From a rosy pink outlook on the beginning of today, came the bleak news that a friend died. It wasn’t sudden, we knew she was sick, and we saw her last month before she went home to Bacolod to be amongst family after her stage 4 cancer needed really expensive, scary radiation treatment she didn’t want to go through. We had made plans to go visit her this month with another of my sister’s friends and make a trip out of it, but unfortunately, we didn’t go early enough.

She was Ate Sheila and she was such a nice person. We weren’t super close, I knew her from my sister who worked with her at her last office job. She was always sweet and I remember her being the one who introduced us to Calea in Bacolod, because she hand carried whole cakes for us when she went home. I will keep remembering her voice, which was always soothing and calm, and around her I felt calm, which, for people who know me, know this is not the case for a lot of the time.

She is in a better place now and I am grateful she is no longer in pain, but to know she’s no longer with us just well, sucks.

Death has been around us lately and it hasn’t been sunshine and rainbows. A close friend’s dad passed away, one of my mom’s best friends, a cousin’s husband. Nobody went gentle into the good night. Strokes, an accident, a terminal illness, none of these are easy ways to go, and it’s even harder for the people that are left behind. I feel the pain resonating from the people we’ve been with lately and sometimes you just want to absorb all that pain they’re going through for them. But all we can do is be there for them.

Life isn’t fair and good people get hurt and sick and sometimes, there are just bad f**king days. It comes with the cost of living. We have to deal with the good, the bad, and the ugly. And sometimes all you need is a hug and that hug never comes.

So maybe I shouldn’t be writing in this mood but hey, I figure I’d be more honest about me this time around and that there are days that you just want to crawl into bed and forget the world. I’m dealing with it, and letting the pain, the hurt, and everything else be felt.

So how’s your Friday going?

In as long as I can remember, Sonnet 116 from Shakespeare has spoken to me. It just sounds right, and it feels right. But don’t let me try to convince you, read it yourself here:

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

 

It may be a bit naive, but the idea of love that doesn’t change and not being shaken by circumstances, I’d like to think we all have a chance at that. Even with time, mistakes, obstacles, real love stays, and cannot be taken away. Now I am not an idiot that thinks that love doesn’t need work and doesn’t evolve, but I am agreeable to the idea of love being there, if it’s real. It may be the most difficult thing to do, to love when crap hits the fan, or circumstances change, but it’s there, you just have to dig deep to find it. And it’s not just romantic love, it’s the love you have for your friends, your family, your pets. Life throws crap at you all the time, it’s how you deal with it that matters. It’s how you love through it.

What do you think about love?