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11 Year Old Thoughts




It’s difficult to categorize important from junk. When I woke up this morning, I already have a plan on what to do this day, I am going to clean up the room and discard everything that I will no longer need. After bringing home my things from the office, the room was a mess. 

Papers here and there, notebooks, books and all sorts of things, like letters from students, small mementos, past drawings and to cut it short, junks that will make me remember. 

I believe that I am not a sentimental kinda’ guy, but upon seeing all of these, I realized, I think I am indeed sentimental! (in the first place, why have I not threw them away?) or maybe, I am just concerned because they exerted effort to make these things to give me, so I might as well return the favor by keeping it.

Anyway, sentimentality only brings trash. As heartless as it may sound, I can’t afford to keep them anymore as the house is getting crowded and it’s getting filled with trash. So, I need to segregate and categorize my things. 

It took me 3 hours to sort and classify the trash from the important ones and another 2 hours to clean and rearrange the room and another hour to separate the white papers with the colored ones (and 12 minutes to drop it to the nearby junk shop.) 

As I was looking at the 4 big boxes, 90% of my things are useless. What’s left is just a small box – just my books and some notes that I am not even sure if I will still use it. Though I was having a battle with myself whether to throw these things as well, but my heart said no. Those notebooks must stay, as well as the books. (of course, those books are priceless and difficult to find!)

Then I came across this notebook. A very old notebook that I had way back in college. (it was a journal). As I was browsing it, I can’t help but laugh at one of the drawings there. It was dated September 2, 2002 and the tag line: “I am happy” really brought back vivid memories of that day. 

Most of the thoughts written there were all of angst and anger, but this particular entry was different. As I recall, I was sitting at hellhole that time, still suffering from a loss and was losing my thoughts in the pain of it all. It was the first time that I felt the pain of breaking up with someone and it’s inexplicable through words. But I do remember how it was killing me.

Then I saw a bird, (it has a black and orange color) landed and rested at a nearby golden bush. It was silently sitting there, staring at me (with the usual bobbing movement of a birds head that I also can’t explain). We were staring at one another for a couple of minutes, when suddenly, another bird landed beside it, then another and another until the place was crawling with whose tiny black orange birds. 

It was a weird moment but at the same time, exhilarating. Cellphones with cameras were not yet made that time so I tried drawing them, sadly when I started getting the pencil and colors from my bag, they started to fly away, which is once more, another tiny enchanting moment that amplified the emotions that day. (the sound of their flapping wings were music to my ears.) 

Since I can’t draw without a subject, I thought of drawing the nearby mountain na lang plus the rainbow with the memory that I will remember this day. It was a day when I decided to let everything go and move on. It was when I realized that I need to fly away.

The notebook was kept for 11 years now, and its all tattered and beaten up. It’s even difficult to turn the pages as the spiral spring that holds the pages together have been flattened out. Some of the entries are almost erased and you can see how time punished it cruelly.

But … at the back of my mind, the question whether I will throw it or not keeps on nagging me. A part of myself is telling me to throw it, but another voice is telling me to keep it. This notebook is a part of me. My past is a part of me.

No matter how trashy is my past, it is still me – for the meantime, I'm gonna hold on to this tiny notebook. There are certainly a lot of things that I may not be proud of, brought me pain and moments where I wished it never happened. As clichéd as it may sound, without those pains and sufferings, I wouldn’t be who I am today. 

I don’t want to forget these things no matter how tragic it was, and as hard as it was and still, it's always fruitful to remember lost fantasies. 

I am just glad that in those tiny moments, I was actually happy.
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