Offkey
Friday, July 6
After 18 years of having to stomach living with myself, it's irritating yet honestly amusing to find out there's still a handful of things I don't know about myself. There was that sadness (along with guilty relief) during that "moment of truth" when I realized I was allergic to beer (or anything even mildly alcoholic for that matter), and then today I "discovered" a new muscle in the back of my head, that allows me to twitch my ears to beat of a tune. It was friggin cool at first, until I lost control and my ears were jerking at the slightest movement of my head, and then it spread down to my mouth, were a thin strand of muscle in my neck went into convulsive spasms, making my lower lip twitch almost uncontrollably.
But what really surprised me today was the fact that I was able to last through the day with just some coins and bills barely amounting to a hundred pesos. The grogginess and sullenness took over my early morning rituals and made me forget about my can of cold coffee and my budget for the day. I only realized that I forgot to take the money from my drawer by noon, and I only had a few coins roughly worth 30 pesos after taking my lunch. Although it only takes a short 7 pesos jeep ride to get back to my boarding house, I felt queasy as I'm not used to having, or rather, not having at least 200 pesos in my wallet. (Now, I'm no rich fat ass brat, it's just something I've hardwired to my brain ever since high school. During those times, I had to commute everyday from Cavite to Manila and vice versa, so it was only perfectly sensible to keep a decent amount of cash handy since I'm a few hundred miles away from home. And now that I'm in college, I almost always make it a point to have at least 500 pesos in my wallet just in case an emergency pops up or on the rare occasion that I feel a loose grip on money.)
And it was during those moments that thoughts of sickly beggars and the demented "taong grasa" began to playfully swirl in my mind creating a concoction of a fear, amusement, and delirium, and gradually forming an elaborate plot of a whimsical future-past: My bag gets slashed at the exact spot where my coins are kept, then I run after the thief to bash his head open, only to lose him in the chase and I find myself in a distant and unknown public plaza filled with the homeless. I fumble my pockets to phone my father but the phone is no longer there, only a big hole down the end of the pocket. I pull my hand out and gasp in surprise to see it scarred and marred with dirt and sweat. In a puddle I see my reflection, I have long unkempt hair, a beard, and a moustache, and I've aged years."
I've always wondered about beggars, about their past and origins, and on how they've fallen through the cracks in our society. They, after all are part of that big 75% of our national population who live in poverty, and they probably have been living like that for over a decade. And yet, nobody has really done anything about it.... including me.
thrown by A.Paul @ 19:25,
