WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY

There are so many things I want to write about, like the way I can be watching a play, here, in the Philippines, or rather a series of plays, and find myself instantly transported back to my senior year in high school, where myself and my class performed our play then watched some plays, as terrible as our own, as we stifled our laughter with grim smiles and unstoppable tears. Or the way that proximity to cancer simultaneously slows the nature of time itself down to a crawl, a gesture, while also somehow speeding life up, bring death nearer and nearer with each passing sigh. Or the sight of the clouds touching the mountains, almost drowning them, a fine mist that means no harm. Or my belief that we don't grow up, ever, and instead remain locked in time, held hostage by our own childhood dreams and beliefs, the nexus of responsibility and maturity a fool's game perpetrated by those who wish to hide their essential, youthful heart. Or what it feels like to watch a film in a cinema after ten, twelve months of having celluoid dreams reduced to the heartless size of a television. Or the way it is to experience, for the first time, an emotion like grief, one you've heard about but never truly understood except as an academic concept common to the human species. Or perhaps a comment or two is more than enough. Perhaps I do not need an extended essay to solidify what I feel. Perhaps a week from now, or a month, or a year, or a decade, I will look back on this post and sense what it is that I was trying to say -- something about the futility of words, the necessity of words -- and I will smile a self-satisfied, reflective smile, and wonder about my own extended efforts to say what I mean as fully as possible, with as much depth as the deep end of the swimming pool of your early childhood, blue and vast and filled with swimmers smarter and stronger and more aware than yourself.