There is a howling in my chest that wants to be heard. Every second it is there--an obsidian fire, varying in power and volume, but always, constantly awake, always, constantly there.I have just spent the last three days in Iloilo, my first real trip by myself, my first real flight. I suppose in a way one can say the trip went as expected. Most of my time here was spent reading and sampling good food from new, untried places--even if it is far from the local cuisine.
I met someone, too. Beautiful and smart and possessing of more enviable traits most youths ever have a right to. Wanting him came easily enough, of course, but I have lived through enough stories woven from similar threads to know how the pattern would take shape. At any rate, what I have been given should be enough--should be more than what someone like me deserves, surely.
There are times when I want it known. When I would want nothing else than a visible manifestation of my pain to take shape right before my eyes. This howling swimming from inside me thrashes about my blood like silverpike caught in a barbed net. Nothing else would please me more than seeing this wild, flailing thing in front of me, gutted and bloodied and drained of life. What would that leave me with, I wonder? What would I find inside myself when all the bad things have been drained out?
My flight isn't until four more hours. I will leave Iloilo with much the same awe and incredible, incredible sadness as I did Baguio six years ago.
I will go back to the life I have been living with everyone who claims to know my name, my face none the wiser. Everyone will see a smiling face, 'Oh yes, I enjoyed my trip very, very much. The flight was comfortable enough. The food was good. The people were nice.' I might make mention of the person I met to close friends, but they will never know I'd fallen in love with him--him, little better than a complete stranger, after seeing each other for a few hurried hours.
Love, I'd come to realize, is free for me to give to whomever I choose, however much I choose, and take back when necessary--or refused.
More and more voices in my head ask 'Is this worth anything?' More and more voices take up space in the mad, mad chorus in my head, in concert with the howling. 'Is this worth anything? Is this worth the crushing pain? The growing space between islands of sanity?' And then I see something beautiful--heartbreakingly beautiful--and I say 'Yes', and I weep.
