My Papa Don’t Preach

Let me overshare: I never really felt my father’s presence up until I was in high school. All those years before, during the stretch of what my parents lousily call “separation,” I had my mom to look up to as the “pillar” of the household.  My father would only visit me at times bringing me chocolates and SPAM. Over time, however, we bonded like how CNN’s Larry King had deemed to happen as he signed off last year for sons Chance and Cannon.

Teenage Scream

There are times when I just wanted to freeze time itself, borrow someone else’s videocam and shoot from the beginning. I’m not yet old, but now I feel so. With the Harry Potter movie series to end next year, it’s like a lifetime– a good chunk of my lifetime– raced past me. And this is coming from someone who’s not a fan of that lightning scar. I think I’m missing a lot: Movies, books, history, people, music, myself.

Stethoscope World

I am an ammidyphobic, meaning I have a great fear of losing a loved one over death. Against death, my pretentiously strong, over-the-surface happy-go-lucky personality is threatened. Against death, I am left with no control. To put it simply, I hate hospital beds, my mother or father lying helplessly on these beds, my emotionally frail self leaning over these beds and all the shit that look like a sad snippet of Grey’s Anatomy. Assuming I even watch things like Grey’s Anatomy.

It takes some courage to watch your loved one lying helplessly in an infirmary. Two years ago, my father was hospitalized due to panic attack. Caused rather psychologically, he had a hard time to breathe till he was rushed to the ICU. An ICU is like a danger zone, and that’s not a place I wanted to see my father when I couldn’t do anything. I just had to watch him inhale oxygen via tank and cables, and greatly trying to not cry. The old man was holding on to me for strength, and the neurologist suggested that I weather a better setting to channel away any further ~negative thinking. I had no choice but to appear very positive even if deep in me, I controlled every pinch of my softness. If I was good in anything, it’s holding back my eye’s tear ducts.

Now my dad is good and well, and yet I hadn’t anticipated worse things to come.

“You think that’s hard? I watched this friggin’ tearjerker movie, that’s hard!”

Just arrived from Joji Matsuoka’s emotionally tiring two-hour twenty-two-minute TOKYO TOWER: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad at Eiga Sai in Shangri-la Plaza. One: I was supposed to strongly relate with Boku such that I  had expected myself to bawl (judging from the trailer). Two: Amid the powerful grip of tear guts, I sufficiently had my heart crushed I couldn’t donate it anymore.