The more that I know
The more I can see
The older I grow
The more I believe
It's not the length of the life
Or the depth of the grave
In the end we'll be measured
By the love that we gave


- Billy Gilman, My Time on Earth

leaden circles dissolved in the air

“…she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”


- 1984, George Orwell

this excerpt from George Orwell's 1984 shall be my epitaph. i was reminded of its permanence tonight when i passed it on to an old friend from my Soup Spoon days. she'd recently lost her life partner to an accident. it is one of those times where everything that comes out of your mouth seems trite and impossibly inadequate.. 

the best i could do, was to give her the gift of dearly loved words. 

this excerpt has always rang true to me; a singular note of the soul blossoming upon the striking of a lonesome bell. i hope it will sound for her as well. 

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. 


A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. 


Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."


- Michael Cunningham, The Hours

i was drawn back to this excerpt from The Hours after a quarrel with my mom.. the quarrel terminated with what could be considered a pyrrhic victory? if only because she started crying in that wheezing, wounded way of hers. i felt horrid; it's one of those hand-wringing moments when your mom cries.  pyrrhic - victory at a terrible cost to the victor. it is a hysterically beautiful word, both in aesthetics and in meaning.

the moment her voice turned wobbly, i knew it was a lost cause and the light would shine against me. i'd not cried visibly but my feelings were hurt as well. "A liquid ache spread under her skin", wrote Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things. it remains one of my favourite phrases, the notion that pain flows where it cannot be seen, curdling deep inside - a vat of insidious sludge, boiling, bubbles slowly but surely bloating, the promised moment of explosion drawn out most languidly, all the more to devastate.  

i wonder how she would react if she knew the secret i was carrying. no one knows, not a single soul. i bear this secret around every day, though it was welded upon my person without permission. but not even i dare to put a name to this secret. i'm afraid to. the secret is that there is no secret? it's all in the mind? until i take the plunge to find out, i'll never know. like a visit to the dentist, one tries his best to put it off though its invisible presence weighs more heavily on the soul than what is opaque.