Second Day of Medication
It’s horrifying fact that I wake up to an empty house today. I can make out the discordant implements of this house’s humanly existence on my un-creaking bed, that is, it does not yield to every move akin to a waterbed or folding one with nicely crisscrossing fibers. The bed has the therapeutic benefit in inducing pain on my back, which I take as a form of exercise and/or mortification.
It’s horrifying in two respects. One, I’m afraid of desertion much more when unnoticed, or that falls in between dozing off and coming to from slumber. Once in my childhood, I woke up from the afternoon nap with searing sunbeam on my face. I was alarmed to confirm that the room was empty of people. The last time I heard before drifting to sleep that afternoon, my mother was negotiating the weekly visit to my grandfather’s house in Talisay (years way before becoming a city), where my other siblings lived and were schooled. What if they had left me, alone and naked in the city? Would I share the misfortune of directionless street children scampering onto the roads, escaping to holes whence they came like rodents? Who would feed me Eggnog, the quintessential kindergarten snacks? What would become of me?
It’s dreadful to even think of waking up to a reality that was different than what I had securely left for sleeping, to an unrecognizable dimension where no one wants me and I would take on the world two decades early.
Two, an empty house reminds me of my mom’s last moments. She died trying to lustfully suck in air, an activity we do without so much labor. She now passed on to the next realm, but I wonder what would she be thinking after coming to a strange land where no one wants her and she would take on that world in timeless forever.
Besides, the mirth and warmth of the house have been significantly diminished on her death that sometimes I ask myself if it’s such a sin to make her grow in importance in our lives, or if it’s such a sin to make her less so. Compounding these questions is the inevitably natural thought process of asking, if I sleep tonight would I wake up? Or would members of the family find me cold and still on my un-creaking bed the next morning? Who would I find in His Kingdom?
I move silently to get up from bed. I scan my surroundings and inwardly I laugh at the traces of the commotion that morning. Ballpoint pens and discarded crumpled papers by students rushing to beat deadlines of procrastinated homework, hurried baths, the distinctive scent of body soap on the towels left to dry. The slippers, their dented part for the heel had waters refusing to sublimely disappear in evaporation, are heaped among fellow slippers and mud and the rug. Looking up the second floor of this humble house, my father is snoring with his glasses on and the day-old newspaper an arm-length away.
Smitten by pangs of hunger, I eat my first meal of the day. Cold rice, some fish doused in vinegar, salt, and garlic cubes boiled to cook, and instant miso soup -which, on account of the long story that would eventually transpire and the amount of digression this entry has already committed, I will explain much later.
I puncture the blister pack by a grimy nail. One tablet smells like rusting iron, and seems to waft off a strong metallic whiff whenever I pry it out. More so when I gingerly gobble it, my mouth sends hints of rust off. I wash everything with water, this time from public artesian well right beside a pigsty.
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