Fragments of the Quiet Mind

There’s no announcement.  No grand epiphany.  Just a soft unraveling.  Like mist slipping from the mountain as the sun stretches itself across the horizon — slowly, quietly, completely. It hits you while doing your usual tasks. Perhaps while washing the dishes or passing by a street you once avoided. It doesn’t ask permission, it doesn’t need to.  You realize you’re no longer holding your breath for the sound of a message, no longer tracing their name in the dust of memory. And it doesn’t sting the way you feared it would.  It just…  settles. At some point, you stopped checking if they viewed your story. You stopped wondering what you did wrong, what you could’ve done differently, what they'd say if they saw you now. The fantasies grew faint like old film reels — flickering, distant, unnecessary. They used to feel like prophecy. Now, they feel like fiction. It’s not that you no longer care. It's just that the waiting part — the gripping, hoping, aching p...

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 c...