Caught in a Daydream

It’s one of those quiet dinners you have in a strange country. It was in my favorite diner, only a few walks away from the flat I share with five Filipinos like me. I munch on strange food. I keep my head down; like being visitor in a mansion where expensive furniture looks intimidating.

But then I caught sight of you. You are the first familiar face I saw here. You saw me and our eyes met. You look handsome, but then I remembered I am not allowed to find you that way anymore. I rushed eating and left.

The next thing I felt was hands; hands surrounding my waist. And you’re heavy breathing in my ear. You told me that you have been driving yourself crazy trying to find me. I opened my eyes to look at you… wondering if I was dreaming.

And I was dreaming, daydreaming that is.

In real life I’m sitting beside my editor, trying to focus on the video we are editing. But my mind had traveled across the Pacific already. I have been thinking about you.

It’s not you though. It’s me. You are not the first man I daydreamt about. And now that I’m trying to process how to stop thinking about our relationship that has long been over even before it officially was; I realized that it has been my habit to daydream even before I met you.

I remember being awake still at 4am, dreaming about how to get even with Fat-trick (Patrick) who poked my butt back in fourth grade.

The classroom hours I spent thinking if my varsity crush will propose to me on the school party (which he didn’t).

The four-hour bus ride to Pangasinan with my Mom, which I spent thinking about Mico, my grade six crush.

The bus and jeepney rides I spent thinking about the zillion of crushes and love interests I had that are faceless to me now...

Thinking about it now, those valuable hours lost, is really giving me a headache. And I’m realizing that at age 25, I think it’s time for me to grow out of daydreaming.

Author David Foster Wallace thinks our thoughts can be a conscious choice. (I have no idea who he is but what he said is brilliant). “It's about what we decide to think about during everyday, mundane tasks – waiting in line at the grocery, sitting in traffic. We can let our thoughts follow our brain's default mode – annoyance, pettiness, outrage, selfish fantasies. Or we can make a conscious choice to "exercise some control over how and what you think".

I have been asking God how to stop thinking about you. Right up to now… while my editor Mel is already sleepy, and I’m trying my best to make him stay awake so we can finish on time… I’m still trying to reason with myself why I should make a decision to block you out of my creatively senseless mind.

I do believe that if a man puts his heart and mind into a task, he can overcome anything no matter how impossible it seemed. Now, I’m convincing my heart and mind to join me in this fight against daydreams. And they’re both not up to it yet.

I took a leak, and that Bible verse I heard back in college popped into mind, “…take every thought captive.”

If you’re a policeman and you want to arrest a guilty suspect, I think you need two things: a gun and some form of readiness. You have to expect that the person will fight like hell to break loose. If that person is fierce you have to be fiercer. You have to be more psycho and heartless than the criminal.

And now I need to “arrest” these really tempting, beautiful thoughts. Because no matter how nice and comforting they may feel; they are thieves. They are stealing my time away from productive thoughts, tasks, and relationships. They steal me away from actual moments, where instead of seizing the opportunity to live this day to the full, I can only offer my distracted self. Instead of actual conversations and actual steps to make the world or just that piece of soil within my reach better; I am locked within my secret world. I have to stop this sick role-play of made-up situations already, so I can live my situation now before it passes me by.

So how do I do it? No idea. But I plan on mentally gunning down every thought about you with a prayer. And should the daydream become too tempting, I plan to work on making reality irresistibly and mouth-wateringly better.