It’s the emotional equivalent of looking at myself through layers of mirrors. I turn, try to find myself in the varying reflections, some tall and short and broken and twisted - but I catch nothing other than splayed flecks of motion. It’s hard to see anything when everything is moving so fast all at the same time. In chaos, an archangel said, thrives order.

Something breaks. Shards of glass take off to every direction, and one particularly sharp piece slices through the quasi-Romantic pretension that is the person you know as me. Do I wince, wail, cry? But I’m supposed to be good at pretension. No. I procrastinate. I wait for a few minutes, hours, days, and I justify the wasted time by writing – er, constructing a textual landscape.

The smile on my professor’s face when returns the essay is broad enough to rival that of Azgalor’s. “Brilliant!” He exclaims in a crazed, demented manner that is reminiscent of Tolkien’s Saruman. On my paper he wrote, ‘Exceptional review of Ilustrado!’. I, of course, have never even laid my eyes on that book, much less read it.

What was it that Crispin Salvador said? “Ezra Pound be damned. Poets lie, though beautifully. Don't make things new, make them whole.” But that is why things get broken, Jin argues inside my head. That way you can make them whole again. But Jin, I protest. You’re just a pen name I use to ship a particular silver-tongued Jashinist. You’re not real.

And then I have to wonder what else is not and has never been real. And then the inner turmoil begins again.

This is why I am broken. You made me believe that we took the journey of an arrow - shot far and true, never to return to the hostility we used to hoard for each other, but you deceived me and made the journey of a boomerang instead, edging away and then suddenly returning to the very same place you told me you have left. And for the first time, I am at loss as to where I home really is, and if I belong there at all. If I want to belong there at all.

I am scared. Of the future, yes, but more of the past and how it haunts the present. If it is of any consolation, I do feel sad right now. Maybe it confirms that I’m still tethered to home, even if only by its shadows and whatever experimental canvas of junctures you cared to paint for me.

“Be mature about it.” “Take it with maturity.” “Deal with it in a mature way.” Those are things Rex Dizon has told me too many times.

Maybe maturity is merely accepting the tally of all the finite and disappearing options of life. After all, love isn’t based on gratitude, and respect isn’t based on debt.