SHIFTING GEARS

It feels great to wake up too early in the morning. The house is still as silent as midnight, though one can hear the birds chirp outside, the motorcycles pass by, the housewives talk about their desperate days of survival. Though my head slowly throbs and craves for more sleep (wake up at noon, would you!) I won’t exchange these few minutes of the day when the fucked-up meter is at zero and I don’t have new shame-on-you messages from my mother.

I wake up knowing that today would be as typical as yesterday. But i’m saying it’s never the same as yesterday, although today and yesterday compose the same episode of my life where I lay all day and listen to 70′s music, and exchange messages with my sweetheart. Today had just gotten different when I decided to write another blog post after a million years. And maybe, mom wouldn’t be sending shame-on-you messages to me today. (Not that I care.)

I just remembered that I want to become a published writer finally this year, and that one more month to go and the year is halfway through. No, don’t focus on the noun with an adjective, or the failure of this yet-another-plan-by-Mia. Focus on my will and determination to get somewhere in life apart from my burial ground, that is one thing that never waned in my life. To those who complain that life is just the same old, linear shit, you should know my story — balanced and fair, full of ups and downs, boring days and too real days, dreams crushed and dreams fulfilled, papers graded 5.0 and papers graded 1.0, winning essay pieces and blog posts visitors never read, etc. You get the point. Life is a system of price and reward. There is a bad thing to every good thing that you have in life. So it’s a matter of either being a pessimist, an optimist, or a nihilist.

But back to reality, I still didn’t seek admission to the Institue Of Creative Writing, though it had been my goal for an entire semester. I decided to gamble with Art Studies, as advised by my counsellor, and formally aim at another degree for the fifth time. Kevin has remarked that usually my plans never find fulfillment. For the most part, I have too many plans — not grounded on reality, but on the bliss of making them — and it’s so common for us to dismiss the other good things.

Three years ago, I began writing this blog. I didn’t commit formally and seriously, but still here I go, doing what I’ve always loved — writing. You don’t have to have a writing degree in order to become a writer. In some way, you just find your way to it, or it finds its way to you. The same goes for the plans and dreams we make in life. In the end, we just want fulfillment, nevermind the position we have to execute just to have it. Just having these moments of writing aimlessly, without a general topic, a deadline, an expected grade, I’ve already found my fulfillment. There’s more to writing than being published, or winning a writing award. It’s the joy of the experience with the written word, whether you are the writer or the cunning reader who gains fulfillment through catharisis.

Writing has many forms and faces, but it’s the fucking same activity that makes civilization possible. The same goes with life. Whether you get pregnant somewhere in your seventeenth year and graduate with a little child, or whether you get your University diploma virgin and gay, the graduation ceremony’s still there for the one point: to acknowledge those who chose to find a diploma that’s a key to every door in this world (so the delusional intellectuals say). We’re just drifters whose drift is defined by our sense of morality and reality. What makes us human is our ability to decide to after all, just get fucked (literally and figuratively).

GOING HOME EARLY, OR GOING HOME EARLY IN THE MORNING

Today, I walked in like a stranger to my own home — open and silent, had given up waiting on me. The sun was already high and I had been travelling like a mexican hitch-hiker, wrapped in leather clothes and unseen self pity. Manang had slid the door for me, but she didn’t mean it like that. She meant to come outside while I just happened to be standing in front of the door. She saved me the ego-crashing act of having to knock on the door and begging them to let me in.

I didn’t come home last night despite my mother’s plea, or everybody’s concern. I wasn’t trying anybody’s patience, though yesterday, before I stepped out of the house, I had made up my mind to spend the night at Kevin’s house and pack some extra clothes. Neither was I little by little moving in to his house (I took back my toothbrush with me). We just really wanted to be together and spend the night, without having to be late at the train station and saying painful goodbyes in the midst of the night. But with mother’s begs and pleas in the surge of her text messages, I can only be a parental law-defying teenager, or Law itself, following nothing and on one but herself.

But I couldn’t go home; Kevin was suffering from a throat infection (from all the sweets he had been eating recently) and late in the afternoon, just before dark, he had to wrap himself since he was shivering with fever. Early in the morning I had already noticed his temperature, so I gave myself a little blame for not having given him paracetamol and strepsils before things had gotten worse. And now no one was there but me — to buy his medicine, to dampen his skin, to cook his dinner. I cannot walk alone all the way to the train station; Kevin wouldn’t allow it, as much as I wouldn’t allow him walk all the way back home, alone, burning. If there was a decision best to be made, that was to spend the night with Kevin and care for him, set aside the disdain I’d expect at home.

That was the third night we’d spend together. The first was when I succeeded in pulling up a lie about sleeping at the ladies’ dorm, finishing some project at school. The second was a half-lie about sleeping over at a friend’s house and being too tired to go home. I didn’t pull up a lie this time; I told mother straight that I was at Kevin’s house, nursing him, coming home tomorrow. After that, I ignored the rest of her messages and carried on with the night.

It wasn’t far from the other sleeping moments we had spent, but a little like that night when I was intoxicated by gin bilog and was out of my mind. I remember Kevin holding me close throughout the night and comforting me when the alcohol had gotten me crying. He caressed my back when I vomited at the bathroom. I still slept soundly, only managing to give him medicine at midnight, as I had told his mother. I was terribly upset by his being sick and I shared half his pain. No, I wasn’t finding our situation to be a painful one, of us being broke and helpless teenagers — oh wait, I’m the only teenager — but it was just as painful as it can be. Instead of a starry, shimmery night of chuckles and endless conversation, we were drooped like dead vines. Happiness isn’t all that there is in life, but even if we only had one reason to be happy about, and that was about us being together, I may say I was still happy to be with this sick guy. Dude, he’s like, my guy.

Then I woke up beside him, this guy who was my first thought in every morning, this guy whom I love and share love with, this guy who was the reason why I’m going to be screwed up at home. His face was still as pretty as it can get in front of my eyes, not quite innocent about the world, but are still captivated by the randomness of it. So I asked, “Bakit ba tayo magkasama ngayon?”

He replied, wide-eyed, “Nagtataka ka na ba sa atin?”

“Di naman,” I held him close, “Sa dinami-rami lang ng tao na pwede mong maging katabi ngayon, bakit kaya ako pa, ano?”

At this sweetly senseless question, he nodded off with a little smile, then I tenderly kissed him. I know that I love him, not because of the distance I’m travelling, not because of the hours I’m spending, not because of the part of me I’m willing to give him, but because of the sense of an infinite sanctuary when I’m only with him.

Later in the bathroom, in that one private moment, I inevitably ask myself if I had ever gone too far. Seeing my face in the bathroom mirror of another house, I can only realize being away from home, of being quite far from where I’m supposed to be. I blink at myself and think, “But heck, this isn’t just another house, this is his house, this is my lover’s, of the one I share half of my heart with.”

And just for the sake of mentioning, here is where I meant to be.

Existential Post 596

Right now I’m having a bowl of choco-flavored oats showered with chopped hotdogs and a fresh cup of creamy coffee. =) But since this isn’t a food blog and we don’t have time to go around the bush, let me get straight to today’s story.

Today, I made myself a bowl of oats, and cooking the oats was damned fun.When I got up I asked Manang, “Do we have any rice?” (I still believe in heavy breakfasts, though usually I take brunch or completely skip breakfast and just wake up at eleven.) Manang replied that we only have pandesal, so I made a grunt and grabbed a steel pot and began boiling water for my own food.

Pretty much nothing was going inside my head. So I’ll go to UP tomorrow, meet Kevin, spend the night with him, eat breakfast today, go to church. But just then, in the midst of nothingness, I encountered a random demonstration of Fate and Survival. A few kitchen ants had been racing around the lid of the pot, racing round while the surface temperature rises degree by degree, and their bodies burn.

The stove fire was at its lowest set up, killing the ants as slowly as the heat can, and I thought about the sad fate of these insects while they crawled/ran all over the endless circle. They kept running and running; why can’t they just stop running and face Death? It’s not like going on and on around that stupid circle will save their lives. So I raised the fire of the stove, still considering my oats boiling below, and while the ants ran faster, and I grinned wider. (I’m more masochist than sadist, but hell, watching poor objects run for their lives and controlling their pain is one hell of fun.)

Eventually, due to the extreme surface heat, their tiny bodies crumpled and withered, and died. The insect corpses dashed to the sides of the pot lid, since no more *what do you call insect feet?* will sustain friction due to gravity. Poor ants, they died while amazing me how even the littlest of creatures try to live up to the last second of their life. They died showing me how amusing it is to see how life runs for life, and doesn’t stop going around the endless, senseless circle for as long as it can, for its own sake. But anyhow, these are idiot ants we are talking about, stupid ants who live only for the sake of living. For God’s sake, they don’t even have sex just for the fun of it.

***

Earlier today, from my OMGFacts Twitter feed, I read that the inventor of the flash camera committed suicide because he thought his work was already done. Well maybe the ants still had endless work to do, so they didn’t just sit there and embraced death, without defense. So is life just all about work; is survival just for the sake of surviving your work; what does it mean to work, anyway?

To come and think of Life as a lifetime job is quite amusing and is further insulting: being born, we are employed into a lifetime job that we didn’t choose (that is, to live a life bound by the rules and standards and prejudice of our society), yet we spend our time living in sacrifice, usually in pain and tire, just to keep our job and perform well our roles. And if you were the ant who was conceived just to get working and building a colony, wouldn’t you find Death the ultimate salvation? Wouldn’t you just run away and completely shun guilt, stop living life in other people’s terms, follow your own will and raise your middle finger in the air?

Your reality is your option, man. I’ve chosen mine, when will you?