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.
20 something, quarter-life crisis, loss of love, name it, nothing's weird.
