#chorla

It’s been a while since I felt this kind of happy. I’m not saying I haven’t been happy having received so many blessings lately. I’m referring to the kind of happiness I felt. It was the nostalgic kind of happiness that took me back to eight years ago.

Tonight, I had dinner with my best friend, Viel, and my old college friend, Rain. We had long planned this meet up and it was only now that we found time in our busy schedule. We had dinner at Nihonbashi Tei then dessert at Caramia in Tomas Morato. In the short time we spent together, we talked about the past, the present and the future. Hospital-related discussions were kept to a minimum. This was one of those nights when I didn’t want to check my watch. Luckily, my iPhone was dead and my hospital phone was running low on batteries so messages hardly came in.

I guess I can compare the kind of happiness I felt tonight with the happiness I felt when Viel and I had our 2.5-hour walk in Tagaytay back in ‘08. I felt so free and detached from my routine, something I haven’t felt in a long time.

I’m glad where I am now and I know I made the right decisions in life with the friendships I’ve built through the years.

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Excerpt from my blog in 2008, “A Long Walk to Remember”

I could die today…

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

― Mark Twain

Death is death. For me, there is nothing else that accompanies death but the thought that your life, however you lived it, is coming to its expected end.

Am I ready to face it? To finally conclude my existence? I guess, at this age, I’m not. I thought I still have a long way to go. I haven’t started the career I have chosen and my family still needs me the same way I need them. I haven’t met someone worthy enough to share my life with. I haven’t seen my beautiful children yet. I haven’t said anything worthy to be remembered if ever I die today. I still want to be significant, to change what I know I could change. I want to help, I want to influence. I haven’t lived my life to the fullest yet.

But… Death is death. Probably, no matter how much I talk about the things I still want to do if it will come, it will come. All I could do is to live each day as if it is my last. I could still get rid of the ‘what if’s I think about every day and instead walk on without any regrets. I could still seize every moment or every opportunity for me to make my family and close friends feel that I love them and I treasure everything that they have shared with me.

I believe that there is nothing more after we die. There is no other place, no other life, no other memory but the ones we have lived and we have created here in this planet. Thus, we should live our lives to the fullest without thinking that it could be repeated, rearranged or relived somewhere else. The idea of an afterlife, for me is an attempt to prolong what we know will come to an end someday. It is like some comforting idea that we could still go on and reevaluate the things we did and regret in this lifetime.