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Maj Guanzon

Maj Guanzon

Umi-emo.

Sometimes I like to just stare at a spot on the wall and feel the loneliness. Sometimes, reliving the memories don’t seem enough, or there are just not enough of them to keep a loop going. Because she deserves to be mourned, not just remembered. She deserves to keep this gaping hole in my life, belonging to her and her alone, until we meet again.

* realization to self and to Maj: an impending visit to your house and to your family draws out the emo in me. The way you still move me, hun. Life is still good. But missing you will never be overrated.

Maj Guanzon

Urban adventure, 11/24/2011

Nobody visits a grave at night. Except for Buffy, or goths playing at amateur witchcraft. Or a boy and girl who loved the same girl such that they were willing to go on a potentially stupid urban adventure.

The motive: both were nursing a unique, unabated grief that stabs at them at the most peculiar times of the day, giving them no consistent or constant respite. They miss her, and since she does not reply, she does not call back, she does not comment on their numerous post attacks on Facebook, she has left them with no other option for contact.

The inner motive: she was fulfilling a birthday date, he was just crazy like that, and he had issues (insert private jokes here).

All the things that can go wrong started revealing themselves one at a time in quick succession en route to the cemetery. The lady in the flower stall spurred it when she openly discouraged (in a high pitched voice) a visit to the cemetery on a late, dark Thursday night. And then there was rush hour traffic, and their unwillingness to read a map, thus leading to the possibility of getting lost (which happened–they followed the wrong van),  the risk that the cemetery was closed (thank heavens it wasn’t), and then the wide variety of creepy phenomena that roam a place where the dead lie. Add to that the fact that the boy and girl are virtually strangers, and that he drove a dark tinted car.

But they made it, a two-hour drive and a five-minute search later. They marked her gravestone with a pink bouquet and a tall white candle that cast their two lone shadows over the grass and the cement. And then they spent the next two hours talking to her, talking to each other, tsk-ing at the inaccurate lettering on the gravestone, guarding the candle from the wind, planning exit plans to save their hearts and to help them move on.

They don’t know if the exit plans will work, but for that night, the general thought bubble was: “It was really nice spending this late Thursday night with you, love. Until the next time our crazy bones kick us into the next urban adventure.”

 

* Today is your 40th day and we miss you hun. Sending love from my broken heart to you.

Life and Lemons Maj Guanzon

Today’s realization, 11/20/2011

“The trouble with giving yourself a pep talk is, that deep down you know it’s all bullshit.”

― Sophie Kinsella, “Remember Me?”

True, that. When I read this quote I realized I give myself pep talk a lot. Thus is the survival technique of a self-labelled logical person. A friend even recently dubbed me a ‘what-if’ person, otherwise known as paranoid (he should have been even blunter and just said it), but that is a different story altogether. Now, if you’re the type like me to give yourself internal cheers a lot, that frequent activity is easily traceable to a plethora of shit in your life, happening in short intervals, usually in twos or more at a time. And when the reasoning of the heart is selfish or hurtful or just downright dangerous, you turn to your brain to derive these in-head dialogues, samples provided below:

“Everything happened for a reason”

“It’s all better this way.”

“Maybe things will end up worse in the end if this did not happen.”

and the top two most annoying and bullshitty ones,

“Well, in hindsight…” and

“It’s all going to be okay.”

Despite the realization of this general truth very much applicable to me, I am left with no choice but to continue with the pep talks. Sometimes, when things are too crazy, or too painful, or irreversible or just all of the previously mentioned rolled into one catastrophic period in your life, you really need to feed yourself BS to keep the sanity intact. You need to tell yourself that the next time, the next boy you will really really like will be allowed to like you back, on a full-time basis and not just on a when-available schedule. And you need to tell yourself that tomorrow, the memories will still be there but the pain will be a little bit number, and life can still be bright and beautiful even without the brightest and most beautiful person you knew.

Thank you, Sophie Kinsella, for the butt in the head. Who said chick-lit is for dummies?

Life and Lemons Maj Guanzon

It doesn’t get better, you just feel a little bit stupider

Not much is expected to be accomplished in 21 days after all. The false sense of peace and the lull from the pain are pointless plateaus. Whatever are those for? Breaks to give space to energize, I suppose. Now I have gathered plenty of strength to cry at will because of a picture, a text, a promise that will now never be fulfilled. A single memory can evoke laughter and then tears in a span of a few minutes, and I feel weary, numb, and yes, just a little bit stupider.

Maj Guanzon

Goodbye, Version B.

The unread eulogy, because I was a sissy that way. I know she would have wanted me to speak at her funeral, but I know she will also understand why I was not able to do it. And that she also knew that I prefer to do it this way. Cos I am her favorite introvert like that.

October 25, 2011, Wednesday. Written for Maj Guanzon, with excerpts from my letter to her that I gave to her parents.

Dear Maj,

For the past few days, the highlight of my day has been going to your wake. Seeing your face, no matter how still and unmoving, talking to your mom and dad in brave efforts to comfort them, meeting your friends, and being around people who have known and loved you. That was my greatest comfort and my link to sanity. Now that too will end, because people are meant to move on, and because you also need to rest, both soul and physical body.

At your wake I had a clear understanding that there is still so much of you I do not know, excerpts of you that I have gathered from people who’ve known you for years, something I expected of course, since we’ve known each other not even a year. But in a way, I have not felt envy or regret, because you have shared with me a part of you that is uniquely ours, and that is something I will cherish. The only emotion in high relief now is a deep sadness that our friendship, and your life, had to have such an early end.

My only consolation is this: that one time you’ve told me, just recently, that you are happy now with how things are with your family, with work, with me and Rob and with your friends in school. I am taking it now as your sweet goodbye, when you said you were very happy things were going well for me, because I deserved it. That text had a hint of an end, and it felt a bit sad even then. Now I am taking it and sealing it inside my heart, with a piece of your beautiful soul, where I will keep them all for as long as I live, maybe even longer than that. I have told you and shown you how much I love you, in every little way I can, in words and in action, in the little gifts I got you to the little gestures and favors, even when unasked, that I have made. We got very close, very fast, and gone through more drama together than I have ever gone through with friends I have known longer. I guess God designed our friendship that way, fast-paced because we have a closer deadline.

In you I have found an intellectual superior, a generous sister, a protective friend, always proud and always encouraging, the only person to understand things about me that even I did not know. In you I have found real comfort and real friendship. No matter how awesome you are, genius and a protégé in your own right, you were humble and you treated me as an equal. I will always try to see the best in me that you always seem to see, because I owe you that among other things. I will try to live by your strict moral code, because you have been training me with it because I know you care, and because I make you worry. I will try to get through each day without your ‘good night/good morning hun’ texts to jolt me out of bed, without the rest of your texts and our exchanges that brighten my day in a way only you can, without the YM and FB chat/comment sessions that last until morning. I will live with this pain until it numbs a little and becomes bearable, because I do not want to use my time-tested effective technique of not thinking about the things that hurt me. Because if I do not think of you I might forget you, and that is the last thing in the world I will do. Until the last of my days I will think of you.

I love you in a way only you will understand. Pray for your family and your friends, for my mom too, if you may, from that beautiful place where you are, and give God a kiss in a cheek for welcoming you home. I miss you mare, my Batman, my hun.