Rebound Girl

She asks me if we can go to Times Square and see the ball drop. I tell her in another life, when we're tourists.

She then sets the mood, the fun it'd be, the crowds, the spectacle and excitement. All I can envision is the insufferable train ride back, drunken teenagers, nowhere to pee. 

"All to see a ball drop" I say. "I'd much rather stay home and watch your ass... drop. Baby, you're my rebound girl... gotta make that ass bounce!" Of course, we're more than sexually acquainted. Our affinities lie in that opposites attract. See, people miss so much by being themselves and only wanting to date mind-like individuals, I guess that's the tragedy of having our heads so far up our narcissistic asses.

We're different. She just turned 22; I'll be forty 41 in two months. Of course, I look nothing like a forty-year old, in fact I don't feel a day older than 27. We're similar, too. She's from the Caribbean; I am too. The places each one of us respectively come from were always sunny, full of folklore and upbeat rhythm, drums, endless sunsets, seafood, beach days, happy people everywhere. 

"Baby, are people happy in Haiti?" 

"Just like with everything else, honey. Misery doesn't have a nationality."

Clever girl. 

Sexually, I'd use as an analogy those deep rollers that the actor Anthony Hopkins, playing his famous movie character Hannibal, warns about not breeding two of the same kind (deep rollers) because their young will dive too deep and die: we're sexually deep rollers, if ever we have siblings, these will fuck till death.

"Only if they're incestuous" she argues.

"Or if they find another fuck roller" I counter.

She's the religious kind, a baptist of all kinds, goes to church on Sundays, preaches the word every chance she gets. She says, I should repent.

"You should go to church, baby" she tells me.

"It's not gonna fly, sweetie" I warn her.

I try to get her to meditate but she says meditation is a pagan ritual. She's not a Buddhist, she says. Therefore, she won't.

"You know, that's what I like about Buddhism. The Buddha does not claim a divine providence. He's not a supernatural being. Buddhists are free to celebrate with others their holiday and it'd not piss off Buddha. In Christianity, you have to believe in Jesus as the son of God and humankind's sole savior. Buddhism leaves it up to its followers finding their own path in life. "If you find the Buddha, kill him" says a Buddhist quote, no space for resurrection, no damnation, no salvation, no one to look after you. You're your own boss in your personal quest, you're not subjugated to the celestial whims of an uptight, capricious deity bent on retribution. 

"That's right, baby. God is gangsta!" 

"Babe, leave God alone" she says. 

"Him first" I say. 

New Year's Eve found me doing the laundry after working a full shift, apparently I have to pay for other people's superstitions. Granted, we've been laying on those sheets for the last two weeks, and not just sleeping, sweat, tears, bodily fluids, dust, food residues, alcohol and fruity drink mixed stains, all form a collage of whatnot. 

"If we don't have clean clothes on the first day of the year, we will be with dirty clothes throughout the whole year!" she claims.

"The way I see it, if I spend the last day of the year washing clothes, that's what I'll be doing the rest of the upcoming year." 

She gets the joke but reserves the laugh.  

Beautiful Rain

The moral of the story, of course, is not in going back. We move forward. It's always the same story. Of course, we like happy endings, but in reality there's no such a thing. We will perhaps one day arrive there, with someone else, but not here, not now. Not anymore, anyway. 

I knew the end from the beginning. It's of no use to regret what takes place; it's a useless exercise. The important thing is to recognize where we can improve, and invest our energy on that front. There's no use in moping around, feeling sad, angry, confused, disillusioned; in healthy doses, and for sometime, it may be the norm. People exist in our minds, and we fall in love with the idea of a person, sometimes taking for granted the actual person. Love is not about setting limits to others, we should encourage our loved ones to be happy, to express themselves, to grow and prosper. There are three ways of loving:

• Dependency, or the love a child feels for his mother: you can be the egotistical child who wants "mommy" only for yourself, not really caring for her needs and feelings but throwing tantrums and mirroring her moves, so as to get her attention. You cause mayhem and you know mommy can never stop loving you, which emboldens you, making you feel enabled. And, of course, later in life you don't take rejection kindly. It is only natural that if you spend enough time with someone you share and live with, feelings of kindness and warmth toward that person will only grow, making cute episodes of jealousy, so long as these are manifestations of love, not based on anger; because love can be childish so long as you don't suck the air out of the relationship by turning too clingy, becoming a blood-sucking leech. 

• Unconditional Love, the kind only a mother can genuinely feel but we should all try to emulate: A mother has no choice but to love her child. Nature did not leave to chance such decision. It is not up to her. A good mother's love is full of patience, kindness, discipline, acceptance, and it is not always "unconditional" as there are certain behaviors and rituals expected of us all since the day we're born. A mother can love more than one child; a child has nothing more than one mother. Mother's love is dedicated, too. It is consuming, and easily the most rewarding. We should all aspire to the idealized love of a mother. Of course, it is only true metaphorically speaking, not all mothers are good and no two mothers are alike. But more or less, women generally are better suited for love. It just fits them so well. 

Take things with a light heart next time around. Do the same with the past: say goodbye without the slightest shred of regret, with a grateful and humble heart. Others may not see eye to eye, so let them be blind to their hatred and discontent; as for those who hesitate to or do not share your enthusiasm, do not mind them. The hard thing is not changing other people's mind, but that of our own. We forgive and let go so that we can lay down the burden carried atop our shoulders, set it aside and move on. It's a selfish act to forgive, a favor you're doing to yourself. Peace of mind is in how I choose to believe things. There's no point in blame, guilt, rancor, in farther escalation. We do have our antics in place, but I've become a ghost before and I can do it again. Why share your life, in any way, with someone from your past? I went and found someone else, met a beautiful girl with whom I get to play the new role. 

Here's the thing. These aren't just words and in finding out about anger, I read different religious texts. Look, I'm not trying to be less angry to make someone in my life happier. It's because it makes me happy to know that I am capable of changing for the better.

No one wakes up and says, "Today is a good day to get angry." Even though, on a daily basis, that's just what we do. And the worst part is, we dump the biggest load on our loved ones. Sometimes we give strangers the discretion and courtesy that we lack in dealing with loved ones. 

All of this may seem a bit too precipitated. People under certain psychological conditions take longer to bounce back from things, so I put in place the positive steps that will accelerate the process but, most importantly, the things that hold you back. 

First off, denial. We can hide behind a false sense of safety and contentment, if we don't suffer things well. Look, it hurts, you can't sleep, you lose weight. Big deal. You're a big boy and you know the drill, if you can't stomach it, then you shouldn't have eaten it. You know how to deal with pain, how you either change the things you can and accept the ones you cannot fix. We can't go back in time and get back what we've lost. 

Other triggers you can avoid or lessen or manage until you tip the balance in your favor. But you'll never get to rip the benefits of tomorrow's harvest, we can only plant our seed, it grows daily but never at a speed that is noticeable to the naked eye. We've known this ailment throughout our lives and it's been mostly fun. But if you go out, and drink too much, you'll get a hangover. Feeling bad is how the body and the mind purge the bad out. You get in proportion the same withdrawal effects and depending on the high, then the longest and more intense the low.The solution isn't simple. It's called time. It's what we feel we don't have. But there are things you can do with your time that will make the time more bearable, even productive. First, something happens to pain when you simply acknowledge it as such: "It hurts." You do not fight it. You don't dwell in it. You simply accept it. You breath deeply, hold your breath and exhale slowly. You exercise. You stop going out, and you read tons of articles. If, like me, you have a hobby, or an artistic inclination, indulge. You no longer have to take your shoes off. Instead of going out and meeting people, I can do without the social element. Sure, I consume social media, but I'm often offline, not really connected all day long. I post baby pics mostly on Instagram and then, all of a sudden, one day I opened the door to this roommate of mine who happened to have fifty thousand followers on Instagram. With her, I get to practice this new me. It makes total sense, I give more and I get a whole lot more in return. I get the complete opposite of what I had: a girl who is social and on demand. She's rather sedentary when in love and texts me all day long and says she misses me and becomes jealous. I love it. But she doesn't overdo it, either.

The answer is space, too. I do make space with my girl, I don't text her as often, I don't get weird if she decides to go out with her friends and I don't try to go out in retaliation. I get to have the place to myself, we already live together so a little time apart won't hurt, she can text and be on the phone all day long cultivating her fans online. She has more than a quarter of a million followers on Facebook. I'm not one of them. Her pictures are public, so I liked them, and since she gets so many Likes, she didn't even notice.
Choose happiness: Usually, people will judge you if you move on too fast, criticize if your progress is slow; no matter what, making others happy with your decisions shouldn't be among your list of priorities. You should only have into consideration yourself, so long as your choices do not cause others misery, forget others. People who love you will love you regardless, and if they don't like you, no matter how much you try to impress them, it's not going to work. It is not in their disposition to give what they don't have or feel for you. This is a time to be selfish, go ahead, indulge. And if you do it right, if you exercise, put the work in, tend to your affairs, meditate and practice kindness of heart, you can find joy within. There's time for adventure virtually anywhere; you'll find a girl and you will fall in love again. We all do. But first, let's work on building our foundation. Love is accidental. And since it dulls the pain, we all crave it like a palliative, but it's best to confront our pain, to evolve... and sometimes, when you look back, it seems light-years away the distant memory of the past.
Choose to remember the good, don't be so hard on yourself. Surrender to whatever it is you're feeling; don't fight it, just immerse yourself in and be one with it. It sucks when it rains but it can't pour forever, and if it does, well then it's time to get your shoes wet, go dancing in the rain. It's been raining for days. Rain is beautiful. 

Days go by

"If silence is golden, how wasteful of this treasure fools can be" -Boris Amar (a paraphrased quote from the Talmud.)

Literature inspired in Buddhism, from the German Arthur  Schopenhauer to all the pseudo-scientific, esoteric works of so-called spiritual gurus, has led me to this path of self-realization, seeing every inherent detail filled with abundant beauty and poise, the trees disposed of their green foliage, its leaves tattered with pale tones heralding the long winter ahead, the Long Island railroad train oozes through the misty tracks under the bridge on my way to work. Manhattan greets me with its multicultural undertones and colors, stunning women everywhere, no matter the hour of the day there are always crowds, night-owls, early-birds, and all that falls in between. If it rains, there's always people out there, infusing the economy with their last minute Christmas shopping; sunny days have longer waiting lines, and everywhere you go there's a ceiling, so if you come from one of those cultures that actually celebrate the rain as nature's A.C., then you pay little, if any mind, that it's raining. And when it rains, the best kind of people, those who do not let something as trivial as the weather get in their way, are all out there. Instead of packing yourself like a sardine on a nightclub, go to a coffee shop, take a stroll in the park, do the laundry or make for friends/relatives, read a good book or article online, see my boys through Skype or travel and see them in person (I don't pay to fly). Last night I had a few drinks with a friend of mine, had in mind to go to my cousin's birthday party but changed my mind, and spent the night home as usual. I don't feel like sacrificing sleep to go out and venture into the night with people I only see whenever there's a birthday or a particular holiday, but I ought to change that, break out of that comfort zone that keeps me shut-in, domesticated, blindfolded and confined to these four walls. I like it fine, here I cook, I fuck, I drink, I smoke; this apartment is my small piece of residential heaven. Here, my second son was born, and here I fell in love countless times with just a handful of people. 

I have witnessed but refused to believe in a world beyond my eyes. The unseen world is for my eyes to discover once my mind is open; there's no way of seeing what we have yet to experience. This possibility is within anyone's grasp, that this fleeting moment is all we really got and that choice by choice, brick by brick, we build the world of our vision. The universe and all the stars, are just add-on bonuses. In Buddhism, we uncover the hidden minute truths that this existential riddle called life bestows upon us, as if the limiting blindfold of our conditioning -or limiting beliefs- had suddenly fallen off our eyes. We need not go searching for new horizons out there when there's just so much uncharted territory within.

With God in mind

It's the first time I open this word document on Wordpad since the last time when  the battery came off and I lost a few good pages of literature to oblivion. She accidentally dropped it on the floor and I hadn't saved my work. It was my fault; I didn't know how to handle her high energy.

Endings are usually pretty messy, it's when both parties resolve to put it all out in the line one last more time, bitterly fight the one we once loved, throw it all to the fire and let it come up in flames. Emotions run high and you lose your cool. The most important thing to do is keep your composure, your aplomb, be receptive and open to the possibilities life affords us. This moment, I find myself picking up pieces and patching things up with my girlfriend. She feels neglected, that's what I get for dealing with children. I call it "the terrible double 2", an allusion to that toddler's two years of age madness, "the terrible 2".

She said, I needed to find an apartment before I get kicked out. I've kept my apartment, had to fight for it. She said I'd never find another beautiful young girl who'd want to be with me, just like Connie had once said. And I did, one month ago. Will it last? Who knows? All that matters is the kindness and the patience, the space and sometimes silence, the ear you lend to listen to her nonsense, poke fun at her, take things lightly. She's a bit lazy, doesn't do much around the house, lays there quietly using her phone from sunrise to sundown. She rarely goes out with her friends, it's kind of heavy that we already live together. Making time apart and she going out there and having fun, is good for the relationship. It brings a cool breeze, the trick is not in expecting others to make you happy; the trick is to enjoy making them happy. I love cooking for my lover, giving her massages, squeeze, spank, bite, pinch, scratch, suck, lick, kiss, pull her panties and wedge them up their ass-crack.

There's a part angel and a part demon in every individual; it really depends on which of the two roles we play more often. The more we sing to the harmony that that divine nature of ours brings into play, the more we adopt more akin and peaceful ways of solving problems, tackling issues that are of the utmost importance without any more delays. The more immersed you are in this moment, the more alive you become. Make a list of things that need to be done with time enough to carry them out. Just follow through and then repeat.

She's sweet and quiet, a tempest and a dance, sex enthusiast, for lack of a better way of phrasing it. Instead of talking bad about religion, I use it on her to push her to find peace through God and she goes to church and doesn't drink alcohol and she doesn't smoke. Whenever things go sour, people talk and demand. It's hard to give, but whoever does manage to give, usually wins. And I've been poor for so long, I'm sick of it; enough grieving my failures as a father and taking my life on. I am eager to commence the classes for my license. I'm working out often. I keep actively, mostly. Oh, yeah, and we fuck like jack rabbits.

Of course, that's when the campaigns to slander one another begin; ironically, the more we love someone, the more likely we are to hate them one day. It's because we view others, strangers especially, as either allies or follies. We have to belong to something, and we find that we are actually at the mercy of a dual mind. We want more than we have, regardless of how grateful we are, more seems the way to go, but substance is of importance. We can accumulate possessions and miss out on family and friends, buy properties and live life counting every cent, consumed by good debt. That's it a plan worth pursing, and it's not like ambitious individuals do not have friends, they have allies; and if they want to, they can spend time with them and still have some time left for the best of relatives. Ambitious people aren't just greedy about money; a good dosis of greed is healthy in the times we live and success doesn't necessarily mean you have to sacrifice good relationships. It means you have less time but whatever time you spend with others (friends or family) is well spent and invested. There's no glory in spending all the time together doing nothing, and that I had done lately. We ought to go places, see new people, don't get entangled too soon, be selective since we have more than one choice and take things slow. The problem is when your life revolves around your relationship. Your life should gravitate toward the matters of inner joy and gradual improvements, maintaince. The driving force that propels some to go farther is an effort that accelerates the aging process. They live two lifetimes every few years, if their drive isn't solely for material posession, some experience more in a day that many will not experience in a lifetime. Spirituality isn't something that all men arrive to, either. There are more religious types than spiritual ones. It's never a clear-cut, self-evident truth and the line may turn blurry when closely analyzing people's hardcore beliefs, whether these have a basis on godly science or abject religion, because as an atheist I may see humor where others see sacrilege. Let's be honest, religion is funny. I understand it's serious business for the faithful but these pages are meant for those who find the light-hearted side of things. To me, religion is somewhat funny and mostly nonsense. Sure, it has its good lessons, thou shall not kill, etc., but do we really need to follow any of the other craziness religion proposes. Humor isn't evil but if people make fun of other people's beliefs, without prejudice and only for the sake of enlightment. I'm not into convincing others of my beliefs, and if people want to have an imaginary boss who follows their every move and judges all the fun out of life, so be it. The biblical god is a tyrant and if we are to observe Christ's life, then we'll have to be Jews. Of course, the roman emperor Constantine didn't want to hand power down to the Jews, so Catholicism was born. The Christian bible was rewrote, the old testament was crafted and adapted to reflect the newly adopted religion of the Roman Empire. There were many emperors who grew mad or tyrant in time, power tends to corrupt and all sorts of atrocities were commited.

But the most atrocious of them all was probably the introduction of Christianity as the official religion of the empire. It threw back herbal medicines, ancient cures and remedies to the ailments of the body. Christianity absurdly holds the anti-natural and demented notion that the flesh didn't matter and that all matters should be dealt with God in mind. Religion stunned scientific progress, killed or silence some of our greatest minds, eradicated virtually all indigenous tribes in the Americas, unforgivable shit like keeping Galileo in house-arrest for most of his life, a man as rich and influential as that, what was left for others? The newly adopted religion spread like wildfire throughout the empire and today we're true descendants of that hybrid between the remnants of Roman rituals prior to the introduction of Christianity.

You can see ambitious people age relatively faster, though they usually are in much better shape than their poorer counterparts. Ambition is a consuming force that demands a lot of your time, sleep, peace of mind. Nothing that the ambitious type cannot overcome; best to have a mature and 

Eventually, the smoke will clear. It is likely that I suffer from a mild case of BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), anger is systematic, a survival mode. We all play our little games to get us through the day. Most importantly, getting a good night sleep. Which what I'll do right now.

To be continued

All day long I've been meaning to write, but the right theme didn't come up. Even now, it's a daunting task to summon the right words. 

Revising recent posts, I encountered many grammatical errors, some of which I correct and some of which I let be. I find that, sometimes, in the effort of correcting a sentence, a brand new paragraph emerges. It is as if, at least when it comes to literature, it pays to mend and fix past mistakes.

All of a sudden, I resolved to write, no matter if the theme or subject eluded me. But the words wouldn't commit to paper; I wouldn't where to start and I'm kind of sick playing to the tune of my failed relations as interesting and alluring as they may seem. If I were home, I'd be more in sync with the ghosts and exorcise them deliberately, but I couldn't. I'd find that, oftentimes, a change of scenery or a shift in routine usually do the trick. A subject presents itself worth writing about and then I focus solely on that most unexpected, wondrous and enigmatic muse that the writing process can be. In it, I can be lost and regained, I find a maddening reason or an evil good to explore. By meditating or smoking a cigarette, I could enlighten somehow the dark passages of unforeseen events that prompted me to sit down and write, write, write. And since I can't reason with enough leisure, tediousness sets in. And since the usual mild narcotics that would facilitate this process are nay, then I have to resort to random acts of improvisation in order to get the creative juices flowing.
And it happened then. I jumped from my blog window screen and opened Facebook on another, and then it hit me: a picture of my first love emerged, a distant cousin of mine, now married with children... how distant a creature now from the frail and innocent child with plumb cheeks, curly black hair and milky white skin, diamond green eyes. She's aged well, like many in our family, but it's a far-away memory now. Luckily, life doesn't play out in the way that our raging hormones want it.

How, at one point, it all seemed as a matter of life-and-death, now is barely a "What the fuck did I see in this girl?" How is it that I awaited her arrival every two years, when her family brought her home to spend the festivities with her mother's family in the torrid and desolate Caribbean coast of Colombia, the land from which I stem? 

See, her family used to split Christmas' time and celebration between her father and her mother's respective families: one year, they'd spend Christmas with her mother's (my father's half sister) and the next year they'd spend it with her father's (no relation to me). Therefore, I only got to see her once every two years, the year alloted to celebrate with her maternal family. And the sad part about it is, the madness lasted me four years. She said she preferred to spend the festivities with us, her mom's family.
Since the very beginning, it seems obvious now, I was in love with impossibilities. First, we were first cousins. We were not raised together and only saw one another when we were in our early teens which made it easier for such feelings to manifest and proliferate, like wildfire but cousins we were nonetheless. Secondly, we were separated by two days travel in distance by car, or more than a thousand miles from each other. Heck, she was royalty, with a princess-like upbringing, private schools, parents perennially married and dandy, as if she were destined to walk along a path of roses in a garden -no matter how proverbial- that was denied to me. My father and my mother had long separated, I was living with my father's mother and was the errand boy of the house. She was even older than me a couple of years which in adolescent years could spell doom in your romantic aspirations. It was not meant to be. Out of shyness, I gave her the cold shoulder initially, she seemed so fanciful and classy, I kept my distance and my cool. But when I saw her washing her own clothes, a look of frustration I couldn't help but tease her, 

-Who would've thought little princess would have to resort to do the laundry by hand? -I teased her. She did not take it too well.

-Leave me alone -she warned, quietly firm and not in the least bit taken by my ball-busting her. We both repeated the same routine, same lines again, but her tone increased in bitterness.

I splashed the running water on her face and she put the same face in disbelief Olivia (who hadn't been born) would put when I jokingly slapped her. Not hard, not too soft either, but funny. 

You can't live life hypothetically. So I moved on. But nothing like being heartbroken when you're fifteen. It wasn't a problem waiting back then, I had all the time in the world; and I was only able to do so only when I fell in love with another. Hence the saying: "The best way to get over someone is to get on top of someone else as soon as possible." That isn't all true, and personally I think that people move from relationship to the same relationship, going from a parental dependency to a conyugal one. We live life according to what others expect of us.

Let Love Rule

I made mistakes, I'm not hiding behind a facade of sorrow though. There's no use in beating a dead horse. Truth is, I am well aware of my short comings. I screwed up my previous relationship not by just being angry. Anger is circumstantial. The reasons for it may not be as see-through and crystal clear as we'd like them to be, many are buried under layers upon layers of early psychosis, childhood trauma create adult drama, and no one is without a slice of sorrow.
Succinctly speaking, I failed to live up to the expectation and failed to keep my promise, and my failures in love made me less of a lover, a feeding nest for hatred.
It is easier to lie to yourself. Truth is, I saw the end coming and, honestly, I don't really know why it lasted as long as it did. She must've loved me somehow, I can't conceive of a better explanation. Only love would make you so blind as to not really see the deception, the shortcomings, the lie. Only love would make us so blind to think that we really had a chance to thrive. Only love dares to dream and materialize the absurd, make fairy tales come alive.

I should've been making more money or at least as much as I was making two years ago. I should've been divorced two relationships ago. I should've been nicer, not so much of a prick.
In blaming yourself, you get nowhere though. It takes two to tango and blame is a two-way street with all traffic going in the wrong direction. It's not like I did all wrong, no. I tried. I worked full-time to make sure it didn't last out but I also held a part-time job making sure it'll be forever. I not only hated her for having a foot out the door: I loved her for having the audacity and tenacity to remain mine somehow. She never ran away, she always answered and being the man, I did not mind in the least bit to be the one giving chase. She loved me in that role, I guess she too felt guilty over the course of her actions, she took more than pity, but also courage and resolve, to patch things up again and give it another go. We were not meant to last, but we did last long enough to give more than a shit. We kind of forgot along the way that our nuptial plans were trumped by the fact that I was still married; we forgot that I wasn't making enough. We fucked often but never out of pity and it was always on. We forgot I didn't take her to many fancy restaurants but I cooked for her daily. We didn't go on more than one minuscule vacation because our life was a perennial getaway. We forgot not to fall in love, and we forgot that it was too late.

Fuck-spree

Who the fuck has one third of a million followers on Facebook? More than forty thousand followers on Instagram? Who gets around sixteen thousand Likes on her pictures? My girl, that's who.

She's sort of a celebrity, complains about having lost 350 followers after uploading my picture, spends most of her time on the phone and takes more selfies on a day than any human being I've ever seen before. She's slender, has a generous behind and is loving, far more narcissistic and vain than her predecessors, younger too than most.
Youngest I've ever been with is 13 years of age, a girl in my childhood named Celina; I was just eleven years old then. I count that as my first experience, because mom would have me in-doors, never allowing me outside to play ball with the other kids in the neighborhood, frightful creature my mother was. She'd imagine the worse happening to me, God forbid I took the risk of playing ball with the other kids. Her fears extended beyond the domestic kind: Travelling on a plane, as we often did in order to go to the neighboring land Venezuela, she'd go through her usual routine of prayer, obsessive cross-signing, have a few cocktails before, during and throw up in bags after; sweat, become delirious. Suddenly, her eyes would roll back and she'd pant, her body would tense and rigid-up, she'd hold us tight against her chest and asked we pray with her. Her reasoning when she came to her senses, is that a plane flies so high above the sky, though it outweighs all things it still manages to glide through the heights of heaven, and God did not like men trying to play him, so she was afraid of God's wrath. She said we were all sinners and that, too, could tip the balance in favor of a midair plane catastrophe. She was kind of a dumb woman, but very resilient and cunning. In some other time, when she was young and beautiful, it might have looked cut. Men were willing to omit her lack in intellect as nature's way to compensate for what she had in abundance, beauty. One day her striking looks withered but by then she had already shipped her eldest son to the States and happily marry her two daughters to good, supportive, well-established men. Even at that, she did so much more for us than dad. There, holding us tight and praying out-loud for others not to doubt her consuming belief, I remember faking being afraid over and over again until I managed to convince myself of the impending, imminent trouble ahead, as my mind's fear so vividly portrayed and projected such ill-fed fallacy.
It's no wonder I am afraid of flying, and I must've been fearless until then because my dream had always been to become an astronaut one day. There, mother too instilled fear, said the day I climb on a spaceship, she'd take a step towards an early grave. She'd rather die than see me hop aboard my intergalactic spaceship, out on a interstellar mission to conquer the stars beyond. As a kid, I had been at the mercy of a woman who has pathologically overprotective, but she had been forced by her mother to drop out of school by the time she was nine years old and, therefore, she had no ideal role model to follow in motherhood.
Home was always packed with girls, my sister had many friends and we spent time in-doors playing mom and dad. Of course, I lost my virginity earlier than most men. Girl next door, two years older, and my smaller sister (whom by then was far wiser than me, and in such matters still is), both accepted me taking part in the kissing trials they had going on under the sheets. All I had to do was threaten I'd rat on them if they didn't let me in on their innocent little game. And so, one day the three of us, as innocently suggested by Celina, we shower at once. Celina said it'd save time and water, and from then on, we would all jump in the shower at once.
Since I became part of the games, Celina had grown closer to me than my sister, and my sister was fuming over it. Celina's plan wasn't to cozy up to me, no; her thoughts were aligned at a deceptive curve, reel me in and get me under her influence, then make her demands. I had been pushing the idea of sleeping together or, as we called it back then, play mom and dad.
Her proposition was, if I sleep with my own sister first, she'd sleep with me.
I was willing to sacrifice my own blood just to get a taste of her, but instead of following suit, I devised a covert operation: I faked having sex with my sister. Everything was going according to plan, my back was covering Celina's visual, and I was pretending to plow away at it. But then my sister interrupted the magical deception, screaming out loud:
"I don't feel anything!"
Celina interfered and said it wasn't necessary, that we'd do it first because she wanted to be my first. And once we did it, she did not want to be with my sister. We used to hide even from her, it wasn't easy, my sister had always been very intuitive and wise beyond her years. But we managed to be together as her parents and mine went off to work, our homes were interconnected since it was the same property and my mother had no moral dilemma on the deal. She actually was supposed to be taking care of us all, as she was paid for baby-sitting that "grown ass" girl, as she deemed Celina. Mom instead said she'd be back in a couple of hours and leave us home as she went out on a casual date.

I was eighteen years old when she was born. I could be her dad, she reasons. It's some dark fantasy of ours she brings under the sheets, as the other girl roommate comes to the kitchen and can sense the action going on behind the room dividers that separate the kitchen from the living room. Later the other girl texts me about having a smoke in the bathroom, and I jokingly pull her hair, she chokes, she laughs, she confesses out of nowhere she has three boyfriends. They have their own silly territorial thing going on: one day I find black strands of hair my girl left in the bathroom floor, for which I reprimand her, and the next day I find a swath of blond hair splashed across the bathroom wall that undoubtedly pertains to our roommate. The roommate is 32 years old and my girl, ten years her youngest, turns shy whenever she's around, says little as the older, more aggressive of the girls flirts with her, showers her with complements and my girl remains mum.
The roommate is more audacious, flashes an insinuating smile, instills a bit of discomfort, pushes the safe zone to the limit. But the roommate is very feminine and submissive towards me, as I am the most dominant figure of the three, make sure both get what they bargained for.
"I can tell you're a mother fucker of a man" she flatters me, as she asks for permission to bring one of her boyfriends in the room and quietly fuck him for an hour or so. Then they leave and she has that look of retribution on her face, as I lay on bed with my black beauty queen, tight ass, long, slender legs, thighs and hips, she's gaining weight since I overtook feeding her. We've been on a fuck spree for the past few weeks, everyday I make her mine, I own her and she gives herself to me completely. I think of ways to love her, not to answer fire with fire whenever she gets ignited over an issue, I bring peace and fuck her brains out.
"Did your boyfriend fuck you good?" I ask our roommate, as we go in the bathroom for a smoke.
"Did your girlfriend fuck you good?" she answers fire with fire.
"Men do most of the fucking, but yeah, she's good and spirited for her age" I answer her. "Are you any good of a fuck?" I ask her bluntly.
"I think so" she says, shying away. She knows she is in front of a self-assured male who would grab her by the neck and fuck her standing up against the wall in a moment's notice. She knows not what's stopping me, but she doesn't give any signs. Instead, she asks for my girl, is she home? What's she wearing? I think they like one another.
My girl playfully said, "Yeah, we already fucked. That bitch ate me out good." I laugh wholeheartedly. Who knows? Maybe the hair all over the apartment is because of sex-up matches they hold against one another in my absence.
Tension with other roommates is natural. It has happened in many instances before. The girl that lived her before spoke of her boyfriend and how frustrated she felt that he didn't seem resolved, almost unsure of himself, and he hadn't even wondered where she spent the extra three nights away from their place, a hundred miles from Jersey. She'd tell me this staring into my eyes, sipping Valerian tea, and dressed in a little girl sleep-over outfit. I'd tell her we'll have a sleep-over and watch movies together, cook for her and the other crazy Colombian flight attendant with whom she shared the room and had grown jealous of how close we had become.
"She looks older than you" Adriana had said, as she got dressed one night to go out. She was barely home and I told her so.
"Ah, you miss me, honey?"
I had seen her dress herself up to a decent fuck, she was chunky but shapely and knew how to play with her wild femmes, making use of the most attractive trail in her arsenal: her round and stout booty, heightened by wearing tights and fluffy furry shorts, as she readied to go out dressed as a cowgirl on a Halloween Friday night in New York, boots and hat, a red hair wig, heavy mascara and a zillion other details I bypassed to pay attentive discretion to her butt. Adriana was 22 years old, her parents had brought her from Colombia when she was still very little. She spoke fluently and had a sexy accent that stems from her native city, Cali.
"Is that what it is? You miss me?" she'd demand the truth with a toy pistol pointed out at me from her reflection in the mirror as she advertised herself by giving me her back. Less than beautiful girls master the game of subtle aggressiveness, where they momentarily adopt the role of the predator and go hunting for the man that they find more suitable. It's the reason why beautiful girls end up with males that are far less attractive than them and vice versa: you can see many divas everywhere with a guy that can easily have whomever he'd choose, but has been chosen and domesticated by a dominant woman figure. Women know what type of men they want, so if I ever come across a dominant woman, either she lowers her defenses for me and becomes docile or we just don't mesh. I like being the hunter and I love it when women give it a bit of a fight, when they play hardball and difficult, when they play hard to get. I like a challenge but I refrain from impossibilities. There has to be a sign of interest, or else I'll move on and come back at it some other time.
But girls who aren't necessarily beautiful sometimes make themselves indispensable, and this little girl from Cali just staring back at me from the mirror with a fake pistol in her hand, looked rather dashing.
"You're not gonna shoot me" I told her as I approached her from behind and held her up against the mirror, grabbed by the neck playfully.
"Let go, mother fucker!" she said. I pulled away and she came on swinging, disproportionately in strength as I had only teased her. She was passionate in her deliverance, so I had to hold her hands and push her over the sofa. She stood there, sitting still, defiant, put the TV on and assumed the position on all fours. I took her panties off as she looked for something to watch on the Roku channels.
"Unlike that old bitch you like so much, I do have a boyfriend who loves me, who's about to come pick me up" she said.
"And what's the problem?" I asked, as I caressed her inner thighs.
"He's so boring and predictable, and don't think you're nothing special, either. I already cheated on him every chance I got" she confessed.
I spanked her. A hard, sound smack on her butt cheeks.
"You've been giving me nothing but shit since you moved in" I tell her, sliding a finger down her rabbit hole.
She maintains her position on the sofa, in all fours, lifting her right arm to maneuver the channels. Her phone rings.
"That's him" she says, as she answered him: "Hi, babe."
The guy talks and she listens as she pays more attention now to me, how my fingers roll in and out of her, Adriana makes an effort not to gasp as she speaks.
"I'm almost done, honey" she says. "Give me ten more minutes and I'll be downstairs."
And then she hangs up and looks up to me:
"We got twenty minutes before he calls up on me again."
Of course, nothing happened, as I rushed her out the door before the second call came in. Later on that night, she walked in home, climbed on top of me, intoxicated, claiming her neck still ached from earlier on when I chocked her. Telling me her boyfriend saw the marks I left on her buttocks and wanted nothing to do with her. She said, she had told him the truth about us, what truth that was, specifically, I don't know. Her breath smelled of alcohol, her eyes are bloodshot, as I push her aside. She's now sitting in a neutral corner, crying inconsolably.
"I know he's cheating on me" she says.
Then I hug her and tell her to go to bed, she could sleep on it, tomorrow will be another day. And so, she does.

Murphy's Law

The money I got from my retirement account was enough to pay what I owe in rent and have some leftovers, but not having my license renewed left me with just enough to survive until I work myself back up to glory. I've enlisted myself in the Fire Safety Director course for the second week of January, 2015, and by February, when the income tax return money kicks in, I will have more than plenty to cover the rest of my debts and some of the plans envisioned. Every cent will be invested in such a way that it will return its value tenfold. 

When I first envisioned going for the FSD license, I was told it was silly of me to pay for my own course. But I did, and it worked as planned, the money I invested in it was reimbursed in dividends two weeks later, as my salary had increased by 30%. By the end of 2015, I want to be more professionally marketable than now, earning above $20 an hour, even if I have to find another job in my new position. Plans would've been sped up if I hadn't been out of work for almost two months due to my security license not being renewed on time before its expiration date. Of all the people I owe, my greatest debt is to my former lover, ironically, which adds to my shame! I bought food items on Amazon with the card she had on file in my account, out of sheer necessity, with the promise -as of yet unfulfilled- that I will pay her back. 

Before she left, she gave me $50 which I stretched for three weeks, buying the most absolutely essential items to survive: half a gallon of the cheapest Vodka, tuna and sausages, the cheapest possible meats, after having paid my $25 monthly Metropcs talk&text phone plan. I'd go to the Union Turnpike Starbucks to use the WiFi and try to find roommates on the Craigslist website. I found myself dumped, heart-broken and broke, a pending eviction case stemming back from April, roommates that would come and go unannounced and create more financial burden than economic relief. Some potential roommates like the girl who left her deposit $600 and some brand new broom, mop and detergents that she did not get to use in the cleaning of her room to be. She cried over the fact that her parents had not approved of her moving in. I gave her back her first month and kept the deposit and from thereon, I warned all my potential roommates to be that if they decided to move out before the end of the month, only half of their deposit will be returned. This particular girl even hooked me up with her own Time Warner account (which, as of today, two months since she left, I still enjoy!) and connected the HBO GO app on my Roku device: I was able to revisit and complete televised HBO programming such as Boardwalk Empire and started watching other famed series, like Game of Thrones. Oh, what a delight tour de force it is! 

A day before the retirement plan check for $5,876, the lights were turned off. I walked into my apartment and slept in darkness, just as I have lived for quite sometime. Like Murphy's Law stipulates, Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Every action taken to avoid being evicted from my place, priority number one in my list, had not gone as planned. It took longer than I had expected to receive the hardship loan requested, but I persevered in calling everyday and fight for it, making demands, pushing the issue over the phone with Mercer representatives, sending mail back and forth with the required info that would facilitate the transaction, until it finally happened. It was my doing and I was glad when I opened the mailbox and saw the check there. I looked at it from every angle, as if I had given birth to it by pushing and pushing with all my might and strength to see it come to light. 

And, of course, upon receiving my check, the first person I thought of was my former lover. She has given me more than all of the roommates I have had combined, as she paid for her deposit and had already paid her month when she left. Not to mention the fact that I destroyed her brand name sunglasses which she bought on Saks Fifth Avenue for almost $500. Or $350, or whatever other obscene amount of money. I, for one, used to buy me a pair of Aldo shoes every week I got paid, when I was still living with Beth and had only one son. I was assistant manager back then to a small security firm out of New Jersey. The company had even lent to me a car with the company signature and paid for my driving classes so I could get my driver's license. It was wrong of me to try and cage a rare and beautiful specimen, becoming overtly jealous and possessive. I've lived and if only I had been slightly more patient and less intense, things would've worked out differently. Of course, there's Murphy's Law to attest to it, that not all things that can go wrong will go wrong eventually, but the inevitability of it, the chaos that slowly fills its quota and breathes in and out of every organic fiber, tearing it apart bit by bit and inevitably ending is, of course, undeniable. We may say, If such law stands, how come a comet hasn't hit earth, for instance? Since everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, why is the world and the human race still standing? Give it time, all in time will vanish, to paraphrase the second law of thermodynamics that, in time, everything will turn to shit. The key word to the law is "Will", which doesn't mean it's happening anytime soon, but invariably, it will take place notwithstanding. 

Think of all the relationships you know. Either lovers achieve plateau (in psychology, a period of no improvement or learning in an individual's effort to move forward) and find some sort of contentment in the status quo (comfort in the way things are), or the relationship, more often than not, deteriorates and plummets. Ultimately, all things must come to an end. Life constitutes a phenomenon in the sense that it goes against such predicament. In other words, life goes against nature in that it grows and prospers up until certain point, before the body and mind begin their unavoidable decline into old age and eventually death, as the absolute finality. In some cases, though, the opposite is observed, you can almost say with a level of confidence that whatever can go right will go in the right direction and it happens, for some, at least. But these are rather the exceptions to the rule. Usually, beauty turns ugly, backstabbing people do their bidding, and we pay dearly for every pleasure life or the universe, or whatever divine entity of your choosing, has afforded you with. If we drink excessively, we get a hangover; and, if we overeat and do not exercise, we're bound to get fat. It takes a great deal of effort to counter the formidable forces of doom. It starts with being fully aware and passionately alive. Go and work out, live in peace, make good lifelong friends and become more a lover, less of a hater. Loving people ages gracefully, and hate has acidic properties, it will wrinkle your flawless skin (it will loosen the tightness of elasticity) and make it sag. 

In the end, gravity always wins. We live in a world that is part of a universe that is marked for extinction ever since it began. It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen. The word universe is composed of two, "uni" meaning "one" and "verse" meaning various. Everything and everyone in it is part of this chaotic force that drives anything and everything there is, and no one is separate from the whole. The people we see and the things we love, the places we've visited and this very day that has come to an end, is part of an endless decaying entity that goes from a higher form of energy to a lower kind. Therefore, everywhere I find it fit, I always declare war on this unbreakable law. Through writings, such as in this blog, I survive the memory of my past as you cannot rely on memory to keep track of all that's experienced. People in my life who know me the least often wondered and even asked me personally how can I go from one relationship into another, and I often say: "Hey, I'm forty years old, I don't have the luxury of sitting around moping over what is left behind!" In essence, it's true: I used to wait for a period of forty days before I venture into another lover's arms. It doesn't take me long to find a suitable partner. I've been very fortunate with women in my life, starting with my mom and all the lovers I've had, four sisters, countless girl cousins, it is as if my whole life there were a predominantly higher amount of women. And if I think of the most important and crucial relationships, women have held the most key roles in it, even when it comes to influential teachers. Just like I have chronicled in my lover's blog, www.ritesofpassagesintomanhood.blogspot.com, women have been of essence. To them, I owe the gift of literature. But learning, I've mastered reading great men, dead and alive, and that I owe too. But that'd be subject for another day.