Today I am obsessed about a rotting dead dog that is outside my office building. It's gross! I went to lunch and back after it was pouring. I had to muddle through the road which was near flooded. The waters that was bursting itself out from the garbage filled drains by the roadside washed over the dead dog's blackened body. I had to wade my feet through this slimy, brown waters just to get to the other side. 3 hours after and I peered out my window and the dead thing is still there.

The Notebook

A few years back, in my self-imposed solitary lifestyle, I wandered along the mall near my place. In typical routine, I popped into the only 2nd hand bookstore in the building. I never really cared very much for the store since they don't normally have much of a collection, it's a lot of sci-fi stacks, Japanese manga and Danielle Steel yellowed-pages love novels and so on. I don't even remember the name of the store which bothers me at times since I have an irresistible urge to pigeonhole everything I see, do, know, feel into special memory boxes in my head.

Anyway, I found a small, paperback called The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. Not the regular book I'm used to reading but I picked it up and I fell in love with it. I am still in love with the story until today. I have watched the movie so many times that I can traced the moment visually in my head when N pulled and kissed A by the pier in the rain as he shouted, "it's not over then, it's not over now!"

It's the only Sparks book I've ever read. Really. I've never attempted to read another just so I could prolong the sanctity and sacredness of this one just a little bit longer. The Notebook holds a special place in the confines of my heart and my soul. It has taught me to relive the love I've had before and to remember the ones that have occupied me in between. I learned to cherish the love in the past, to breathe in the moments of ecstacy, to sear every moment in memory, to cry and grief, and to look forward to love in the future. Last Friday, when Tim and I celebrated our 2 years together, I thought of this book and I smiled. I told him so. I know why I bought the book then and I understood what it meant now.

In The Notebook, N wrote to A for 365 days since they parted in summer. She never responded to any of the letters and in the final letter, he wrote,

"The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls were connected. Maybe they always have and will be. Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other. And maybe each time, we've been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.

When I look at you, I see your charm and your gentleness and know they have grown stronger with every life you have lived. And I know I have spent every life before this one searching for you. Not someone like you, but you, for your soul and mine must always come together. And then, for some reason neither of us understands we were forced to to say goodbye.

I would love to tell you that everything will work out for us, and I promise to do all I can to make sure it does. But if we never meet again and this is truly goodbye, I know we will see each other again in another life. We will find each other again and maybe the stars will have changed, and we will not only love each other in that time but for all the times we had before".

Over time, I realised I don't remember the books I read. I forgot what they say, what they served to remind me of and why I had picked it up in the first place. So I decided to read this for the 2nd time over this past weekend. Each line is reflective and now that I am reading it for the 2nd time, I am beginning to see the overly interpretive nature of the characters. Each one has a layer waiting to be peeled and discovered, complex than the one before. And I'm enjoying it. I thought about it last night and each time I do, it evokes different emotions, thoughts, bringing new perspectives.

'Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense,' notes the storyteller

Senegal

creating new days

I noted my last entry was in Feb 2009 and it is now July 2009. Almost 5 months have passed. In that time, I started working with an international organisation, somedays I slaved myself over with important duties, sometimes mediocre tasks, others I spend it rather leisurely. There are days I am proud doing what I do and I want to do more. But lately, I have become less motivated, and I am itching to be somewhere else, anywhere. I long for days of no obligations, of sunshine, breeze through my hair, open blue skies, my lover next to me and we sipping wine. We would not have to say anything. In the silence, everything is being said and nothing could go wrong.

Come August, it will be 2 years in Sierra Leone and it gives me a nauseous feeling, that I actually have been living here in that 2 years.. it's such a surreal feeling that I find it difficult to express what it all really means to me. Somedays I understood nothing my of existence here. I keep wanting to be somewhere else, where I will come alive. It could possibly be some inner inhibitions that keeps me from living it out here. But I am anxious and ready to leave. To a new and different future. One where I can spend days in creation of something more and bigger than myself perhaps.