QUIETUS

I used to be stuck in front of the boob tube watching Korean films of great or tragic love stories. There's this film that really pinched my heart.. my tears slowly flowing from a trickle at the start of the story until it flowed out to a gushing well in its finale.The film is A Moment to Remember (2004), a Korean love story about the burden and loss caused by the girl's Alzheimer's disease.

I have also read stories about great love and survival. I found myself welling up with tears while i was plunging myself into Noah and Allie's world in The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks.

I have also read Erich Segal's Love Story as endorsed by a good friend Rodney.

All these stories are plotted out on a common theme, real love and survival in a relationship, a struggle with a partner who has a malady, and staying beside her till her last breath.

I haven't read Nicholas Sparks' A Walk to Remember nor watched its film. A friend advised me not to read or watch it if it would damn kill my happy cells.

These fictional stories hit me straight right where it should:
bafflement of pent-up emotions.

Just recently, i met someone who has undergone the tremors and pain of losing his beloved in a fight against an illness. I could not measure the depths of grief that i have felt upon knowing his story, it was as if i was sucked in a vortex of delusion. I take my hat off to him for staying beside her all through those difficult years, just as those brave men from the stories that i have read and watched.

Most of the times, those fiction and non-fictional stories make me wish that someone would as well stay beside me until my last breath. One who would take time to listen even to the echoes of my heart when i could no longer speak. One who would describe the beauty of surroundings when i could no longer see. One who would hold me, touch me, feel me when my senses are already numb. One who would sing to me the melodies of yesterdays when my memory couldn't serve me well.

I very well know my prognosis and what it would mean in the last and tender hours. Few people who have walked in my life promised to stay but didn't. I fear the pain that they will have to go through and so i understand their needs to walk out of my life. There are no words to express my sorrows for this, and I am sure I am at a loss for words. Perhaps, just perhaps, love will find a way to come back to me despite this affliction. Maybe, just maybe, in the presence of one of those brave men who's willing to hear the soft sounds of my slumber, as i finally lay myself into quietus.