Days, Dates, Names, Numbers

This is a draft of a story (or what) I wrote over a year ago. I always wanted to rewrite it but it's funny how some works defy revisons and just keep on being themselves. This one has a funny way of self-preservation. I just hope that after putting it here (meaning, to be always seen by the very me), I will finally have mind to do it. "Revise me, you idiot!" I hope it screams.

I hope to find the discipline to do things better soon(er). Or that the discipline finds me.

1

You hurt.

You say you hurt yourself because you think too much. You think it hurts you to think that you’re thinking too much. And it hurts you to think you think faster than you can talk, you think faster than you can write, you think faster than you can express yourself. You try to find a way----or ways----to express yourself better. You believe you don’t know how to express yourself----that you never express yourself well, enough. That’s why you try to write. You try to join groups, you try to do things, that you think can help you in expressing yourself. So, one, two, three, four: you close your eyes, you breathe deeply. You hum. You whisper to yourself, Hmmm, but you’re still there, trying.

2

The world is never with you. You think----you believe, you convince yourself----it may not be against you, but heck, neither is it for nor with you. The world never cares. The world never cared. Why? Who does? Who did? Fuck the world. Fuck them all. And you say to yourself, fuck you.

3

You met her five years ago, and you think she never changed: the way you think her eyes evade you, your gaze, when you pass each other, and you believe she thinks the same way about you still. You wonder whether she wondered. Or maybe she still wonders----why you stopped seeing her, stopped talking to her, you snobby little snot----why you stopped to get so faltering, stopping there, standing still, trying to breathe that waft of air that carried the smell of her perfume. You gathered enough strength, enough courage to stop, and you did (for some reason that even you don't know if you really understand) but ended up hurting yourself wondering whether she wondered or still wonders why.

4

You know that eternity lies in brief, brief moments one can never hold. So you close your eyes and think: Maybe----maybe----this was really meant to happen.

Then you stop and ask yourself, "But you don’t believe in fate, do you?" Of course you don’t. It’s not fate. It's never fate. Things happen simply the way they are meant to happen. That's why they happened.

But it’s never fate.

5

You know that eternity lies in brief, brief moments one can never hold. You think, therefore, all your moments together were an eternity. All of them may have been long gone, long passed. Long gone. But then again, they were past. Thus gone. But meant to be.

You hold them thus, those brief, brief moments, if only in memory (for you know that moments can never be held in your hands, of course you know), eternally.

6

So you let things be.

7

So one day you hear she gets pregnant, you wait for yourself to feel something. Grief maybe, sadness maybe, pity maybe. Anger maybe? But no, nothing comes. You only feel the warmness of the wind slapping your face, you standing there again, alone, waiting, thinking. So you wonder why. And the more you wonder why, the faster the hurt comes running, wheezing, rushing back. You’re hurt again.

8

But what is "hurt" anyway? For hours, you sit there looking at the blackness of the coffee trying to think about things but nothing comes. Only a feeling. You’re hurt, you know it, but you don’t know why.

9

You seem to always run out of answers and you know that this too is one question you can’t find an answer to. So you come back to realizing that you really don’t know how to express yourself. So you look at yourself in the mirror and see whether its true, what they say, that when you feel lost you see a different person there looking at you. But no. For you, it’s never true. You look hard and you see there, you see yourself again. It has always been you, you know it. You just don’t know who you are.

10

This other girl you first saw almost two years ago. What with her, but how you did it, only you can tell. You got to know her name, her address, her cell phone number, her home number, her class schedule. Everything except her middle name. You talked with her friends, her classmates, her teachers, but not with her, you idiot. So what? You ask yourself. So what?

11

It’s February and you know it. It’s Valentines but you don’t care. Well, at least, you tell yourself you don’t care. For 20+ years now, you've never cared. But come the nights or mornings or afternoons when you’ve nothing better to do (which come most of the time anyway), you find yourself sitting there, sitting there again, staring at that cup of cooling coffee, thinking, thinking, asking yourself why.

12

You have tachicardia, you know it. Your heart thumps faster, heavier everytime you take in caffeine. But you still take that cup of coffee anyway. Stare at it for some moment, watch it as its steam goes up, rise, disappear to nowhere, and you look at the cup, and you sip from it. Slowly. Little by little. And you wait for that distinct beat, thump-thump, thud-thud, to come.

13

And you feel awed, you wonder why.