Aspire for the Spire

...Hope dangles on a string, like slow spinning redemption...

I open my eyes to a dark June evening, tired and distraught by the pleasantries and negativities of the long registration process that dominated the week's itenerary. There is some warmth kissing my cheeks, and memories from some distant past. It might as well all I have in mind. Poverty in thought strikes those who are wealthy in action.

Hail once, hail twice and not until the eighth time in thirty minutes do I get a taxi ride. I pretend to look back and take note of the plate numbers of vacant cabs who did nothing but look at me and ignore my plea. I plea for sanctuary. I plea for reclusion. I get inside, my head bumps the ledge a bit and makes a thug. I give out the instructions and gives the driver a smile. The kind of smile you give when you have nothing else to say. A standard smile and a shrug to make the man sure you're not trying to do anything funny, nor proposing something stupid. The taxi moves along the lighted Katipunan commercial district. I am disattached to the frenzy, the commotion, the mayhem of Friday evenings.

I would like to call it exhaustion, exasperation...it has a lot of forms. However, it is not much that I am tired. Truth be told, I love my job and have no regrets whatsoever in taking this path of service. The hesitance that enveloped me during the campaign no longer exists, and has instead been replaced by much hope. Hope that dangles on a string, slow spinning redemption...as the song goes.

Aspire for the spire.

How do you deal with fixated angst and sadness on one person? How can you be angry at someone you do not want to let go of? I tell myself that it has to be so. I tell myself that it only hurts in the beginning. There is too much at stake. "Shame on you Paolo, shame on you. You do not risk further that you have invested so much in?" But I have to let go. I can not have everything. Sure, tell that to yourself you cliche-lover. I stare at the horizon, the eastern metropolitan skyline as we car goes through the fly-over. At the landing, there is uneasiness and a depressing feeling as well. I ask myself if I will I ever fall in love the same way again. I ask myself if in that time, that person would love me back for all I am, the nothingness of me.

I do not take pride in what I am. I am a bouncing boy of fat. Immature, struggling to make himself feel better. Or is he not?

I could only hope for a day I could be that someone to my someone. For now, it is complicated. No, complicated is a term used by those who could not see the challenge or accept the task at hand.

So I say, you go on the pursuit of academic excellence. I crawl for excellence in the service. Temperamence doesn't come easy now, now that stress is looming at the next turn. Thesis, economics, council work...bah! I pray for the strength to think of other nobler things than personal realization. I pray for the perspective to see things as beautiful instead of what they are.

Funny how man can talk of the same thing over and over again. Has he not moved on? I think not. Life is a cycle that bends and leaps forward. It is slow spinning. It demands redemption. For as the Punisher would say, if it is not vengeance, it has to be punishment.

I am glad yet I lack something. My friends would tell me to put my faith in God. I do. Some of my friends think God does not exist, or that reason has won the battle over dogma. Times like these, I find the existence of God to be as real as anything else. For just as the taxi meter ticks, time ticks, God moves and leads to His overall plan. Call it unfair. Call it what you want. But isn't breathing a privilege more than a curse. Even postmodernists would say that it is a matter of perspective. Then in a world of so many views, how can there be order? I say we do not go for compromise, we choose one and perhaps another to take us to our destination.

This is the fallback of the faithful. God works in mysterious ways. Everything has a purpose. Call it self-serving, I find power in such thinking. For if man does not find meaning and purpose, he is nothing. If man thinks he shall be dust after he dies and nothing else, then he is doomed to being so.

Idealism should not be quelled, it should be harnessed and used. The world needs dreamers. The world needs less of pale staring moments in a taxi.

So to those who may believe I have not learned my lessons and moved on, I beg you to think otherwise.

There is much to be had in this world. I am determined to have them.