By Ken Castillo.   junebug@cav.pworld.net.ph
Date: 18 November 1999

Revisiting the Cliché

Telling myself I have not held her for more than a year has lost its novelty.

I try to remember how rawly it hurt the first time I realized that the last
time I felt her warmth was one beautiful summer ago.  I find no sharp relief...
Nothing in fact, but an echo thrown from far away, words diluted from their
passage.  I haven't smelled her hair for more than a year, I say, and even the
sound of her laughter, once enough to justify my waking moments, now eludes
memory.

I say this, and wonder why the sentiment fails to move me as it did.

When did I stop pining for her, paining myself?  What happened in between? 
Perhaps I have changed that much, though having regrown my skin could have been
enough.  I run the tips of my fingers over my chest, follow the old patterns of
healed bruises and old wounds where the things I never said to her and wished I
had have chafed me raw.  I have traced them before.  And slowly began to 
understand what a cliché, so clever and necessary for a while, dully feels
when spoken in the present.

It wasn't necessary to feel the same, not anymore.  For the first time in
months, I'm finally free to find someone to horribly miss again when their
absence comes.  As absence inevitably shall, for everything.

And in time, forget.  But though I may not remember how, I will remember that
everything, even the pain, was beautiful while it lasted.  And as surely as
today's poetry will become tommorow's clichés, there will always be those
beautiful moments to pine for.