Today, I asked a question to myself. It didn't form words, but like a pair of leering eyes full of inquisitiveness and fulmination, I cannot avert it. I've been trying to think, first of a question, second for answers. I've been trying to exhume the parts of me that fell asleep to the stupor of life's tangent complexities; been trying to unfold the corners that I have elaborately pleated; been trying to get off of the subterfuge of my own making. The realization of the self is an ardous task. But I understood, whilst trying to unspool scatterd thoughts left in my capacity, that it is not as difficultto ruminate as it is to care. I am no longer trying to think. I am trying to feel. I am trying to care. What is the construct of the self? Who am I? Who am I trying to be? I am no one - the self is nothing but a constant displacement of another simulacrum of the self. Do I want change? Where am I? Where do I want to be? The self is a reality that believes in another and tries to achieve it, rendering the self in its reality an unwanted illussion. Do I want to leave this state of self that I am at now? The self is the last person to jump off the cliff, because it desires conformation by non conformation. Are my decisions and philosophies, conformist or non conformist to the society? What am I? What do I want to be? The self is a unsustainable definition that we vaguely use to give meaning to numerous irrelevancies that we value more than we should. Why am I trying to be relevant? The self is nothing, is of no value, as all the things it dispenses of its possession, as the self is the collective and entire breadth of everything that questions, that supplements, that revolves, that attracts, and that repels it. Why do I want to be important? The self, is a thing detached from a person, like a shredded skin a hollowed man muses as a mirror that looks both ways of the past and future. It is hard to think when you're a nihilist. It is hard to reason when you're a conformist. It is hard feel when you're apathetic. It is hard to be a self, after building a stone-faced city made of failed endeavors around my solitary musing. But it's actually not so hard. It is the easy way. This is both the denial of the questions of existence and at the same time, a passive-aggresive riposte. Outside, two lances of traffic lane move in a slow, mechanical, and dizzy mirage. I decided to leave Makati and my solitude, and stay at Bulacan with a family that makes me feel foreign, to drown in the impassive silence of tangible distance far worse than my solitary life in Makati. In Bulacan, I can be alone even from myself. To pass time, I read a book in the poorly ventilated coaches of a Del Carmen bus, surrounded by loud and squalid faces, mosquitoes, roaches, uncertainties geared for unknown transitions. The world is the thing that prevents the self. Or does it hold it together? Am I my choice to read a book in an absurd place? Is that non conformation? Or am I the absurdity in the place I dwell? Is not giving a damn about it conformation? Perhaps, we are what we choose to be apart from what the world demands of us. This is, perhaps, why I always reserve a place for loathing in the world despite my blind conformation and apathy, that almost always lead to self hate. I can look back to the times when I give myself and the things around me more importance. I can still look back, as easy as closing my eyes and letting my eyes roll at the back of my head, musing on the culverts of the past hollowed inside me. But I can only look back. I cannot go back. My freedom is limited. Am I my freedom, or what my freedom dictates of me? I'm trying to find my centrifuge. Everyday, I wake up from four to six hours of constantly interrupted sleep. I check my calendar studded with client meetings, with immovable tasks, with Marooner's rocks in the rocky sea of eternal drudgery. Are these my tethers? Or my moor? Because outside of this calendar, whenever I am not a slave to the machinations of the corporate prison, is the real strife that I try to avoid. I call my job, the people around me, the expectations and the manifold of life constructs around me, distractions. They distract me from feeling too much, from not feeling too much, from poetry, from getting neck deep in the mire of exiatential questions, of sadness, of pure verve. Then I wonder at the farce of how the things that kills what I thought was essential are the same things that keeps me alive. Aren't these things the same pillar that holds me together everyday? Aren't the things it distracts me from the real splinters that topples me down and the real distractions? What is living? What is existence? Do we subsist on meaning? On human connection? On self appreciation? On faith and beliefs? On a personal whetstone for all the mundane hours of the day? On all these fatal, detrimental play things? Then why does it hurt? Then why is it sad? Why does it feel like exact opposite of life? Of growth? Of change? I am an entropic by product of all these and yet I fluster msyself over and over to come to the light on why I wish to think, to feel, and get off of my subterfuges? Why would I desire to molt out of the cocoon of safety I have ardently knitted from years of experience and inexperience? Why do I keep on trying to write? I have no reason. I have no faith. I have no hope. I have no goal. I have no one to appease. I have no value for value. I have no importance. I have no faith. I have no answers. I have nothing. And it does not hurt. Now I'm trying to think again, to feel again, and the turnstile keeps on spinning but I am always led to a cul de sac. I have become my liminilaties too. Is this the end of it? A blank page, just as how it have started. When I start to question, I begin to wander, and that is how losing begins. It is hard to believe that the self and its existence is finite, and fleeting, and unsustainable if the self has infinite ways of questioning and hoping for answers. I let the torrent take me, it's a complete surrender, but eventually the torrent morphs into me. I guess my idea of the self has come to a point where the self is a question of existence and the acceptance that these questions do not have answers. And so I live like this - detached and hopeless sans hope itself, wearing the verisimilitude of satiation. And so I live like this.