Sadness and Desire, Chapter One

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These past few days I kept dreaming about a garden. I was lying on a bed of grass, the hard earth pressing against my back, the frail green blades tickling my ear. Surrounded by what looked like decaying rose petals, I was staring at the sky with cotton tufts of clouds embedded on a canvass of blue. For some reason, there was a comforting ambiance to it, like I could stare at it until my eyes grew teary, longing for sleep. Or for something else.
When my father died and his mere existence was narrowed down into a lifeless carcass beneath the Earth, I remember when he told me that I was meant for great things. Now that I am older and most of what I remember about him was his face beneath the coffin’s glass, I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that. These thoughts were probably fueled by the fact that I arrived at the age of twenty feeling unfulfilled, like I really haven’t done anything with my life. Haven’t finished school, haven’t the slightest desire to graduate. Maybe it was because I loved staying, or maybe because I no longer desire to peek into the curtained window of my future.
My head was the drain where most of these thoughts collect upon waking up. I was idle in dreams, much so in my waking life. My apartment was as silent as a crypt, while my body was the mummified remains of a self I barely recognized. I looked at the mirror and contemplated about death and how soon it would come, and finally whispered to myself that no, not today.
Sometimes I would wake up and find a woman beside me. Most of the time it was Kristelle, sometimes a stranger. Whoever that person was, it didn’t matter because I always begin morning conversations about my dreams of the garden.
While most girls would find it very boring, (and it was very boring indeed), Kristelle was the one who usually interprets it for me, even though the dream was very much the same: the garden, my body lying on the grass, my eyes focused on the sky, and then I would remember my father’s death.
“You are the grass,” Kristelle told me. “The garden is the world. Your father is God.”
Her interpretation left me speechless. Suddenly, I was out of words to say and my tongue was pushing back against my throat, as if holding on to something I couldn’t understand. She would then proceed to the kitchen of my sorry apartment and make coffee. “Coffee cures anxiety,” was like her motto in life. Holding the warm cup in my hands, I could say I started thinking clearly. Upon taking a sip of the black, hot liquid, the steam piercing my nostrils, it would appear as if she has convinced me: I am the grass and this world was the garden, and my father was God. Did it mean I was sorry for all those lost time I could’ve spent doing something else? I wouldn’t know. Dreams and its interpretations never offer any clear answer. Just more things to think about, to reflect on.
When it gets really bad, I’d take a notebook and jot down the things I wanted to do and the things I’ve done, and always the latter would take the less space. I was aspiring too much, I guess, but then I would remember that the list I’ve made were nothing but words I assume and assumed, meaningless symbols mankind has developed to provide an illusion of meaning.
Looking at these notes, I could clearly see that I spent my eighteenth and nineteenth years of existence fearing my twentieth. It was a door on top of a mountain, and I knew I must reach its top, but not to open the door but to just stay at the summit and chill, drink beer or brandy, write countless poems that no one would read, while waiting for other people to reach the summit and offer them a drink, or had them criticize my poems. Nobody should enter the door. Or, I won’t let them enter the door. Because behind it was the downhill path of the mountain. And what lies after was simply where everything began: the bottom.
When it wasn’t Kristelle who was beside me when I wake, and I’d tell that person (whoever she was) about my dreams of the garden, she would hardly care. She’d put on a listening face, nod her head as if interested, and yet there was something comforting about it. It suspends my anxiety for meanings, and I don’t know why but sometimes I preferred meaninglessness.
“It’s just a dream,” one of these people said. Nobody made coffee. Nobody tried convincing me anything. They’d just slap me with the truth: it’s all just a dream. It doesn’t need to have meaning. And maybe I am just a dream and maybe I don’t need to have meaning. And what comes next was the hunt for pieces of clothing we tore away from our bodies the previous night, before marking the same bodies as if an owned territory.
There was something so geographic about sex: mapping out blind spots in the fogged areas of strange lives. Cupping every bit of topography, marking relative locations and regions, smelling every inch, nook and cranny, as if clearing away mosses and cobwebs in a long lost, or long forgotten, spaces of the self. So a dream about a garden, is almost, if not forever, just a dream.
And we begin the day with less anxiety. We begin the day the same way the previous day began: looking at our naked bodies, letting ourselves be pulled by its gravity.
And that is how I want to write this story.

I have tried telling this story in the past, but for some reason, I couldn’t write the first line. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I had ceased dreaming about the garden for a very long time. Whenever I think I’ve got the chance to write something, there was something else I’d better be doing. I had a notebook where I kept a bunch of notes, but I lost it somewhere and never bothered to look for it.
We always try to look for things that simply wanted to be lost.
My father had passed away. My mother was in the States with her other family, working there and pays for my tuition and apartment. She sends me allowance every month. We rarely speak, though. Maybe the distance was a factor.
Kristelle and I had split. Maybe she grew tired of interpreting my dreams.
I met a new girl at the LRT. We go to the same university. She didn’t give me her name, nor did I give mine when we first spoke to each other. We went out together, and eventually found ourselves in her bedroom. She hesitated at first, but then gave. Most often than not, we do it in my place.
Now that we have all these details, we will go back to the garden, and then, I will tell its story.!