With death there's a funeral, or: quarter life crisis

This is a cautionary tale. I wrote this when I was in college and, looking back on it now, I can relate to the stress and melancholia and the feeling of wanting to run away, but in college I came really close. Now it's unimaginable. How can someone who loves God allow herself to be so unhappy? The answer is simple: a lack of constancy.

There are days when I just want to curl up on the couch and watch an Apocalypse. With stakes, and vampires disintegrating into powder, and Giles wiping his glasses on his shirt. (Hopefully with no Michelle Trachtenberg in her profound annoyingness.) To identify with all of that drama. I don't wish I were the Chosen One or anything as melodramatic, though I do wish I had an ex I really broke up with, rather than a couple of overgrown men who had no idea what their priorities were and who basically tossed my heart around as though it were a football, all the while without me ever getting to change my Friendster status. (It's an inexplicable ambition. It's not as though I even use friendster.) I wish I could have days that are not off days, days that are not Buffy days.

As excited as I am about thesis, most of the time I just want to effectively disappear. Disintegrate, become invisible. An option is running away. But my mom would die of a heart attack (no, she would. Really.) and my dad, of despair, and my brother, of the overwhelming happiness that I am no longer part of his life and he can have my parents' attention all to himself. I imagine myself disappearing, disintegrating into tiny unseeable balls of cells, all floating away to be part of one ecosystem or another, feeding the fungi and the algae on the edges of the sea. It's more and less than death, because with death there's a funeral, and so much black and so much fuss, and coffins are so expensive. I want to disappear, and go where they will never find me. Maybe I should try, but I don't think my conscience can handle the guilt.

I've alienated my Tahilan friends and many others from various social spheres. Mom and dad are probably the only people who really love me who I actually want to see. The feeling is deeper than loneliness but I have no word for it but loneliness.

I wonder where I'd go if I actually ran away. I wouldn't take my laptop. I'd say goodbye to it and delete all of my files except a .txt one saying I'm sorry, as classless as that is. I'd bring a pair of Crocs because they can last me through the rainy season, and my mom's old Nike jacket, and a picture of me, mom and dad, and my copy of The Fifth Elephant, and my Daily Roman Missal, and an umbrella, and a prayer card of St Josemaria. I'd bring a notebook and a pencil, and a big packet of instant soluble coffee to get me by, and some underthings and a clean shirt, and that I think would be it. I'd put it all in one of my brother's duffel bags.

I'd go somewhere very far away, somewhere with trees and sun like Alabang but with the dirty Ankh-Morporkian anonymity of Manila. Maybe I'll work in a cafe. I've always wanted to work in a coffeeshop, never a Starbucks because one day I might see someone I know. Just one of those little coffeeshops, like the ones attached to bed-and-breakfasts, where there are terracotta pots and cats sunbathing by the windows, and I can spend my breaks reading or taking really, really long walks. I don't know where I'd sleep, but I'd find a way to keep off the streets because even beggars steal from beggars.

I don't know what I'd do, because stripped of my parent's ambitions and the expectations that people have built up around me over the years, I have actually no idea what I really want.

I could be a doctor. I know that. It's within reach. Whether I get into my dream med school or not, I can still have that MD attached to my last name. But I think that maybe this will make me desperately unhappy. That maybe I'll regret it. That maybe I don't want a life with no time for science fiction and crawling around in the garden looking at fungi and the slime molds on my mom's orchid planters. If I don't become a doctor, I'll be a scientist, and while that would be lovely, I just sometimes think that maybe I don't want that, too. That maybe I should just follow what my heart really, really wants when I wake up at four in the morning and can't see the point of anything, of microfuge tubes and PCR machines and biosafety gear, when we're all going to die anyway.

I think that if I run away I can get that quiet kind of life. I think I was happiest when dreaming. Maybe when I run away I'll have time to dream again, like I used to when I'd come home from school and sit, Indian-style, on the library floor thinking of all the fabulous things I could be, all the books I could buy. When--should that be an if?--I run away I'd live quietly, by myself, and it would be lonely, but such a different kind of loneliness from the one manufactured by an unwanted isolation from the people who used to care for you. At least this time the isolation will be of my own choosing, and I can put all the people I used to love in a neat compartment, an attic box labeled "past", to be set aside and not opened for years. Maybe when I run away I'll take my violin too, and learn to play again, if maybe my landlady (if I get one) will let me practice despite the noise.

I really have dreams of wearing an apron and working somewhere quiet. A simple job no more complex than greet-the-guests take-their-orders make-some-java. When--if--when I run away maybe I can start anew, stop thinking about what everyone else wants and figure out what I want. I'd cut my hair really short because there would be no need to impress anyone, anymore, and besides I'd need to save on the shampoo. I'll I guess that after a few months I'll end up quite thin, and I wonder if that will make me any happier.