Mari’s Pink Notebook

During one of those rainy afternoons when it was just so nice to curl up in bed and reminisce, I found myself going back to this pink notebook which I had been keeping since the latter part of 2008. I found myself leafing through its ruled yet muddled-up pages. And I caught myself smiling as I went through all the doodles and dreams, the angst and tears, the bursts of extreme emotions and the nuggets of pure wisdom.

There’s really nothing special about the notebook. It was just some extra exercise book which was lying around the house at the time. I wish I could say that it’s one of those pretty ones with the dainty stationery-like pages, but it’s just some plain, lined, cheap book that was THERE when I needed to release those first few rounds of pent up, unexplainable emotions.

The notebook’s first paragraph went like this: “Love is a funny and crazy, crazy thing. Wala lang. Thought that I’d just write down some of my thoughts about love and matters of the heart so that I can have something to look back to and laugh at when the time comes.” (14 December 2008)

I was smiling when I read that first portion. Chuckling when I read through the rest of the entry as well. It was really funny. The whole thing spanned through ten whopping pages. Ten pages of Mari rambling on and on about how complicated love was and how complicated it seemed at that time to fall for a certain complicated person.

The pages that followed were filled with more Mari ramblings, released during moments of lovelorn emo-ness.

“Emotional. Why am I so, so, so emotional??? I took the oneishy personality test again yesterday and the results said that I’m melan-sanguine. Oh no. The battle of the emos. In fairness, the melan’s got my weakness, and the sanguine’s balancing it out with all its sunshiny strengths.”(17 April 2010)

“Render me vulnerable. Render me completely and utterly vulnerable, heart and soul bared open, ready to take on pain, ready to get hurt at a different level if it must be so.” (3 June 2010)

“Pero yun nga. What if? What if? What if? Would I risk it all by simply trusting you?” (8 June 2010)

Yikes. I guess this whole thing would come as a shock to people who see me as sane and level-headed. But the truth is, when I feel, I feel. But yes, a lot of the notebook’s entries still ended with me telling me to get a grip on myself.

And getting a grip, I am.

The notebook’s all filled up now. I might buy a new one soon, but I’ve been pretty sane and level headed these past days. Well, I think I’ve been. I hope I’ve been. Yes. No. Maybe.

But anyway. The journey written there is one to laugh at and cry over. And so, that pink notebook’s final paragraph “ended” the whole thing with this:

“Daddy God, You know everything in this heart and everything this heart has been through. And Lord, I surrender everything to You once again. This is more than teenybopperish angst. Kuya Paul said that in life, you make two major decisions – the first is to accept Christ, the next is to get married. And I guess ‘whom to marry’ is coupled with that [second decision]. I surrender this ‘love story’ to You, Dad. (Yikes, that sounds so cheesy.) But I do. Use this as a testimony of your goodness, greatness, and sovereignty. Use this to glorify Your name. I love You, Daddy God.”

What a journey. What a story. This story – greater than fairy tales, far too glorious for books to contain, and better than all of my dreams put together – is still yet to unfold.