On Growing Old...

On Growing Old…

A couple of hours more, and it would be one more year added to my life. And how do I feel about it? I am content, I could say.

I can still remember birthdays from long ago celebrated with cakes and candles. So long ago, and yet there is something about memory, of its selectiveness that though I may not remember every detail, there are some I would never forget as long as I live. A red sailors uniform that I once donned. The crunching of brown dried mango leaves under our feet as we celebrated it with my cousins under one of the mango trees way back in Mampang.

I can still remember birthdays that I spent with my friends.

Or birthdays celebrated with a love one from the past, a celebration without balloons or candles, but with a flame so much brighter, so much warmer as it was flowing from the sighs and moans and whispers of two lovers, I being one of the two.

I can remember the first birthday of my rebellion. It was supposed to be a “no celebration” at all due to economic necessity but good friends started coming, bringing food and drinks, raw fish and meat, telling me to just sit down and take it easy as all of them went on to their tasks of preparing everything. Everyone got drunk, two of my brothers decided to sleep over at our place. In the morning they called up the others and celebrated my birthday. Again. That celebration was thrown by my brothers in the Baisan Gang. And though there have been silence and misunderstanding throughout the years, I will never forget how they made the first birthday of my rebellion a happy one.

Or that birthday wherein one of my sisters, Posh, have me a bottle of cognac and thus started my tradition of having a bottle of that fine spirit after that. A birthday and a double date to booth, how could things be better eh?

But for some reason, this year’s birthday is something that I cannot really put into words. For one, this is the 2^nd birthday that I am spending out from the city I call home. But more so, because the friends whom I have been with are not here with me, though wishes and greetings have started flying towards me.

I guess it has something to do with how many years this birthday is going to celebrate.

Three decades to be exact.

And because its my 3^rd decade in this world, I don’t know why but I decided to group it into 3 groups, a decade each.

For the first, it would be the birthdays of my growing up. I did grow up normally (though what normal is is open to arguments, but hey, it’s my birthday so don’t argue ok? =) ) Those years would be the years of growing up, of discovering the sweet things and the some bitter truths. I still haven’t discovered women back then. Hmmm, well, I had but that’s a story that is really not fitting for this theme.

The second decade would be the birthdays that happened less at home and more in the streets, not with my family but with my friends. These were the birthdays wherein every year brought me closer to understanding and deciding on what I would then do in the next decade that would be arriving. It was in this decade that the seeds of my humanity, of my personality were being sown. It was also here, on its final year that I found love.

Only to lose it on the Third one. Hahahahahaha.

And the third one dealt with my long travels searching for the things that I was then losing, though I did not know it at that time. Running out of time. Running out of chances. Losing. Dying. Crying. More and more poetry became my last standing ground, and it helped me through. Poetry is strong, but I was not that strong to carry the burden, and so the past years saw me giving birth to malformed lines and verses who haunt me to remake them, as if I was an alchemist and I knew the transmutation process, I if I have the Philosophers stone. (alchemy stuff due to my recent finishing the anime series Full Metal Alchemist on one of my anime fests.)

This was also the decade that I found myself running away, literally and figuratively. Inside my head I erected mazes where even I get lost at times. I ran away to Cebu, and “victimized” a handful of willing ladies in my anger, in my last, in my pain and shame. Only to realize that what we carry in our heads can never be far away, no matter what shore we bring ourselves to.

In some aspects, the 2^nd and the 3^rd decades mirror themselves, if only I should say that the second was sweeter, when innocence was still to be lost and the third the most exacting, when I foolishly tried to regain the innocence I lost. The lakes of pain I found myself floating and drowning got deeper, more dangerous. In the end of the second decade I thought I found the map of my life, and I was wrong. In the end of my 3^rd decade I experienced something similar, and I thought that there is salvation for the self-damned. Again, I was proven wrong.

And yet I am still alive. And though only the living may feel the bites of dying, only the living can only feel the softness of a kiss, the tenderness of a caress. Though the living may lose and die and lose everything, it is also only the living who can have it all before they have to lose it.

Three decades, and soon a new one will open up to me.

I wonder how is this new one going to be.