seasons of rain

(an excerpt from my real paper journal, with some additions)

 

December 7, 2005

3:30 PM, My Room

 

perhaps this is an inordinately long break i’m taking from answering my scholarship forms. but look at this gray rain! and i suddenly miss the earthy music and dancing. even just tapping my fingers on my bamboo flute stirs up something in me.

 

it must be partly my cold, too, that as usual makes what is essential in this world more stark to my senses. whatever it is, i have totally forgotten my “real” life. i’m dreaming again, the way i always do when i’m under my acacia tree.

 

all i can think of is the smell of the rain, and how i used to sit up in bed, too, in Davao, in this same half-light, on days when only the rain mattered.

 

i suppose growing up had something to do with the loss of those rainy days. i’ve had to think of other people, how they need me, how i should be making myself available to them. selfishness has always been one of my great flaws.

 

but right now i miss my selfish self that lived in a glass bubble. i was totally oblivious to who was outside, and what they were thinking, and because of that, they didn’t need me quite so much (i don’t know if i made any enemies that way. as far as i was concerned, my friends liked me). for them, at best, i was “lost”. in a haze, they said.

 

of course, that also meant i didn’t know what to do in the company of strangers. i’d be helplessly frozen inside when meeting people’s parents, or normal people my age...that sort of stuff. i’d only eventually warm up to people who had the patience to get me to talk, and who i unconsciously knew had a weird streak, too, because we could talk about other things. not-usual things.

 

though i don’t regret being “in the world” now (after all, i spent years after college consciously trying to live in the “real world”, awkward as i must have been. and now ana says i’m still strange. so much for the attempt to be normal.), because it allows me to experience other people more fully, instead of just seeing them as flat characters in my life, i miss being able to become completely lost in rainy days.

 

now people in the neighborhood (whose names i still don’t know, at least) call out to me and tell me to bring an umbrella. and i actually hear them.

 

PS i think ashley got my cold when i gave her a bath last night, because she’s sneezing now, too =P and yahoo! last night i think i finally succeeded in teaching her to drink milk from a dish instead of from a dropper! =D

 

PPS this is ashley on her last night at home. little did i know shed be kicked out the next day =( see how she fills up the basket now? =)