Coulrophobia

11.22 pm

sometimes I think I need to learn how to feel tired of all the oddly-timed phone calls and cyclic conversations and riddles and expectations. I need to get sick of rehashing every stupid goddamn thing that happened with you. I should be sick and tired by this time. but the dreams and songs and tastes and visions come, and barely go. “as if everything that exists were little boats that sail towards those isles of yours that wait for me.” 

well now.

pwede naman ako matuto. 

I guess I am a storyteller in the very inside of my heart. 

The skies are clear today. It’s strange. I’m used to having rain this time of the year—I thought that from the very beginning, I am a child of the rain. Automatically, I think of how strange this year has been, and will be. 

It’s strange that today has to be a Monday. Everybody is busy, but they find the time to remind me that today, I am a little older. Happy quarterlife crisis. It’s going to be a tough year—the past burrows on the chip on your shoulder ever deeper, and you have a tonne of things to prove. Exams to pass, papers to fix, people to woo, jobs to do, patients to heal. Here, have some cake and a bit of chicken. I prefer stories over carbohydrates, and because it’s my birthday, people indulge me with more secrets—less smoke, more mirrors. I smile and spread my shoulders and hands open. 

Thank you to everyone. Thank you for sharing yourselves with me this sunny Monday. I don’t know what I’d do if I only had myself to listen to. 

I lie on my bed and listen to Sweet Disposition, and imagine myself melting into the circular patterns of my bed sheets. I think of truths that I have to deal with now. And I realise that everything moves in circles, and everything that ends comes back to the beginning.

Today, I am twenty-five years old.