Five Hundred First September

If there is a sleeping pill, then you are the tablet that wakes me up.

Five hundred and one Septembers ago, you and I shared the same room, the same bed, the same blanket. When I open my eyes I would see your long eyelashes meticulously curved above your eyelids, refracting the little sunlight passing through the capiz window in my roomy quarter. The sight of your angelic, young face on an early Saturday morn is simply tonic to my hibernating veins.

We tread along the enervating garden of our youth: by summer, the May branches robustly picks its might, facing the unstirring sun with vigor; by rainy season, the June twigs fold themselves on the puffing gale; by calm Septembers, the earthlings move in and out of the ground to renew a daily need for movement.

Everything was going perfect between the two of us until one bizarre September, I saw you boarding a train with another man. I never asked, I never went to know, I just knew that seeing you leave on that train was coterminus with seeing you. It was an exclamation point bordering on an ellipsis and reaching the finality with a period.

It were those excruciating images of the leaving train and your entwined hands that are vividly haunting my sleepless Octobers up to this day.

You were the only girl that I hoped to be with for ten million more Septembers but the impossibility of a renewal is just as elusive as an aberrant apple tree in the center of the Sunken Garden, very unnecessary. Our future can be told by the dead leaf clinging on to a branch on the onset of a typhoon. I am waiting for the last ant to enter Noah's Ark devoid of further emotions as the Ark closes. By October I will be drowning.

If punishment is absolute, then leaving my sanity is worse. I only have you on my mind, and that is enough to cleave me for a million more Septembers of hits-and-misses.