We parted like Strangers.

Shorties, Continuation

Installment# 2: We parted like Strangers.

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Someone tapped me and asked if could pass his fare in front. I grasped without hesitation and said, “bayad daw po." Then I mulled of nothing but to clear this thing off my head.

At the end station still, I kept mulling, I headed down the street and floundered each indecisive step. I came across this old sluggard fella’ where we jolted our shoulders. He howled, “Hoy! Tignan mo yung dinadaan mo.” More, he stared at me with a menacing look, snitching his obnoxious mastery. I looked back in disgrace after we parted a block or two. And he was gone like silhouette of a waving slender curtain.

I glamored a billboard to where I usually cross. “Ohh, pinalitan na pala?” I muttered. The billboard seemed to illuminate the plaza where I stride through home. The grinning subject, the resplendent bulbs, and the couples fondling each other on benches only made me crestfallen.

We had been inadvertently like this since then. Discord, narrow-minded, childish acts, we were like magnets repelling akin poles, like parallel lines that will never converge at some point. That‘s when we were at our weakest.

I felt being the fuel which made her atrocious. And to tame the fire, I had to slightly uncoil the lasso bound between us. If only emotions were just child‘s play, then we had been long ago sanctified by wedlock. But taming has gone out on its own way. I, to accept the fact, was never an exceptional tamer. The clashing fire I thought would underrate by spaces turned out to lose its radiance. She was, as it came to my senses, gravely becoming cold.

The numbed morning like the manifold before it. The peculiar thing with this particular day was: an another man.


I looked at her in a distance—distance which never happened to us when we were comfortably close. We were closer than anyone else would know. I tried to break that distance. But it felt like they were constantly far no matter how persistent I tracked them down. I struggled to walk past them yet it seemed I was just a stranger—a stranger just as nothing mattered between us.


“Am I unmistakably a stranger now?”


to be concluded....

Easing Out.

Shorties
Installment# 1: Easing Out.
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She said she love me, I never answered back. 

The cars on the highway were free flashing in speed. The jeepney I was riding to seemed speeding against time. The backseat driver changed the compact disc to a local breaking rhythmic music. And the other passengers were somnolent due to swayed movement made by sudden breaks and approaching crepuscular light. 


Some old folks were becoming agitated believing we might get bumped or hit anything on the road. And I, who used to ride on it everyday couldn't care less. Whilst cuddling my school bag, I brooded over things that bugged me the most after the academic day – I guess, not really. The circumstances I had in mind were fast swirling; every single detail I captured earlier seemed recurring back the way it was and its definition was clearer than before. I am thinking if I could have done the rightful thing, this would not seethe. As if I‘m capable of defying my predestination. 


Simply, I kept thinking the unyielding situation I had and thought of indefinite recourse but I know everything that happened will permanently leave its fissure. Throughout non-occupational moment, I only tired myself thinking, gradually closed my eyes and let myself become one with the slumbering cimmerian shade.

I did not know I fell asleep. I winked my eyes two or three to prove this delusion was not authentic and even blinked more. But the chromatism I see and the metaphors telling my retina contest that everything was true and I just woke up from napping eleven minutes from my seat. 

“Was it a dream?..” I asked myself still enigmatic.

I quieted myself and held back until destination. I checked on my cellphone and rashly hovered to see whose one message that might be. To find out sadly, it was one damn chain message. I knew I was expecting a message from someone. 

To aggravate the conundrum I was enduring, the vehicle where I was sitting for dozens of minutes, got its tire flat at the right front part, in the middle of dusky, bumpy road. The driver who was corpulent, apparent to his big soiled red shirt and bulky breadbasket, went out of his throne and started cussing out words. I would have scoffed at him in the first place for not slowing down. After all there is nothing to speed about. Like relationships that wear out so easily. The more you urge to push the boundaries, the more it gets loose. 


The music turned off, trying to make comfy, the backseat driver said that everything will be alright. They have a spare and this is just a trifle hitch to handle. The cold drowsy night shifted into fierce, scorching mood by fellow passengers. “Witty,” I said to myself, “How auspicious we glued ourselves with such inconvenience.” To think it was my bad day. As minutes frittering away, other passengers becoming smothered, on the spur of moment, a typical light afar from us was drawing near. “Am I dreaming again?” I boldly asked. Now I could visualize and hear a truck horning, constantly coming but not pulling over. I could not think but to bawl, “get out!” until the raging vehicle crushed us.


to be continued....

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Minsan

ganun siguro talaga kapag nagmamahal,

masasaktan ka muna para matuto ka.

May mga taong iiwan at lolokohin ka para makita mo yung para talaga sayo.

Pero dadating ka dun sa punto na pag nakabangon ka,

marerealize mo kung bakit hindi ka para sa kanya

at para ka talaga sa iba.