Six and a Half Years Ago ...

Whenever I hear this song or see the video, I see my first few days alone in the dorm, June 2005. I remember the awful feeling of being left completely alone as my parents said goodbye and closed the dorm's door. I was alone, several miles from home. Feeling sad then was rather odd, considering I had been looking forward to a taste of independence, whatever that meant. I wondered what my classmates would be like. I felt scared. I hadn't expected to make it this far. Only six months earlier, I had been wondering if I would live to see college.


I remember sitting on the newly waxed floor of my dorm bedroom, listening to the noises outside. Even as I looked into the afternoon light from the window, all I saw was a gaping void, pretty much like an empty page nobody could ever fill.


My iPod Shuffle was becoming faulty, but I didn't mind. I listened to this song to give myself hope that maybe something was here for me. I was going to do what I want. Perhaps what made this song special is because it somehow gave me hope - that somehow, if I held on, I just might get what I've always wanted. And I did. I learned again what it was like to be happy and to see others happy because you are happy. For the first time in 17 years, I felt real companionship, to have others love me and respect me and never look at my cankles and funny gait and wonder if I'm not quite normal.


I listen to this song now, and I feel hot around the ears. I feel the heavy air in the University Belt and see the chaotic roads with its drivers and fare collectors calling for nervoous students that have become heedless of the smog and muck staining their pressed uniforms brown by the pre-semestral exams. I remember dodging pesky beggar kids who think they can demand for money or a meal when my tuition takes several years of my parents' jobs. I remember entering the UST Museum and feel like I'm in Heaven.

I remember racing for the LRT on the way to Buendia's Batangas-bound buses and back. The air was hot and humid even at twilight. Yet I enjoyed watching people pass by the train. I remember wondering what they are like - what they do, what they love, what they live for. There are so many people in such a big city, and plenty more in the surrounding provinces. Yet nearly all of them are insignificant to me; and I knew I was insignificant to nearly all of them, too. They look at me having no idea that I spoke and sang at the age of two and recited numbers 1-10 in English, Tagalog, and Spanish. They look at me not knowing I was member of my school's Gifted and Talented Educational Program where I skipped a lot of sessions out of sheer lack of motivation because of constant bullying.

Yet I still found joy in reading poems posted on the LRT's interiors and at the same time sorrow and guilt and frustration that I missed out on a lot of opportunities. I write well, but I write mediocre poetry; I attempt at sonnets never knowing how good I am. My prose is good, obviously; my fiction is even better. Call me a megalomaniac frustrated poet, but even now, I feel like I could have done better. Yet I know that being 'the best I can be' was virtually impossible under the circumstances, considering my personality and all I've been through.

But even through all that, I look back in wonder and think, wow! It's been six years since? Almost seven? This was what I hadn't imagined before: that I would still be alive and actually happy.

I look at my writing and tell myself I have so much to offer. Then, I listen to Stonefree's "Sayang" and convince myself that yes, my life is too good to waste.