it's my mother's birthday tomorrow, but i will be out of town until saturday for some freakin' training i wish i had experienced before when i was still showing some vigor at work. it looms in me a feeling of guilt, especially now because it is only her and me in our house, and obviously there's no one left with her on that special day. and i am more saddened by the fact that i could not even dare to back out, and she sure as hell won't let me do so, save some considerations to our department that has a battalion of officers: the boss and the weary researcher.
birthdays, for me, are more than mere calendar marks calling forth fancy celebrations of some sort. i don't know if this is peculiar to me, but i feel a sense of sympathy and/or sorrow for someone on the day of his birthday. it's as if i tend to assume that that particular person is so sad, everybody needs to partake in a joyous diversion for the celebrator to have something to compensate for those youthful years disappearing right before his eyes. and that compels me to do even the smallest thing i could or give, be it serious or just to make that person laugh, or even smile upon knowing that there is someone who did not fail to remember (well, in some cases i do. you know me; i'm the personified Dory). that's why for those dates i will never forget, being unable to give or even do the simplest thing, and worse, being not there for them as they hit that milestone in their lives becomes a grave emotional distress. it depresses the hell out of me.
today is one of those special dates. it's someone's birthday, and i don't even know where that someone is... to you, wherever you are and whoever the devil you are with, i wish you a happy birthday.
***
anyway, to make amends for the "might have beens" haunting me every single minute, i'm treating myself with excessive indulgence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's genius. he triggered in me an emotional impact of overwhelming admiration and respect for his poetic diction, that i could not seem to agree more on whatever there is that his thoughts inflict upon me. he is my Pablo Neruda when it comes to novels. my first intimate encounter with the pleasures of his words was when i read Memories of My Melancholy Whores. on that first romance, i learned to love Marquez as another author of my emotions. what more in my maddened soul can Love in the Time of Cholera enkindle? i am just on some thirty pages from the cover, and i couldn't help falling in his poetic spell, from the lucidity of his realities beyond human comprehension to his eloquence in human love...
"With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.'"— Love in the Time of Cholera
"Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer."— Love in the Time of Cholera
"He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, not would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.— Love in the Time of Cholera"
"Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love"— Memories of My Melancholy Whores
"We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice, but when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about."— Love in the Time of Cholera
"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."— One Hundred Years of Solitude
"To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell."— Love in the Time of Cholera
"He is ugly and sad... but he is all love."— Love in the Time of Cholera
"...and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love..."— One Hundred Years of Solitude
"It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them."— Love in the Time of Cholera
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."— Love in the Time of Cholera
"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."— Collected Stories
...and so on, as every page gives me another quote to keep and live by.
NEW YORK - "Pirates of the Caribbean" star Johnny Depp was named People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" on Wednesday, reclaiming a title he first won in 2003.
