She was crying, the girl. Six. A torn piece of paper, presumably from arts class, with doodles of houses and clouds and flowers and gangly stick figures at one hand, and her mom’s hand on the other. Disappointment. Of how something she’d probably spent hours poring over has gone to waste.
I was sitting across them on the jeepney ride to school. Words of comfort. “It’s alright,” her mother said when the tears came uncontrollably. At one point, she squeezed her hands tightly.
As fate would have it, we dropped off at the same point, near the conspicuous pizza joint at the corner of where the jeepneys stopped to have their numbers marked as to which driver would take passengers back next. Somehow, they went the same way as I did, and, well, pretty much unsurprisingly, the girl was still very much distracted when we were walking down the sidewalk.
“Sige, halika,” the mother said, as we passed by a convenience store. Me, somehow drawn to the whole thing, felt I was rather part of the story now, and followed them inside. It was just eleven, after all, and my classes didn’t start until one.
With the younger one’s hand still held tightly to her own, the mother took a bag of cookies from the shelf, walked a short ways to the counter and paid. She then turned to the little girl, still crying and all, and with all the sweetness and patience she could muster, said “eto cookies mo; wag ka na umiyak ah.” She knelt down, wiped the tears from her face, and drew the little girl for a heartfelt hug. And in that very instant, the girl stopped crying.
I was moved.
I came from a retreat a couple of weeks back, and my mind has been floating around more than usual. There’s always that little big something due tomorrow, a lab report waiting to be finished, a couple of pages worth of lecture notes waiting to be studied. Admittedly, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this now, the pressures associated with college life – or with being finally branded an adult, even – has gotten me a little bit under the weather.
Truth be told, there’s been a lot of points in this very short twenty-summat days of college where I simply wanted to scream. You know, let it all out, until my throat hurts and my voice gets raspy when I talk. But being where we are right now dictates that you have to keep it in. Hold back your tears, they say, and smile as if nothing’s happened.
Let’s face it. When you were a kid, you could do everything, say everything. Say anything you feel, get mad, get happy, laugh a lot, cry a lot with fear of little to no consequence, knowing that tomorrow, everything will definitely be alright when the one who was teasing you yesterday asks you for a piece of biscuit at recess.
Things have definitely gotten more complicated now. Things you say today may have an impact even long after you’ve long been assured things wouldn’t change. Obviously, they have, and who knows, really? The probably still will.
I guess we’ve always been shaky since day one. Priorities – there’s that rotten word, again – meant that what holds true now may not be the same tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that. Or the week after that. We become more mindful of what needs to be set straight. Responsibilities, deadlines, whatever. It’s a consequence of how much we’ve grown, or rather, how much we’ve aged. And people, well, they tend to drift apart just because of that.
And being where you are? Well, there’s no one to comfort you anymore, nobody older to look after you, no one to squeeze your hand and say everything’s going to be alright, but your own self. Not that you don’t have choices – of course, you do. But when the choices are either to implode, move away, let go or keeping insisting on a lost cause, it’s not really that easy to decide. Bad feelings, no matter how much you wish they would, don’t go away with a cookie cure anymore.
Obviously, I miss being a kid sometimes.
Freesia
October 31, 2009 by Dexter
Picture courtesy of louisa_catlover
It is with you,
Ever patient,
Faithful and enduring,
Waiting springs to come to bloom;
And I,
Impatient,
Insistent and
In love as I am
Budging against uncertainties
Cutting loose.
Or at least,
We used to.
For what we are, I guess,
Is the product of a choice,
Of time,
Of fate,
And of compromise.
For what ever, indeed,
In the world could make
An angel
In the humble semblance of a flower no less,
Leave the mighty lofts of heaven
To surrender everything
Once grand and beauteous and soft
For a life with a mere mortal like me?
In the arms of someone
Unworthy as me?
For it is
With your selfsame devotion
To share a happiness beyond any,
Against a life carried away
By the promptings of a Fate
Playing deviously
A game of puppetry?
There is no less
For jealous, as he is
In his sky discerns,
The eyes of Fate,
All that we are.
And it is none other
Than a war we’ve waged
Just for a love
That’s taken center stage,
As I put into verses
All that you are,
And all that you mean to me.
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