Serenade

Serenade centrum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your eyes,
A mix of nostalgia,
Euphoria and pain
That soft, gentle
Short moment,
Unintentional
Irrevocable,
It froze time,
Right through the veins
Oblivious
To the world
Outside
Speaking
A language
Unknown
Melody after melody
Short
Bittersweet
Moments
Carved
In destiny’s timeline
You were but a stranger
Who’s echoes are embraced
In dreams
Your voice no longer
Hums the melodies
Your heart sings
A broken harp
Never a full circle,
Coming a little
Too late

Thin Line

Image via Wikipedia

They say there is a thin line between love and friendship and for American humorist Emma Bombeck, “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.” That minuscule thing that determines where one ends and the other begins, that border, matters a lot.

Today I learned something in the least unexpected way. We were seated in the waiting area near the emergency room of a private hospital this morning waiting for the result of the laboratory test of my nephew (he had his tooth extracted yesterday and was suddenly bleeding terribly last night until this morning despite medication , my brother got into panic mode so my nephew was rushed to the hospital). Then it happened… that moment of impact that made that can make your hands grow cold and damp, and your heartbeat   quite unstable. Inside the Emergency Room (ER) was a man who happened to be the brother of my cousin’s wife (talk about the six degrees of separation, the connection of each person to one another), he had a heart attack, just weeks after being released from the ICUfor the same cause. There he was battling for his life, traversing between the thin line that separates life from death, and within a few minutes, he was gone. 😦 The cries of the family members said it all, and the first thought that entered my mind was when we went to the hospital when grandpa died last year.

Just as the cries subsided, my thoughts shifted to another direction. There I was wallowing in fear for the upcoming exams in school while there are people who are facing bigger battles, mine is just a tiny spec, something that is all in the mind. There are people who no longer have the chance to pursue what they were going after, before taking that last breath. There are those who can no longer hold the hands of their children or their parent, nor kiss their loved one before going to sleep at night; gone too soon.

Life has no expiry date to let you know when the time is up so it is best to live it to the fullest. American business woman, Mary Kay Ash was once quoted saying, “Some people drift through their entire life. They do it one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time. It happens so gradually they are unaware of how their lives are slipping away until it’s too late.“

Every person must make every moment count, to collect memories and not regrets, to leave behind happy thoughts and not heartaches and to be closer to the one who gave us life. Don’t hold back, let the people who matter to you know how much you care, how important they are and how much you love them. Carpe diem!

Moments and Memories

Image via Wikipedia

“Life’s all about moments of impact and how they change our lives forever. But what if one day you could no longer remember any of them?” Leo Collins (a.k.a Channing Tatum), The Vow

A lot of people will be able to recognize that line and there are those who remember those words by heart. But have you ever really asked yourself that big “what if”? This is not a movie review, neither is it a summary nor a set of quotes from the movie. But I think it is appropriate to take off from those lines.

“What if one day you could no longer remember anything?”

Suffering from a cold, I asked my dad if there are still herbs available from the house next door (which belongs to my aunt and grandma from dad’s side), he said there are none, it’s only my grandma who is fond of planting and she no longer does. My grandmother is 90 years old, she is healthy, her eyes and hear hearing are still good BUT she does not know me anymore, nor does she know any of her children or grandchildren. I remember spending afternoons in her house, listening to stories that she tells with such enthusiasm. She used to wake us (my cousins) up at six in the morning for breakfast when we would spend the night at her house, and she would fill our plates with food and the hard-boiled egg is never out of the menu, then she would tell us to eat everything there, which we then considered a great feat. But what I looked forward to was her hot chocolate, which, no one else can prepare the way she does, come to think of it, does she remember that recipe? The way she holds the wooden thing to mix the hot chocolate the old-fashioned way, it’s like an art and that memory will forever be engraved on my mind. There are a lot of fond memories with grandma, it’s just sad that she no longer remembers any of it. Just like her herb garden, those memories are no longer there.

Grandma has not completely lost her memory, there are facts that she recalls well. She knows her complete name, date of birth and other similar data. But what really touched me, is that, even if she does not recall who we are most of the time, she remembers one person so clearly, as if it was 70 years back (or sometime close to that), she remembers my grandfather, her husband up to this very day. She knows how, when, and where they met; she remembers the date of their wedding. It seems like a once in a lifetime love that will never be erased from her mind. My grandfather died long before I was born, long before my parents met; he died when my dad was still in elementary and grandma never remarried nor entertained such thought. Perhaps in her subconscious mind she wants to relive those moments, to freeze those memories when they were still together or perhaps it’s just the romantic in me thinking that way.

Leo was right, there are moments of impact that can change our lives. These moments often happen when we least expect them to, and the best thing to do is to cherish those moments, relish the feelings that come with them and make the most out of every second because we never know if there will be a next time, or, if one day we can still remember it all. Carpe diem!