in transit

When 2011 began, I spent the stroke of midnight on a speeding train that was eerily empty. In fact, I got to my destination at about half the time it usually takes because all the platforms at every stop were empty. Nobody was boarding or alighting. Maybe I wasn’t the only one on that midnight train, but it certainly felt like it.

Filipinos have a superstition that whatever it is you get up to at the stroke of 12 on a New Year’s Eve will define what the rest of the year will be like. Hence, when a year ends, we jingle coins on our pocket (for prosperity), wear polka dots (because round shapes are lucky), and have children jump at the stroke of 12 so that they’ll grow taller in the year to come.

On the very first few seconds of 2011, I was moving at breakneck speed, through the night, alone. And I had a premonition that this year would bring massive, unpredictable change, and that I would be by myself. I suddenly felt very desolate. 

Maybe I already knew what was coming even before that train ride. But I believe that life speaks to us in signs. Or maybe our outer surroundings are reflections of our inner selves. I am often guilty of over-metaphorizing things. 

Either way, it was a prophecy that has fulfilled itself. 

Last year, I had plans. I had a future I had dreamed up in vivid detail. I had career plans, and plans to settle down eventually in suburbia, and names for my future, un-born children. 

But one thing I’ve learned about life is that plans, especially big plans, are merely suggestive. In fact, making big plans is practically an open invite to the universe to come and mess with things. 

A relationship ended. Our lives came apart cleanly and easily, which was a big surprise given the intensity of our 3 years together. It was not like an amputation with lots of ragged, messy, bleeding bits. We disengaged like lego pieces, two whole, solitary entities.

The only thing that changed about my life was that, well… he wasn’t in it anymore. At the time of split, my life had already changed drastically. I had a new place, a new job, and new friends. Everything was new. The split was just another change in the bigger, giant tsunami of change. Or at least it helped for me to think of it that way. 

I certainly won’t deny that for the next few weeks, I’d be up till 2 AM every night crying into my pillow until I fell asleep, that I got rid of all his personal belongings slowly, in stages, because I couldn’t bear to throw them all away at once. Toothbrush, towel, socks, dirty laundry, shoes… all these I put aside one by one, with all the reverence of a funeral rite. Each shirt was folded slowly, carefully, as if preparing a body for its final resting place. 

When the last item was gone and everything returned to him in bulk, I woke up the next day feeling a strange equanimity, a grounded lightness. The storm had passed. I was going to be okay. I always knew I would be.

Break-ups don’t get any less painful as you get older. But you do learn that no matter what, life goes on. It always does.

And true to prediction, life moved even faster after that. Half the year has elapsed.

Alone in transit. It’s not so bad. Solitude was never something I feared and I’ve always tended to take to it very naturally. And though I often miss having another person as a repository for my thoughts at the end of the day, it feels good to have Me back. Just me, traveling solo, with a small carry-on of questions that I may or may not find the answers to.

Where am I going? Right now, it’s okay not to know.