Catharsis of a living ghost

26. Yep. That’s my age now. Believe it or not.

I celebrated my birthday the usual way. Just got drunk over the weekend. Nothing fancy or wild, I should add. I spent Saturday drinking with my friends from the office. Then, Sunday was videoke day/night with my cousins and friends from home. Of course there was drinking involved in there too.

I am writing this now with a screaming hangover and lots of unanswered questions. I hope you excuse me if this blog seems incoherent. When I’m disoriented like this, I tend to digress from one topic to another. Well, I don’t even have a main topic to start with so I guess this should be fine. Let me ramble on and hopefully, we’ll get somewhere.

Ok. First of all, thank you to everyone who greeted me and wished me well on my birthday. Thank you for remembering. I didn’t expect that much people to know it was my birthday and it was quite surprising that some people suddenly greeted me out of the blue. Thank you for the heartwarming messages from all types of communication. – SMS, Facebook comments, Friendster testi, email, verbal greeting, body language, facial expression, and so on and so forth. Your greetings made up for the awful weather on my actual birthday. August 6 was the rainiest day of the year for me, and with the country mourning over a beloved former president who passed away, it only added another shade of melancholy. Nevertheless, all is well and I was able to convince myself that the rain was, in a way, purging me from all the sad stories of last year. Its time for a fresh start, it seemed to say to me.

Since we got to the topic of fresh starts, I viewed my blog entry for last year. I was reading through my birthday blog of 2008 and some sort of chill started going up my spine. Its not the good kind, I should say.

I had this terrifying realization that nothing much has changed. I’m still running around in circles. It was so surreal reading my past blog and feeling as if I’d written it just yesterday. Something’s not quite right and I can’t, for the life of me, point out what it is. Its like being a character in a Haruki Murakami novel. (You could probably tell I’ve been reading too much Murakami lately. I realized that I’m now a fan.) For how long I’ve been chasing my own tail, I have no idea. 3 years? Or maybe more than that. I’m getting tired of it, really. I can’t help but ask myself –‘Is this it?’ Is this the adult life that I so coveted when I was a little kid? Is this the freedom that I’ve been dreaming of? Am I who I wished to be when I was in the stage of planning for my future? The answer scares me.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of running away from it all. I’d like to go to some far-away place where nobody knows me, some obscure place in the corner of this planet where I could learn a new language, recreate myself, and just be someone different, someone free from disillusionment. I wish that people’s lives had a reboot button so that you can just restart yourself when you’re stuck in a loop.

I guess you can say that its human nature to want. No matter how much you have, you can never be satisfied. Some of my friends say I’m lucky to be me. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re wrong. One thing is certain though (in my point of view at least) - I’m not yet there. And that, is the sobering truth I have come to realize.

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