philos
liberté
princeps
memoria

Today is a really beautiful day. Seems quite special in fact (:

I looked out, and saw sunlight dancing on the brickred rooftop from another estate, and it's like the roof is alive, the way it glimmers and shimmers like an expansive display of sparkling gems in those jewelry shops.. And then the rays hide behind clouds, but only to return even more dazzling than before. Thinking about it, it's almost as if the roof was dancing to the tune of the breeze..

And then looking further out my room window, there's this part that's shrouded with hazy dark shadows, where all the gloomy clouds gathered.. but in my room, sunlight slices through the window pane and kind of melt into the air.. It kind of gives this sense of foreboding. Almost as if the storm is nearing, so better remember how the sunshine looks like before the bitter rain pelts on the panes. But like I said, it's definitely a beautiful day outside.

That's just the way it is. Life serves you surprise, agony, misery, and pleasure on a platter at a buffet, and you have to take whatever is served with a pinch of salt. And it really depends if you want to add sugar to sweeten that platter. To lighten the pain of feasting on something unpleasant. So in a way, I guess people cannot control what is given, but we can control what we make of it. I like my meals sweetened, spiced up and salted all together, like a bucket of popcorn. We take the good and the bad, and then we grow.

Read All We Know Of Heaven by Anna Tuttle Villega. It's this fictional story about how this woman accepted living with a HIV positive man, knowing that one day, very soon, he will die, and he will leave her with the emptiness of her life, taking away her dreams and her hope. She went through this whole inner conflict, and finally decided that to dismiss him from her life totally was impossible, and she would willingly receive the pain of death's separation, after the happiness of spending his last days with him.

If I remembered correctly, the author wrote something like "I weigh the whole of my existence. I learn to doubt that paradise refused is protection against paradise lost. I would rather live with a transient bliss remembered than a sheltered, sealed contrition". That really made a huge impact on me, so much that I kind of memorised the statement she made. The whole story was so bittersweet and poignant, I doubt I'll forget it too soon.

The whole book wraps around Emily Dickinson poems. I know the book title is from one of her poems (she doesn't title them..)

My life closed twice before its close-
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

-Dickinson

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There are points in life, fractures in the channels of ordinary time, when what passes conspired with import so immense that years after years beyond, long into the untold future, remembrance of these points recur with the same vitality whether it is called on 6 times a day or 6 thousand. They hint of immortality, these fractures in time.
They are what keep a man alive.