On Life and Electric Tricycles

I found a new addiction… riding electric tricycles from Market Market to Bonifacio Highstreet. It’s a great experience, more like riding a modern calesa. I have one little idiosyncracy though, I ride at the back. While everyone’s trying to ride it the traditional way, I always seem to find myself riding alone at the back of the trike. I was, for a few days, wondering why I like doing it… then, in one of those eureka moments, one of those “aha-now-i-know-why” moments while I was once again smoking my first stick of the day on my way to my newfound home in Highstreet, it hit me why. Riding the electric trike like I want it is similar to how I live my life. I walk away but I linger. I want to be able to walk away without completely turning my back on that thing I am walking away from. I walk away but I try to bring with me the memories, I want to be able to look at these things from afar, remembering what I did, why I did it and who I did it with. The IT being anything that I’ve tried out at least once in my life, that “it” being something that at one point made me so happy and at one point, made me almost tap out from the unbelievably torturous pain.

I don’t like fleeting things, contrary to popular belief. I can easily move on, I can easily walk away, but these things are disappointingly not fleeting, they’re stubbornly permanent. These are things that I know have forever changed the way I looked at things., the way I feel things, the way I handle things. To walk away is the easy part, especially if life or fate have their own way of compelling me to finally leave, the hardest part is to not linger, to not try to hold on to the things that are still there but should be walked away from. The hardest part is to deal with the memories. I’m masochistic that way, I keep everything, not only in my heart but in my brain, in my room, in the now dusty corner of my shelves. Everything’s just a few steps away from me, may it be a journal that witnessed how I cried millions of tears for something that seems too mundane now or the already withered petals stuck in between pages that symbolized a chapter that needs to be forgotten but will never be.

So, that was my realization for today. I don’t turn around and walk away, I walk backwards. It could be because I’m holding on to my optimism, or because I just can’t let go or I don’t want to let go. It’s fun and emotionally tiring at the same time. But I like it that way, in the same way that I predict to be hooked in my electric trike addiction for a long time, until the bar perhaps. Until I need to walk away and find a new addiction. I refuse to make life pass me by, I will look at it straight in the eyes and say, I’m moving on bitch, the past looks smaller and smaller each second, and I love it.