This morning, I went to the bank  within the University to withdraw my allowance for this week. As I was waiting in line, the guard on duty greeted me and commented, “Mukhang napabayaan ka na sa kusina sa inyo ah noong bakasyon ah” (It looks like you’ve been neglected in your kitchen last Christmas vacation). I grinned. Half-hurt I replied,” Yeah”. “Sabagay, walang masyadong pressure kasi naman talaga sa bahay kesa sa school noh?” (Well, at home there’s not much pressure unlike here in your school).And so later on, I bought a chocolate bar costing two meals and ate away my depression—only to feel guilty afterward. I felt like my guts were crying as I munched on Twix and all its 250 calories yummy goodness.

Other than a bad hair day and unrequited love, a quick way to send a girl crying home and make her feel like crap magnified then thousand times, is to call her fat.  My guy buddy once told me about this difference about pulling off fatty jokes on boys and girls. Most of the time, every girl whom he taunts fat  (including me) ends up pinching him/crying.  Whether the jokes are true, half-meant, or not, for a typical girl who has been bombarded by media with the definition of acceptable as skinniness, being fat is a nightmare. 

In 5^th grade, my as I was starting to enter puberty, my appetite increased. I developed a liking for eating more and thus after a few months, I gained weight and grew chubby cheeks. I have always been skinny since childhood; hence, my relatives were astonished with my growth. I never gave a damn about my increase in appetite until my cousins and my grandmother called me baboy (pig). My relatives had always wanted my figure but now, I was a little larger than my cousins who were of my age. I felt ugly. Other than my weight issues, it was by this time that I started wearing retainers for my crooked teeth.  It wasn’t until I was suffering acne in high school when I found a picture of my 5^th grader self and realized I wasn’t fat back then and that I looked pretty cute with retainers and my emphasized cheeks. (Other than that, fast forward a couple of years after 5^th grade, braces started to become a trend. So much for feeling like a metal-mouth loser in elementary school. )

When I was about to graduate from high school, my relatives once again noticed my “fatness” (I always tend to be larger than my cousins). My grandmother warned me to never go fat and become like my full-figured mother or else I’d look like Dumbledore. But to my shock, when I was already in the university, my friends told me I was so skinny. It was by this time that I started to get confused. Whenever I go home, people called me fat. But when I am in school, people say I’m a skeleton.

Now, every time I look at the girl in the mirror, I see nobody but a reflection of a distorted society telling me who I am, telling me that I am nowhere between the beauty of cover girls and ramp models, telling me that I am no good, telling me that I am horrible, telling me that I do not belong. And that’s when I realized that I shouldn’t be doing this to myself.  I am happy about my body—with flabs and all. I am happy about my assets as well as my quirks. Yes, I am not perfection but this is me, I am a real girl and I have flaws and no matter what anyone will say, I am beautiful in every special way. Society doesn’t have to  dictate what I am because I am who I am.

(Source: gloomysideup)

DECAY

The wallpapers of crimson red patterns of maple leaves were already starting to peel off.  In this tropical city filled with busy honking cars and smog, you can never know if it’s autumn or what. But the wallpapers told me so. It was time again to embrace the sadness and the nearness of another period of gloom.

Once, you told me how overrated and fancy coffees had become these days. still you never failed to meet up with me in this dingy cafe over a cup of latte. Yet, I was too busy flipping pages with a new novel that I’ve bought from a second hand book store nearby. I knew you never like caffeine in your veins. I knew even better how you are disinterested in anything printed with words. So why would you even bother with me? For a second or two, you began tapping your fingers over the wooden table and started to stare at the decaying wallpaper. The air between us that smelled like mocha and my grandma’s home-made cookies, started to get heavy. You twitched. We were decaying like wallpapers.

“ Look, if you don’t want to talk then I might as well have to go..”

“But I like..”

“what?”

“I like the silence between us”

I saw a crease, a slight movement on the side of your lips. It was as if you were trying to hold a smile because it was inappropriate—— like you being here with me.  No, I like you but it’s just that we are starting to lose reasons to stay too close to the point of sacrificing our personal space. Maybe were just too different.  We’ve been trying too hard to pretend that we fit together by fooling ourselves with sweet delusions. And then one day we would just woke up realizing that everything was bland, that from the start, in an overflow of abnormal hormones, there was nothing there but desperation to feel comfort. 

“I have to go to now”

I said nothing as you got up and started to walk out of the door. I flipped another page and drowned myself in a cup of bitter blackness. The wallpapers had peeled off. The cars honked and coughed outside the streets. There was a twinge of emptiness burning inside my guts and yet I did not cry. Sometimes, the only time of relief we would ever have after a series of bruises is just a simple goodbye. 

(Source: gloomysideup)

Everyday, you remind me of how  horrible  I am.

(Source: gloomysideup)

Wires

“Some connections led to confusion,

he’d said. Because I lost track of what I wanted. So were all my ties

meaningless?”

-Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murukami

Recently, my laptop’s charger stopped working. It just passed out after all its wires grew really hot. My Dad said its because of its wiring that’s why before it went to gadget heaven , it suffered a lot of constant soldering, and disecting its inside till its veins we’re clumsily twisted enough to spark or maybe even cause fire. I was never giid at chargers, you see because prior to my laptop’s charger death, my phone’s charger died too.

Wirings are meant to connect the source to enable the output to work. Chargers feeds the battery to make a certain item achieve its function. I’m beginning to think that my bad luck with wires and chargers must be an omen. I sometimes feel like its a mirror to my guts. All my life I had difficulty with establishing and maintaining relationships and not just in a romantic context. On some days I could instantly befriend and hang out with somebody, after awhile I would see them walk away and whine about my dullness and constant awkward silence. I always have a pocketful of good intentions and pure affection for my family, friends and acquaintances but I always seem to fail at expressing it or showing it to them thus, resulting into cold indifference between us. It is as if my wires that connects me to other people had been cut down, stopping me from reaching them and sealing the connection properly. Often times, it would result into ignition that totally burns down my connection with certain people and I would sit there and watch all the past memories I have shared with them crash to the ground and turn into flames and later on, into dark, bitter speck of dust. And no, electrical tapes, nudges, twisting and soldering iron cant connect myself ourselves again. The line had died out and there is no flow of electrical affection anymore.

At times, I find myself awake in the middle of the night, paralyzed and caught up in the deluge of emotions revolving around the feeling of unattachment. I dont understand why but I feel like all my wiring had jumbled up into a big bowl of spaghetti, drenched in blood and gore. It’s that odd, fearful feeling of realizing that I broke of the cycle of human interdependence. As if I am not part of the of this world anymore. As if I am ghastly being that wasn’t meant to exist. There’s an abundance of well kept emotions inside me, those that I failed to send at people across the line due to my bad wirings and all of these stored emotions are eating me up alive. It’s morphing into an internal pandemonium, a biological time bomb inside my flesh and I swear anytime now, my whole system would explode and I don’t know whats beyond that anynmore.

Is this normal? Am I still normal? Am I still alive? Am I just a figment of somebody else’s dark imagination? Am I still part of the cycle?

Tomorrow, I will take a trip to the local electrical repair man and see what he can do to my charger. I am keeping my fingers crossed for him to bring back my baby to life. Perhaps, I should see somebody who could fix my wires too. If I can ever reach whoever that somebody is. Sigh.

(Source: gloomysideup)