My boyfriend's in China (hopefully not contracting SARS). My parents are in a house blessing. My sister is watching a dance recital. I am home, doing nothing.

It's the first time in a long time that I'm actually home. Like really home - with nothing planned, with all things unstressed. Just plain home. I can walk around the house mindlessly, until my shih tzu gets dizzy watching me. With a roll of his bulging eyes, he turns to the other direction and decides that it's better for him to sleep. Later on, I find him lying on his back with legs spread apart, asleep strategically on a spot where the fluffy hairs on his belly welcome the electric fan air. I smile at him, amused.

Nothing is happening. So here I am, writing about the nothingness that is (not) happening. It is comfort though, this nothingness. With the strong but soothing choruses of Handel's Messiah playing in the background. Sigh. I feel like a high-school student in summertime.

Well, I read poetry to pass the time. I revisited my favorite verses. I read Wilde, Dickinson and Neruda. And to end this post about nothingness, here's one of my favorites from Neruda, fittingly so:

Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence,
without you moving, slicing the noon
like a blue flower, without you walking
later through the fog and the cobbles,

without the light you carry in your hand,
golden, which maybe others will not see,
which maybe no one knew was growing
like the real beginnings of a rose.

In short, without your presence: without your coming
suddenly, incitingly, to know my life,
gust of a rosebud, wheat of wind:

since then I am because you are,
since then you are, I am, we are,
and through love I will be, you will be, we'll be.