Fate never fails to demonstrate its bitter sense of humor. I was throwing away a decade's worth of acquired memorabilia, at one point, sentimental values, when an old friend phoned me and reminded me of the pink box she gave me. She said, she was reminded of it when she saw a piece of candy wrapper I had, almost three years ago, given her. She would keep it still, she said, pressed between pages of our favorite book. A simple box for a candy where I should keep all my hopes and wishes in, she said. Before we talked, I was about to leave with three extra large garbage bags outside our gate for the garbage truck to pick up.
The existence of that candy wrapper, ticked miles away between dog-eared pages of Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” made me doubt my decision to throw away once-treasured, otherwise useless junk. But as fate would have it, the truck bounded down our streets moments later and took them along with other garbage offered by our street. And it was only then that I remembered that I didn’t even remember what I placed inside that box nor eating candy that day. Perhaps, then, all the material memorabilia I had collected were as irrelevant as that candy wrapper; souvenirs that have long lost their significance.
I displayed symptoms of Peter Pan complex, that same friend once told me, laughing at how often I would trip on my own feet from staring up the sky or staring down at the road while I walked – I was always searching for Neverland, she said, or else assuring myself that I still had my shadow. And true enough, I had always treasured the past too much, and had kept all I could to remind myself of it. The printed letters in that box, like pieces of the map to Neverland. And it is only now that I right myself. Shadows must never be allowed to precede, and the second star to the right will only be Neverland for as long as it remains distant; only the clock, wound by time itself, will continue to tick in the crocodile’s stomach.
Nostalgia is not really different from eulogies: only the good are remembered, the past is relived, endearments are finally vocalized, but all too late. Neverland will never stare back, for by the time its light reaches your vision, the star itself has long gone. And you get left behind in the process; wallowing still in the past rather than learning from it, while everyone has moved along.
The planets must be realigning, I had told a close friend of mine of two months ago, offering my best explanation as to why we were sensing portentous heaviness in the air. Everyone seemed to have been displaced by some sense of imbalance and were all in the process restructuring, or, in more mundane terms, we were all preoccupied with our own personal problems and seemed to have forgotten how trivial they really are in broad outlook.
Yet, however delusive it may seem, I will allow myself to believe in an underlying, incomprehensible system of things that need not be fully understood. Because in hindsight, the planets seem to realign every year during the months of June, July and August, and settle in their new positions by the end of September. And as always, the aftermath of disruption and new gravitational interrelations is both displacement and reestablishment. But as always, the settling dust leaves even more room for us to adapt and, eventually, to laugh and accept our own naiveties.
