Estranger

if you let me

I watched this movie Jeux d' Enfants (which has an English title of 'Love Me If You Dare') over a week ago but it still lingers in my head. It stars Marion Cotillard and her long-time real-life boyfriend, Guillaume Canet.

He laughs like that, He sings like that, He stares like that, He talks like that...because He is a Greek god.

He is Apollo, Eros, Dionysus. He is Casey James.

It is incredibly uncomfortable to be “too conscious” of the fact that whatever decisions one will have to make in the present will have huge, direct implications for the not-too-far-away future.

The forty-five minute travel for work during mornings always has the feeling that one can get something from things one sees in the streets. It is the consolation for the eight hours of shrinking the senses for the rest of the day.

Most of the time, I, for one, will just notice how bright it is. The sun is just heart-breakingly warm of dreams—always reminding that there is content in merely seeing bright days.

For someone like me who has a degree in Creative Writing and has hopes that someday, perhaps, when I can have the luxury of time (“without despair”), I will have a long pause so I can collect the flotsam and jetsam and write. What are the odds? Creative writing is a grandiose thing to do in a third-world country. Impractical, I must say. Impractical for me to take “too seriously” now. Someday, I know, I will indulge in the grand and I will not have the concept of practicality because I tossed it out my window.

And for someone like me who is working for five months now in a sprouting outsourcing company in Davao City, who knows that I have a job description as a web content writer, but more often, I create links and post “ready-made” articles for website promotion—it is just a daily gift from the universe that I can ponder on stories, characters and images in jeepney rides. Sometimes, thank God, I am made to WRITE articles on stress, Meniere’s disease and tinnitus. Sometimes I spin articles on online casino gambling.

I don’t mind, as long as I can say I’m a web content writer because that’s what they wrote in my pay slip.

All is fleeting. This is why everything is permitted.

I am planning to go to a law school next school year. I have taken enough time to finally do something for people’s expectations. I am grateful that I have choices because some, who might have the same circumstances as mine, do not.

“In my own pace,” I told my parents.

And yes, in my own pace.

I have been very fond of weekends since I started working. I never thought how it feels so good to just wallow in my bed all day on a Saturday. Suprisingly, I would rather stay home than loiter around.

To an extent, I refuse to wash my clothes even on a Sunday. Until I realize, I have no clothes to wear for work this week. And so, late tonight I decide to wash, at least, five shirts.

I have a habit of watching news when I'm washing my clothes. I think, that's the only time I intently turn on the t.v for news. I am not a news person since the "Hello Garci" and ZTE scam. Philippine politics dishearten me big time! They eat up the news like cancer.

This time, the news is different. Philippine television is flooded. Literally--Manila area is flooded by Bagyong Ondoy. With deaths, and hundreds of people gone missing--what does someone like me has to do? It just makes me think. My worry does not help a single person stranded in some roof, waiting to be rescued.

I shut off the t.v and continued hand washing my clothes as if they can illuminate the entire world with bubbles. Like the man in the photo (taken by a friend using his camera phone when he was travelling through Katipunan, Quezon City), we all need to walk through life even if that meant ushering through what should have been taking us to places (like the motorcycle).

From one of my favorite authors, I like to quote: "

"Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights. We're played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own." -Annie Dillard