Time to Say Goodbye

I've peaked in college. Since I graduated, that's how it felt.

The last time I wrote for this blog, I was 20 years old. I was an intern for Malaya Business Insight, a broadsheet with an intellectual reader base in Metro Manila. I was naive, but I was hustling.

I remember the way the sun reflected on the white Supreme Court paint; the bustling sounds of the cameramen and reporters outside the press room. The writers were all shut inside their cubicles unless they had to conduct an interview.

It was the pork barrel era. Leila De Lima was in hot water because the investigation of Janet Napoles rested squarely on the shoulders of the Department of Justice. Today, we're facing a similar crisis, only exponentially worse.

I didn't know what I was doing with my life. I was concerned with so many unnecessary things, like expensive headphones, Reebok shoes -- toys that I thought were expensive enough to make into a dream. Those were the days.

Like A Foreword

I crash-landed into my early twenties. I had a chip on my shoulder and so much angst against the world.

My family and I lived in a shoebox, fresh from getting kicked out of my father's home church, where he returned to a couple of decades later after living in QC, to a rude awakening. He had some theological differences with the pastor who served as its caretaker, and they had clashing management styles. So like the Israelites out of Egypt, we were cast out from a house of bondage into the world of homelessness.

We lived in a tent for a year, and after we scrounged up enough money, rented a small apartment of about 20 sq. meters on the far side of the city. We were sandwiched between two other units and the only windows led out to a front porch that was sealed in by another door. The summers were absolutely brutal.

I would wake up too early in the morning in a pool of my own sweat. I would pull out some of my clothes from the dresser and they would feel freshly ironed. Even in the middle of the night when God turned down the thermostat, the atmosphere there felt solely like the heat of hell.

I couldn't invite my friends over because my parents were unwelcoming of "unbelievers," and I had a strong sense they didn't want me to meet anyone. And not that it mattered anyway, the house was so hot that my friends wouldn't last an hour with a gun to their heads.

The Worst and the Best

My girlfriend left me for another guy. I didn't qualify for the course I really wanted. I was an outcast at home, in a city where I really didn't know anyone.

My life was miserable. But it was also the best.

College was my escape. I remember looking into the Pasig river from an unnamed floor in our main building, thinking I was finally free. My professor was late for IT class and I was secretly hoping to get a chance encounter with my then-girlfriend, who studied IT. When he arrived, I got one of my earliest tastes of how rambunctious my classmates can be when you make them wait for half an hour in a poorly ventilated hallway.

I met the most loveable bunch of misfits on God's green Earth and I had so many adventures with them. I joined a pageant, and for the first time in my unremarkable life, I drowned in the screams and applause of people, just for showing up. I got good grades for next to no effort, and I was popular in my college.

Pathetic, I know, how I'm reminiscing on these things now, but the length of the quarantine can make people do strange things. Just last month, I signed up for a transcription job, and I hate transcription with a passion! It's a shame that school is out. This can make for a hundred thesis topics for mass comm students.

Take Me Back

Back then, life was so simple. I would go to school, meet my friends, flirt with a few girls, and then study when I had the time. After class, we would go to a nearby mall and play video games.

There was a time when we were assigned to make a magazine about Divisoria, and we spent nearly all week just playing Tekken and occasionally taking pictures.

I didn't live a life in high school, I was a certified shut-in. In college, I was crossing three-meter-high floods in Bulacan for a case study, spending a night in a three-star hotel because we interviewed an architect in the middle of a storm, and made up any excuse just to go see each other in our hometowns.

Outside their windows, their gates, and driveways, we would all stand like a perfect before picture, waiting to be snapped in. We'd get some work done, or so we like to pretend. No one smoked, no one had a drinking problem, and the worst anyone carried in terms of psychological damage was a broken heart.

Today, life is a slog and the future is black. We're all struggling to find the next step and figuring out if it's even worth it. To all the people whose life matches the veneer of positivity they put on Instagram, Facebook, and their little vlogs on YouTube, I tip my hat to you.

Right now, most of us are just trying to cope. Our job prospects have either been put on hold or disappeared completely. Some have even lost their current jobs by the action of the government.

A Sunken Place

So many of my peers have developed self-destructive habits. Some smoke, engage in indiscriminate sex, and some have become so unsatisfied with their lives that they have to constantly lie about it. There are some people that I haven't heard from in years, and I can only see their once-happy faces in my memory.

I'm sure there's a smart way to find happiness in the world we live in now, but today, I just can't find it. Maybe tomorrow I'll be lucky. If not, then maybe the day after that.

I just have to find better ways to cope.

A part of my soul will always be wandering the streets of Luneta, with the memory of friends when we went there. A part will always linger in the Port Area, in Intramuros, in the boundary between Rizal and Antipolo through the Valley Golf subdivision. 

These places are only important to me now because of the feelings they hold. It's of a lost yesterday, a paradoxically happy and miserable time in my life when I didn't know who I was but glad to be myself. It's heaven and the Sunken Place, all rolled up in one.

Goodbye

The world is no place for dreamers, and it clearly isn't a place for the sentimental. Before it makes me into someone I wouldn't recognize from the time I was truly alive, I just wanted to give these things one last pass. It's time to say goodbye.