There are days when I make do with what I can get my hands on, may it be a new book, an old one, a new show, an I-don't-know'how-long-it-has-been-there show, an old habit, a bad habit... And then are those days - when you discover something that changes you, either in a way or in every way.
A day which exemplifies the latter was the day I finally decided to read "Stargirl", which had been sitting unopened in my iPad for weeks now.
First few pages of "Stargirl" and I thought, "Well, this girl must be Sagittarius." And that's when I finally, finally appreciated the said astrological sign (by the way, when I first learned that the inclusion of a 13th astrological sign in the zodiac squad would result into my relinquishing my sea goat hooves and donning the lower body of a horse, I was mortified. Ready to curse the 13th sign - which I could not pronounce, much less remember - to oblivion. Prepared to swear off the Philippine Star's daily horoscope entirely. Well, not really, but you have to see what I mean.).
Stargirl. Susan. No, not Susan. She was never Susan nor Julia nor Ms. Caraway. She was Stargirl, and she made laughter so liberating and freedom, such a prize. And she made me realized I haven't been seeing the world at all; I have just been looking forward and going about it - not seeing, just looking straight at how I would like my days to end up.
I have forgotten to stop and smell the flowers - both literally and figuratively. It has just been a go-go-go ride. And it has been awful, though I had learned, since long ago, to dim the belching capacity this routine/life (whatever it is) has and just go with the verbal garbage and monstrous traffic, with the indifference and callous responses.
I didn't even bathe in the rain anymore, much less perform a dance number while it was storming - largely due to the press releases on the harmful toxins rain carries and the number of diseases you get if you wade through the puddles.
Suffice to say, "Stargirl" and Stargirl, herself, were welcome respites.
And, now, I share some of the lines therein with you:
"In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark catacome in from the desert."
"She was illusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew."
"When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light."
“Nothing’s more fun than being carried away.”
"The trouble with miracles is, they don't last long."
"You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know."
"The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper."
"She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day."
"She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as "nothing" I walked in a gray world of nothing."
"“You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t much think about it, we’re scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day….It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of out most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves."
“I’m erased. I’m gone. I’m nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl…. And… I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. The thing is, there’s no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.”
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