Estranger

if you let me

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.