solitary

i'm a solitary traveler often seeing the world alone. i find recluse in my writing and i escape the world through books. it gets lonely sometimes but i have gotten used to it. i was never much a crowd pleaser nor was i the type to surround myself with people.
 
i was a loner by birth even if i had four brothers. i was a silent child my mother recounts to me. i would work in silence and to her surprise found my brother's bike unscrewed. i had unscrewed it with my bare hands.
 
as i grew up, i gazed at people often sporting a blank look. i was an observer. i liked being a watcher of people. there were so many different things you could see if you really looked. take the mother who would tend to her child in a stroller and whisper baby words and smile at her baby's life...the old man who walks each day with a cane seemingly engrossed in his own thoughts...the pensive readers who spots the gardens during lunch...the punk rocker kid who helps the old man...or how the passengers on the bus look weary after a hard day's work. what's going through their minds? what are they thinking about? these were my thoughts and observations. i always wanted to know how each affected one. and how one could affect others.
 
so, i lived my life surrounded by thoughts often sharing with a friend or two. i have a few trusted friends. friends i can trust my life with. i am blessed to have met them in this world of loneliness and selfishness. they suffer everytime i leave. i suffer too when i am plucked from the comfort of a wonderful friend at arm's length away or just a telephone call away. now, i just write to them through this ethernet and i await for their thoughts from miles away. but you can never really hug a computer screen, can you?
 
i lived constantly with this making friends and leaving them business. it was heart-breaking at first (until now) when i left my elementary best friend in the philippines. i had cried until my tear ducts had dried. i was young and it was the first encounter at a "friendship" worth keeping. i left for the states and lived a solitary life. i met some people who treated me like a friend but in the end, betrayal was waiting at the helm. it would shatter like the mirror reflecting something beautiful. too good to last. then i met sarah kay during the last year of my stay in chicago. i was 13 and she was 12. she had another best friend, katie mier who didn't like the idea of her friendship with me often stealing notes that were passed from sarah and me. i could understand. sarah wasn't your average 12 year old. she was deep often questioning life and being sweet like a child should be. our friendship developed over that last year of my stay in 1994 but soon i would leave for abu dhabi.
 
it was another heart-wrenching goodbye and exchanges of pendants descriptively shouting, "#1 friend" was given to her and i received a broken heart she gave me as a pendant. i never knew the whole engraving but i knew it sounded like "through distance we remain friends."
 
so, we did. i moved to abu dhabi, friendless again. i met a girl who i thought i could trust but she ran off with my love interest. yes, i was young with a love interest. i often thought of future partnerships. i was never the thought-less "for now only" type of person. but after this, it threw me into frenzy, questioning human nature, questioning friendship.
 
i lived my life to survive and i had my thoughts to keep me company. i tried to reach out to people my age at the age of 13 but it wouldn't work out. i turned 14 and i was still solitary and bore the stigma of speaking with an american accent in a school with predominant filipino students. it must have been painful for their ears to hear my accent. so, i stayed mum.
 
but the limelight wanted to follow me. it was the awakening that was waiting to be revealed. i would become an orator and a writer. i recently transfered schools in my second school year. i soon turned 15. i was a "star" thrown into the stage by teachers who thought i had potential. i never questioned my inner intelligence, but i always had a problem sharing it with people because they couldn't understand me. i had found a mentor who could understand. then, began a friendship with a teacher. she was 9 years older than me and she understood me. she would often compare my talking to an encounter with a mirror. it was like i could just talk and no one had to listen and i'd still talk. if one would interpret it negatively, it would be like she wasn't listening. but precisely, a mirror reflects the thoughts of the speaker, thus the listener would have the same idea as the speaker. right? and often as a mirror would help in self-realization, so did she.
 
so, began the first tale of friendship that braved distance and time. i will end here for my fingers ache at pounding away at the keyboard. i shall continue...for my readers, hold your breath.