It rained hard that night when I last saw her. It rained so hard that you would think it never rained before. Someone said rain makes people sad, but as rain washed the glass window of the car she rode, we waved our last goodbyes, not really knowing if that rain made me sad, or not.
As she drove off to the next set of traffic, so is my life, sometimes intermittently stopping for people like her who, in many ways, I find insanely not different as I am.
I walked my way home as the rain poured insatiably, washing the empty crossroad, clearing it of people I regularly meet but never really get to know more.
I thought about the things she said, about her happiness and not getting it. About being scared, and being angry and desperate. About losing and gaining. About running away, or taking a temporary leave out of life.
My shoes were sullied. My toes felt cold. A trickle of rain water found its way to my neck from my umbrella’s broken wing. I thought about the many sweltering nights she spent alone, at the mercy of broken wisdom and faltering self-esteem. How many of us changes so fast, like dreams can be traded as quickly as we change our underwear? Then why dream in the first place?
But when I saw her the last time, that night when it rained so hard, I sensed a different kind of happiness in her, like that brand of happiness a parole can give to a prisoner, somewhat disorderly but sure, and trusting, and complete.
I remember the many sunny afternoons we filled with conversations of things we don’t know yet talk about so much. We talk about people who never really care about us or what we have to say about them. We talk about which dream is good, and which ones are phony, and which ones we cannot really have because we just can’t. But we were one in the belief that something out there is reserve for us, a desk waiting for our things to fill, a coffee machine waiting to brew one every morning, and big houses waiting for us to occupy. She talks about why some things are solid facts, and why others are too far, indifferent.
I listened to her quite often that summer before these rainy days came and she was a fan of the things that I said. We would sit by the park, trusting that each conversation would find ways to make things better. But every time we depart and go on with our unconnected everyday, I am gripped by the hollow fact that things are different from where I sit and that she is burnt and I am not. I wonder what big Jem would tell her little sister, Scout about this: that you can’t really speak about a person unless you wear his skin and feel the insides of his shoes?
My Chucks were sopping wet as I reached the door step. I rang the doorbell, and threw my cigarette just as the door opened.
She must have been caught in heavy traffic, that night when it rained so hard, inside a city she hardly knows and will soon leave. I cannot forgive her for giving up first, for a let down which never came up during those sunny, volatile afternoons of the summer. But I wove my goodbye, the last in the many years to come until the next hello, that night when it rained so hard that you would think it never rained before, because alas, she found what it is that she has never seen before, far from the dreams she spoke of, far from what I exactly know and believe in, and she has given up her everything for it.
This is the song I was telling you about. I think I have years to learn to play this on my guitar so that the next time we’ll see, I can finally say that “When flowers gaze at you… they are not the only ones who cry.” Godspeed, my friend.
Both my parents were present at my birth. It was a wonderful day for them. For me, it was the most terrifying day of my life. I cried. I howled. Maybe that’s when my manic depression began. According to my mother, I was born a blue baby (due to lack of oxygen). I don’t thinks so. I think I was having my goddamn panic attack. My first.
Well not exactly my first, really.
When my mom’s umbilical chord was still dangling on me, she would pass out at any inconceivable places, and then remember nothing about it when she woke up. I think those few lapses were caused by this lunatic kid inside her tummy— those were my first’s fetal goddamn panic attacks and they knocked her out, mind you.
My proud parents took me home and for the next two weeks invited strange people, people I didn’t know, didn’t want to know, round to the house to have a look at me. I hated it. I cried. I howled, and proceeded to have my third goddamn panic attack.
Little did they know they were nursing a mad baby who cried like a cow and whimpered like a chimpanzee. But not long enough.
At the age of five, I already knew what depression meant. My panic attacks would manifest but I knew how to control them, conceal them in utter silence. It was a sick behavior really, now as I look at it, but I was always alone then so how will I cry and whimper when nobody is going to pamper me?
I took the silence seriously. At any given day, when I was not at school, you would find me either curbed at one corner with the encyclopedias (yes, encyclopedia, now you see how bored I was) or painting with illustration boards (I think I was more gifted when I was younger). The only sound which will tell you I’m at home is my piano (see, I was gifted, until I discovered heroine. More on that later).
My biggest mistake was that I went too far to become manic depressive, and by twelve resisted any form of convention that I think was not applicable to me and embraced those ones which deviate stubbornly and instantly. I like it especially when nobody knows about it but God and me.
And now I’m twenty-one. Still manic depressive and never learned to make friends with strangers, have smoked pot twice, get laid on once (no, I am not a virgin anymore and I’m not kidding here), nearly died every so often when I feel liking it, smokes incessantly until the final day of reckoning absorbs my lungs, and dumped on first attempt (and promise not to do it in, say next ten years, or until I reach New York, whichever comes first).
Thank you friends and countrymen for not forgetting my birthday. Or else I’ll have my redundant panic attacks, again.
It’s Sunday and you decide to skip breakfast. You toss and turn over the bed and listen to the wide stretch of typical Sunday morning silence across the dorm’s landing.
Then you look for something inside your cabinet, maybe your cell phone’s charger but nothing in particular really. Your hand then find something hard and glossy, you pick it up and it take no less a millisecond to recognize what it is: your high school yearbook.
You go outside and fill your mug with hot water, then drop a string of tea. You sit by the window clutching the glossy, hard bound book between the curve of your stomach and pulled legs. You light a cigarette for breakfast, sip the tea then you begin to flip the leaf of pages of the long-kept yearbook. You smell the old ages as the aroma of caffeine and nicotine mixes inside your lungs.
Mindlessly, you flip the pages in a quick rhythm, sometimes stopping a minute or two at some pages. You wonder why everytime you open this book, you never miss noticing something new, or different. Then you held a minute longer as you arrive at the page of your high school crush. You smile, engulf a lungful of smoke, and then muse. You linger some more, pore over at the details of the picture infront of you, then grin at the thought of power you have over the paper. Now you can look at each others eyes.
Then you continue flipping through the rest of the pages: faces of long-lost friends run like video clips infront of your myopic eyes. Some of them you would barely remember, but the close ones still look familiar. Then something tingles inside, sting of nostalgia perhaps?
Outside of the window, the College of Engineering rooftop beams the sunlight brightly against the cobalt sky. The early birds flee the corrugated roofs everytime the cold morning zephyr blows. What is wrong with this morning?, you ask. There is nothing wrong with this morning, you actually know that. It is even close to perfect.
Then you turn up at the class picture of your Senior year. You are at the middle of the second row, putting on prim and proper convent-bred smile. You are at the center of the four decks of fifty heads all beaming, ethereal happy kind of smiles. The focal of the camera’s lens was perhaps fixed on you, adjusted at your convenience.
But as you examine at the picture closely now at some distance, you realize that all these years, you stand at the middle yet you are outside.
You recollect the long years of the past, some in diminutive detail of one ordinary day at your grade school or one of the meaningless hours spent ogling at your high school crush and you realize you were so different. You were so different to the point that although you were the center of gravity of your high school, nobody, or nothing ever fell into your depths.
You realize that nobody took in to know you better, to understand you beyond the person who perfects math and solves trigonometry as fast as lightening. Nobody from your high school has ever understood what it is that you really desired to have: not the praises, not the applause but the imperfect friendships and the silent hugs, those sort of things.
What is wrong with this morning?, you ask as you laugh at yourself and how emotional you can get, another aspect of you nobody ever recognized from high school.
A center of gravity which can pull no body. You said this aloud.
The early birds flee from the edges of the roof, and sink to the blue lake of the vast sky.
You close the glossy, hard bound book as you let out the tears harboring from the emptiness inside.
I am drunk. The other week, somebody said that a tropical typhoon is going to beat up the city today. I am done with the stupid state board exam this morning, but where the hell is the typhoon? I just came home from a lousy bar, took in a bottle of beer and my stomach feels like a non-stick pan right now. To hell with all the exams of the world. This is really weird. The sun was all over the place today. Am I just getting confused because all the while I thought it’s going to be a rainy Friday night? The mother must be smiling jubilantly right now: her blackmail worked on me. How was I not stupid in falling into one of her hair-brained ideas and took the board exam? I need the typhoon right now. I swear to my father’s grave I could spit on the exam paper!
It’s not a matter of question now whether I passed or failed the exam. I was blackmailed by The Mother to take the exam, what more can be derogatory? I took the bait, and hell was I naive. Now passing it is The Mother’s entire problem. My failing it is her entire fault. That problem was mine for two harrowing days, not to mention the incalculable dim hours that precede as I watch the moon kissed the sun, and the great pretense of answering the exam problems at the point of Pollock abstraction. My beer belly is heavy with madness. Damn this alcohol. I need a typhoon, I don’t care what name you got.
I am drunk, and I didn’t really want to take the board exam. I didn’t want to fucking take it because it’s useless, and it’s moronic. I am so over myself and I am so arrogant. Believe me, I really hated the board exam. Right now, I smell like a concoction of a fermented coconut sap, and brown tropical fruit called chico. I never really get The Mother every time she whines when I tell her I don’t have plans to take the state exams before. I am discriminating. I have a graduate school to go to this September. And I would tell her the licensure has no weight on what I would be doing in the next few years, first because I would be in a foreign country and that I don’t have plans on working here, in tropical third-worldness. Besides, I hate our government, and the government gives those exams.
And what the hell did come to me? That I suddenly swallowed all the mushiness of my angst and gave in to The Mother’s blackmail? Sometimes I would like to believe The Mother is doing a social experiment on me. I am the guinea pig and the guinea pig is submitted to take an exam without the guinea pig’s approval (of course). But prior to this, the guinea pig was made to run on a cartwheel, in the laboratory, to stress the poor subject to do all else but prepare for the exam. The mother has a way of telling the guinea pig to do everything she wants. The guinea pig can only whimper.
I so hate the board exam, I so hate it I just want to get more drunk than I am now. What I am now is terrible. I think it’s going to rain tomorrow.
Nakatsu, my man-wish, is missing in this picture. Can someone tell me where he is? (Click photo for larger image)
My New York Times e-line subscription has been biting virtual dusts ever since, but over the last weeks, with the absence of cable television, reading e-NYTs have become a preoccupation. The sudden penchant for e-NYTs was bore out of my interest with the on-going melt-down of the US economy, largely because I am a fan of US (blame pop culture, not imperialism), but more importantly because I want to track down the domino effect this event will provoke on other states including my poor country.
And truth to tell, a melt-down is a melt-down. Think
The
But going back to the imperialism US Economy nose-dive, I learned from one of my bosses that the limbo was instigated by the demise of real estate industry. The
The first question that came to mind was: why the hell did Americans build too many houses when nobody will buy ‘em?
Megalomania is an obsession with doing extravagant or grand things. Not so rare for Americans, eh? Which keeps me thinking: if houses are cheap, then why is nobody buying them? What happened to the consumerist Americans of the Westinghouse days?
In this scenario, the problem answers the question. A lot of factors have brought American economy to its sorry state right now. A close friend who works for an American IT company said that three months ago, 400 Americans were ditched out of their company’s payroll after the company decided to outsource IT yuppies in
What affects
What is cool is if its Jason Castro and David Cook on the finals. FREE TIBET!
