Grey

This is the last of my color series, the one about apartments and shit. It was written on the night I moved out, so it's a bit emo. But reading it now makes me think dislocations are romantic.

Dec. 30, 2010. 1:30 AM

As I write this, I see my things scattered all over the floor, all them I own. It get’s sentimental coz I’m moving out of my grey phase. This night will be my last here. On air is the soundtrack that kept me company throughout the past two and a half years, from Radiohead’s In Rainbows, The National’s High Violet, The Band of Horses and a little bit of Bjork’s Volta, all apartment stories in themselves.

This apartment is beautiful. It’s unfortunate that the management is tearing it down. Perhaps it's too old, but I’ve always had a heart for old houses and buildings. This one here has parquet flooring and marble counters. It has two storey ceilings and an exposed beam oriented in an angle that made it appear like it was pointing to the north. Most of the walls have been kept in their original white, while some have been given an extra splash of color, like grey.

I stayed in the apartment’s third floor, which I’ve since euphemistically called the loft. It has hardwood planks for its floors, and has windows on opposite walls. Sunlight flowed all-day long, it seemed, even on the rainiest of days.

I remember a lot of things in this apartment. For one thing, this is where I really matured as a person. My relationship with Monica blossomed during the years I lived here. And, speaking from the heart, this place might be remembered as where Monica and I really started. I wrote her letters in my room. I smoked a lot of cigarettes at our utility area the first time we broke up, while Reckoner was playing in my iPod. This is where we dreamed of our future together.

I also remember reading a lot of postmodern literature in this apartment. From Guattari and Deleuze, to Zizek and Virillo, to a little bit of Agamben. I also wrote a lot of draft essays on legal theory here, mostly at night when sleep was ever just around the corner. I ordered a lot of books online, eagerly waiting their arrival from my bed where I also wrote a lot about being artificially mature.

This is where I woke up to the news of Michael Jackson’s passing, a most sad morning. He danced his way through life, an inspiration to take your craft seriously. Here, Ninoy Aquino became President, and so did Barack Obama. Maguindanao was massacred, and so Asin played all day long.

Here raged the parties of many pretexts. Someone’s birthday, a block’s year-ender. Someone always had to leave. She deserves the popping corks, and the empty bottles in the morning will wait to be collected in a corner, a temporary reminder that some nights are spent wastefully, unapologetically.

It is always easy here. Alex, the resident dog, owned the first floor. Life wouldn’t be complete in Unit 10 without the occasional mauled shoe, or a long line of pulled toilet paper snaking its way out of the comfort room. Alex is the true queen of this apartment.

Sometimes it gets tough too, and it must be said. I will never forget a very serious mistake I made while I was a tenant of this lovely apartment, one which cost me one and a half years. It gets tough on a smaller, funnier scale. Like how we’ve made it without having keys for the main door, or not having a working flush for our toilet, or a real TV, a real dining table or a real sofa.

I learned how to take surfing seriously in my stay here, perhaps a last ditch effort to save the last of my youth; an attempt at postponement. It was a futile game I played as I was always consciously dreading a life lost in drawers, keypads and ATMs.

It could happen very well that I will forget about the architecture that I dreamed about guiltlessly here. It could also very well be the case that I will forget the love for music that made me buy a guitar and an amplifier that never saw the light of real acoustics. The day will come perhaps, that the books I’ve read, I will give away. The music I’ve listened to, I will dismiss. The surfing that I’ve professed tireless commitment to, neglected with the preoccupations of what would be me in a different day, a different year.

But in this grey phase, I remember all of them quite vividly. I am in here now, but I won’t be tomorrow.