Spending a couple of hours with a chain-smoking gay professor to edit an audio-visual production (AVP) has led me to wish for a magical power to edit my own life. I could have edited out the nicotine fog that almost choked me, but I have no power or even the right to do so as I was sitting in his domain...It would have been rude to tell him, "Sir, can you please stop doing that?" Although, I admit, I could not help myself from advising him - and I know he is very much aware of it - that what he is doing is contributing to his own mortality. Still, I sat there...and endured...and only felt relieved when I stepped out of his house to go home.

But that is what my life is right now. There are so many conditions I could not control at this point because I am just a "boarder" in their turf. A transient. As much as I want to do my own thing, I could not do so. I am disabled by my own empowerment. Imprisoned by my own freedom. And all I could do is cry and pray that I'd be able to overcome the odds in the end.

The professor did a good job with the AVP. Each frame is a testament to the greatness of a woman regarded as an outstanding Filipino media practitioner. But the process of filtering out what needs to be trashed and polishing what has remained is very tedious and requires a lot of patience. It would seem that the unused scenes and data are useless and negative or maybe just not worth mentioning at all.

It was like life, indeed, as I meet each day. I have stored countless memories...but not everything or every detail is still existent in my mind. I guess my own mental faculty has a natural way of editing events in my life...setting aside those that have no more use while remembering those that could help me cope with the troubles of everyday battles.

Unlike in videos where the editor could click one or several buttons to change a scene and replay it, real life has no way of doing that. One could only wish to undo the past. Time cannot wait. It runs through like the air we breathe, it cannot be contained.

I see edited versions of my life flash through the spaces in my mind when I'm alone. All the replays, though, have details forgotten or added...Yet the leftovers somehow hang in the shadows, ready to take a leap into my consciousness. And I know that these feelings I have would stay its course until I finally resolve to delete those moments that deserve to rest in peace. How I wish they are like cigarettes that after consuming them, the smoker could just trash away the butts and never use or see them again.