My friends,

I hope you don't mind the intrusion into your small, private, electronic worlds. This is a bawling session, so treat it exactly like SPAM (yeah, yeah wise guy, you can fry it, too). Read on at your own discomfort, boredom, and hopefully, patience. Here goes:

She left today. Well, yesterday at about 10:05PM, the time her flight was scheduled to leave. She left for Bangkok and is scheduled to stay there for about a month doing all sorts of ramp and print, maybe even tv jobs. More exposure, more experience, more money. After that she's scheduled to leave for Singapore, where she's slated to stay for two months doing similar stuff.

I can't stand it. The distance, the silence, the absence. The distance is invisible, the silence is invisible, and the absence is invisible... I cannot see my tragedy but I know it exists. Who among you know this? Jesse, certainly. Bob. Agham. Even my brother-in-law-if-everything-goes-right, Joel, knows a wee bit about separations. How about you, Kristine?

I miss her. Terribly. I tell you because you're my bestest friends, and I know that even if I intrude upon you with rants like this, you'll always have enough decency to (if you don't want to bother) trash the post discreetly and remember to sympathize when next we meet. You're all great, and because I've been a pretty secretive little bastard for the past twenty-four years, I decided to share this little wonderful thing that I have with you. It's called agony.

Riding in the car driving away from the airport, my eyes welled up with tears. This should come as no surprise since a mere trailer of 'the Secret Garden' will reduce me to tears... I don't see why something as personal as temporal and spatial separation from someone you adore should elicit a less powerful reaction. So I almost cried, but I didn't. Bik, who was driving, had brought his girlfriend along for the ride, and I deemed it imprudent to cry like a baby not five minutes after dropping Nina off.

I tried not to think about it by going to Starbucks and getting all of us three some nice, cold Frapuccinos. The coffee was good, of course, but the venue was all wrong. We went there often, Nina and I, even though she never drank coffee. She knew *I* loved coffee, and she'd suffer the crowd and the absence of having anything substantial to consume, except for my company. But last night, she wasn't there. Not physically (yeah, yeah, all that stuff that they say about that person being there in spirit and all that is true. It should be, or else it'd be a pretty crappy world), anyway. So Starbucks wasn't such a good choice, after all. I was miserable. We also decided to watch two movies (it was Friday, so there was the 'midnight movie' at Greenbelt), so we went off to see 'I know what you did last summer' and 'Gattaca'.

I'd seen the wonderful 'I know what...', which was sritten by the same writer who gave us 'Scream' and the reportedly even more exciting 'Scream 2'. Kevin Wiliamson is brilliant. I'm digressing... anyway, I'd seen that movie already... with her. So every minute, though it was fun watching Bik-bik cower in his seat (what a wus), was excruciating as I relived seeing it with her. Gattaca was no fun, either. Aside from having a somewhat painfully tragic milieu, the love story, whatever hollow little was there of it, only served to remind me of nothingness and abandonment. Not because the script wasn't strong enough (it wasn't), but because I was annoyed that the two characters were together at all. I mean, how could these two paper characters be together and feel a movie happiness, while I was sitting in that sticky-floored moviehouse feeling like shit? It wasn't funny.

I'm writing because I know most of you have gone through this... exactly this, not exactly this, similar to this, worse than this, almost like this. This, this sense of abandonment. I got my 'correct weight and fortune' again, last night, after she left. It was something we were fond of doing, if only because the weight check was always essential to both of us (she, to check if she was getting fatter (she was), and I to check if I was getting thinner (I was)), and because believing in mystical prophecies from machines is always fun when you're in love. It didn't hurt that those things turned out to be pretty accurate (we may have developed a knack for subverting the messages into something believeable -- it's a talent). Last night's advice was (in true, Yoda-like fashion): "FATE is pointing just one way. To you hard luck it seems, but in the end you'll surely win in love and business schemes".

Great, huh? So, it had a good chance of being true, so long as you were having a bad day, but who cares? I enjoyed it, and it was probably the only thing that made me a little less tragic. The promise of a better tomorrow. That's pretty good, I guess, and I'll take it. So, in my small web of depression, I have the small promise of triumph printed on the back of a 2Php cardboard fortune. It seems pathetic when you think about it. But what the hey. I'm not in any rush to get back into the Angst Club. I'm happy. Not perfectly, maybe, but I'm happy.

I'll write again, guys. Maybe lighter. Hehehehe, get it? Lighter? Later? Bah, never mind. Anyway, gotta go for now. It's four AM, and my eyes feel like pan de sals.

. . . . . . .
s a i n t

"I am truly convinced that people need to be constantly reminded of compassion."

- Natalie Portman