get over it? And I blame how things ended for us. Nobody told me it was over. At some point, while I was waiting in vain for you, when your absence was too much for me tolerate, something told me that I lost you somewhere. I hated to believe it at first, but look, we’re over. We were punctuated with silence.

I can’t help but to blame myself. Maybe I did something, said something that pushed you away. If I did, I wished that you should have told me. You should have said something like, Fuck you Marc, the day you said this to me when I told you this, I was fucking offended. It made me realize how much of a shit you are, you’re a mistake. Screw you! We’re over. At least, I knew what happened.

When bubbles pop out of thin air, you can always blame the wind, or maybe the bubble wasn’t strong. When patients die under the hands of a doctor during surgery, the relatives can always file a medical malpractice suit. So that while grieving, then can push the blame to the whole medical staff even if the patient was really dying when they arrived in the hospital. But even despite the impending case, the doctors are still persistent in explaining what really happened. If all else fails, the suit pushes through – all for the sake of having something, someone to blame.

For us, I can’t. I wish I can, but I really can’t place the full burden on your shoulders. There is so much dignity in silence that I can’t demonize it. Maybe you left without saying a word because you didn’t want to hurt me. Maybe you remained silent because you don’t know how to break things to me. Maybe it’s too painful for you to say that you got tired of me. I don’t know. I can come up with a full-blown list of maybes but they won’t stand up and say, I am the real cause.

I remember when you told me that you hate people when they try to tell you things indirectly. Yung mga taong nagpaparinig. I have tried telling you that yes, I felt pain when you left just like that; that yes, leaving me in the height of my emotion makes it worse; and that yes, I wanted you to be back. I tried telling you. Hindi ako nagpaparining. But what was your response? Nothing. I was mad for a while, but what can madness do? Nothing. So I stopped being mad and started being pathetic.

I bet people who I’ve told I was okay would mock me right now. I concede. At this point, I’m really being pathetic. Because even if I know you belong to the pits, I still go back and scavenge for you, your memory. I feel pathetic that at this point, I’m still in trance with despair allowing words and words to frame what I really feel. Words that I know wont be able to scream; words that can’t cry; and words that are plain futile. I feel pathetic that in my effort to drown you in the pages of books, in long talks with friends, in parties, in whatever, I still experience a lag in the process of moving on. Because the pits have grown so big with you in it, that I continuously fall back into it.

Maybe it’s my fault too. Your photo still sits in my phone memory. Somewhere along my two thousand something messages in my inbox, there your texts still reside. Your number is still in my contacts – renamed, but nevertheless the same number that once greeted me the whole day, narrating pieces of romance that poisoned me well.

I texted you last Christmas, hoping that the season would grant me an affective mood for you to send a reply. I stopped calling you what I used to call you. I used your first name. I told you that I wanted to keep things simple. So I said: Merry Christmas, Thanks, and Sorry. I told you to be happy in your right. I told you to not be a stranger, and reach me when you need me. I texted you because I believed that there were no reason not to. Maybe that single reason to let you go exists, but unless it’s definite, then it doesn’t.

At some point, I wanted to call you. But being diverted hurts, and so having no one to talk to. So I had to stop wanting to talk to you, and began typing once again.

I told myself that I’ll start the year without you. But the past has this distinct way of reminding us that it exists – that you’re part of it inasmuch as it is part of you. Being in the present is not something to be proud of either. What you have is the definite past and unfathomable future.

Like these texts that I see on my monitor, I wanted to highlight everything and press Delete. Like that, everything will all be gone with a blink, even if there’s that Undo button sitting on the top of the screen. But behind the act of highlighting is a form of doubt to one’s self of letting it all go. Because once I changed my mind, hitting that Undo button will revive everything that were erased, compare that to laboriously hitting Backspace – erasing character after character.

Someone sent me a message the other day. It reads: You don’t have to forget someone you love, what you need to learn is how to accept the verdict of reality without being bitter or sorry for yourself. Then maybe, I was doing it wrong. Moving on has a requirement. It is acceptance. It is accepting that it’s over. It is accepting that you’ll never be back. It is accepting that it is the end of the line.

It is amazing how from being strangers, we became friends, and then more than friends. I just wished that we’ll both retrograde from being friends again. Because I entered the relationship not thinking that I’ll loose you somewhere in the future.

There are still so many things to say. This wont be the last time that I’ll be talking about you and how I feel, on how hard acceptance is, and how moving on seems so unattainable.

The future waits for us both. Probably we won’t be part of each other’s life as friends anymore or maybe yes. Life is a big trick. But I’ll be waiting for that future that even if I’ll continue to find myself back to the pits, remembering bits and pieces, I won’t hurt anymore; that even if impulse tells me to scavenge back, I wouldn’t feel pain, but would rather smile because you were part of it, part of that pit.