10.31.-11.01.2009. Samhain. Or most of us would probably prefer 'all saints' day,' 'halloween,' 'all hallow's eve,' or whatever you want to call the midnight that connects october thirty-one and november one. A day when the lives of the dead are remembered and celebrated would be a sweet day to conceive and give birth to a new online journal. Now close your eyes. Feel the breeze left by Santi, the demon who disguised itself as a wicked storm just to bless this day in a subtle, seemingly-undiabolical manner. Hear the silence of creeping death. Smell the stench of despair and frustration seething and possessing the fresh air. Keep your eyes closed. And you experience eigengrau.
Yes. There seems to be a problem with the spelling. I replaced the second e with a. Besides the username 'eigengrau' being already taken (and I prefer to not use numbers in usernames or site names), I wanted the word to capture all the vowel sounds. I also wanted the word to have an internal rhtyhm that seemingly rhymes with 'pagan.' Or maybe I just want to justify my re-spelling of the word to EIGANGRAU.
Anyway, another day to reanimate the death. When I hear or perceive the word death, one particular death never fails to come to mind. Let us call it the death, and the person, the Shade. The death changed my life. Kwaderno is the Tagalog term for notebook. Nostalgia is something you could google, if it is your first time to encounter the term (kasi, nagtuition increase. baka ganoon kababa kalidad ng edukasyon.). Or find what you call 'context clues' in the text. I searched my drawer for a folio that contains a poem that someone wrote for me. I failed to find it. Instead, I unearthed an old notebook. Closed and abandoned at the time when the gates of the University of the Philippines Los Banos has just opened for me. The notebook preserved silly poems, tolerable stories and amateur sketches. It also kept memories. Of the Shade.
I realized that way back in high school, I was relatively a normal kid compared to my self now. I am somewhere between popstar, popculture kids and the artsy, dark, weird ones, according to my subjective categorization. I love people like normal people, I express how I feel like normal people do--at least in the written form. I reminisced how the Shade and I met. How we came to be what we are and how we have what we did. Inserted between the sleeve and the transparent identification card holder is my name--made by the Shade out of overlapping construction paper. I flipped the pages and found lame poems with the Shade's comments at the side. I flipped the pages of notes, drawings, video game notes, undecipherable words, more lame journal entries and noted numbers and textmessages, until I had no pages left to flip. Tucked at the backdoor sleeve of the brown-somewhat-leathery notebook is a letter. The letter the Shade gave me after we reveal the cadavers we kept deep in the secret compartments of our closets. And now, the Shade is a systema skeletale kept six feet deep, beneath the earthen partitions. Up until now, the Shade remains a skeleton in my closet, at least for most people.
The Shade never paid me a visit. I hope it would, so we could tell each other stories and adventures that occured in the past six years. And the bass heavy vocals of Type O Negative's Peter Steele rants and echoes in my head: "Loving you is like loving the dead..."
Which seems to be the case at this moment, at this dead expressionless night. I have to rethink and redefine things I fail to understand. Tonight, just like all the nights with the same date, I summon the Shade for counsel and wisdom, and welcome you to Eigangrau.
