Katipunan.

It was past eight in the dark and the sidewalk crowd rushed against me. I was trying to be careful not to drop the chocolate sundae I bought from Mini Stop and the people were making an effort to be careful too, this time to make sure they make it on the LRT immediately. Sometimes it feels like the world is conniving, that it's time to go home. So I did. And I hate to cross the street. Really. Vehicles just wouldn't bother; they don't see anything anyway.

The jeepney terminal was death in silence. I dug out seven peso coins from my back pocket, where I usually just drop coins and other small stuff. Then as I enter I realized that there weren't that much people at all. There were just five of us in the inert vehicle. I sat on the corner by the exit, which was my favorite spot since I don't have to bother myself attempting to reach the handles above and I can rest my back either on the sides or where it normally should be. The others were normally sitting, quite impatiently waiting for the jeep to go off, except for one who was lying down on the far end. It seems like he's no passenger at all. As usual I was minding my own business again. I finished helping myself with that damn chocolate sundae, which was rapidly dripping, faster than I could eat it. And while eating it I had to move up my glasses back in place again for a lot of times. As I keep the tissue in my pocket, someone called me and sat beside me. "Oh hey," I said back, "Where're you heading?"

It was that girl who always sat in front of me in Spanish 11 when I was in first year, second semester. She was the girl I had a crush on and I humiliated myself on that year's Valentine's Day confessing my love to her. As I think of it now, it was rather the stupidest mistake I ever made.

"I don't know," she replied, "I just feel like riding anywhere." She smiled at me. I didn't know what she was really up to, but it was indeed strange. "Cool," I said. Then I bowed my head and looked down. I noticed that she wasn't moving away her head from looking at me. It has been three years, and now, as I was thinking in my head, is she trying to seduce me? I felt her touching my chin, then I slightly shivered. I looked back at her. "What is it?" I asked. She just smiled. What was that? I wasn't raised to interpret her body language. It sure was strange. "How about I sleep over at your place tonight?" she asked. "That can't be," I said, "I'm a dormer." "Then stay over at my place then," she said with another smile. I could not understand. What was she up to, really? Seeing that I was drowned in my deepest thoughts again, she uttered some more. "Come on, stay over," she said, "Because I feel too lonely."

With her words I felt the same loneliness that she was talking about. After she released those meaningful sounds that my mind interpreted as 'because I feel too lonely,' I answered her, "For how long do you want me to stay over?" and she replied, "As long as you wanted to." The engine started since the seats were already filled, and she and I just looked at each other in the dim lights of the interior as the jeepney cruised the avenue. "Then for how long will you keep staring at me in the face?" I asked, somehow being naughty, but I never expected her reply: "Forever." I felt my eyes grew large a bit as she said that word. It felt like a joke, but then it felt like a trick, a trap, something weird, something bad.

I moved my stare away from her. She moved her hand over mine. I didn't know what to do. So I just smiled. I made sure she saw that. She placed her other hand over my glasses to remove it. "Carefully, please," I said. "You look better that way," she commented. "What are you up to?" I asked her. But she did not listen. Instead, she moved her head back and looked outside the window. The breeze sweeps her straight soft hair towards me. "We're here," she said as she slightly raised her hip to pull down the string that will stop the vehicle.

"What are you exactly doing?" I asked, somehow pissed off by this lovely strangeness of her pulling me up the blue Ateneo footbridge and doing all the other things tonight on me. But still I made sure to create an impression that I was already angry. I noticed that she clenched my eyeglasses a little bit harder. I noticed that she was also a bit taller than me too, which made it a lot weirder when she held my face with her both hands. Then she kissed me. Then she moved back. "You're blushing too much," she said. I should have known, I'm almost white-skinned and I get drunk red so easily. But I got so carried away that I haven't felt the blood rushing rapidly within me. I took hold of her jaw and kissed her again. It felt like time stopped and for a while I thought I lost my hearing. I had not realized that she accidentally dropped my eyeglasses, because, at that time, that kiss was what only mattered.

She pushed my head back, and apologized. "You can go home now," she told me, as she picked my eyeglasses from the cement floor, and fortunately it was not broken. "But why this all of a sudden?" I asked, as I wore the glasses again.. She said that she'll walk me home. "What about you?" I said. She just looked at me for a while. "What are you thinking?" I asked again. I didn't mind asking another question after an unanswered one. "You don't want to know that," she said. "Why do you want me to stay with you?" I asked, once more. By the way she looked it seemed to be inexplicable. "Remember the time you told me you love me?" she asked me. "Yeah, of course," I replied, "You practically humiliated me in the face of the whole CAL lobby." She looked at me again, straight into my eyes. I somehow felt a strange kind of attachment to her whenever we look at each other. It was different, peculiar. It was - "wanted you since then," - wait a minute. "What? What did you just say?" I said, because I haven't heard what she fully said. She said she wanted me. For real? "I said, I wanted you since then," she repeated, "but we haven't seen each other in a long while so I somehow forgot about it myself." I felt my blood rushing again all over my body. She is one too peculiar.

As she spoke to me those words I felt her loneliness again. I realized that I was also lonely all this time, and by being together maybe we could fight it off. I held her hand and we sat in the middle of the footbridge, and gazed at the sky, at the road, at each other. Everything seemed to be silent. And this silence had been the best of all.

*Because it wasn't included in Salidsid, the Sinag-CSSP literary folio, I can now post this entry freely. :)

Ignorance and Displacement.

It's odd and annoying at the same time.

It feels like the world is in a conspiracy.

I again for some thought do not know who my real friends are, who they could be, and why they just don't seem so.

I don't know why friends should be called friends when they just disappear at times you need them, dump you after they used you, leave you hanging without a clue. I don't know how friends can take that but hell, I'm too tired of listening to others without anyone listening to me. I'm tired of attitudes, egos, pride. I wanna vomit all the lies they have to make just not to make it look bad but still I know what a lie it was and how awful they really are. I'm sick of self-appraisal, false cares, irrational thinking, superrational thinking, indestructible worldviews, closed-mindedness.

[My. Shut the mouths of those nerds! Irritating.]

I wouldn't want to care anymore.

Getting it all back.

Finally, it's March. The past few months were abusively spent on almost sleepless weeks of horrible tasks and studying. I lost time for myself. Rather, it was a struggle for survival, not necessarily for me, but for accomplishing responsibilities and maintaining a desirable academic grade. I kinda lost time for my own self, my own interests, and the things that really pleases me. I was busy facing the laptop screen creating publicity materials and identification cards, kept myself in my room (which is better as I found out) rewriting notes and highlighting my Economics book, drowning myself in a rush of thoughts and battle of concepts, attending org activities, occasionally cutting classes, little visits to the library, walking here and there, shouting at friends, getting irritated by everyone's attitudes, panicking from time to time, rushing every work to be done, stealing few hours for sleep (and in class too), and eating and spending too much. Even eating and sleeping aren't leisure stuff anymore. They became tasks to be done for survival. Everything I did then was all for survival. Leisure seemed to be too expensive: I cannot afford it, along with the lineup of tasks that await me.

There floated in front of me a high opportunity cost of substituting work for leisure. Risks await me for every action that I do. It's like taking a journey on an upward-sloping (supply curve?) pavement filled with vines that would easily trap me and make me immobile. Assessing myself, I seem to be vulnerable to all pressures, yet I seem to be strong enough to outlive them.

Damn. A lot of challenges have already passed and a lot more are coming in. But I want to get a grip of my life first. I should steer, not row!