beach house

Crazed is a sense of being.

“You have to endure. If you endure, everything will be fine. No worry, no suffering. It all disappears. Forget about the shadow. This is the End of the World. This is where the world ends. Nowhere further to go.”

The End of the World. Not a simple concept. How to tell when life ends and another begins? Or when life begins and then ends? Especially when one is still alive. In a dredge of monotony then, when repetition takes over and life assumes itself. I could be hovering about the End then.

Dreams, dreams, dreams. Not since the existence of C have I come across such vivid dreams that fill my mind. Experiences past, gone, dreams woven out of vividness. Hard to tell when reality ends and dreams begin.

Some memories are coated with a layer of dust. Some things I’d rather not look back on, coated with dust, swept under the carpet.

You were there. Infused into the air. Vestiges of another time and place, imprinted across me as I ate in the spaghetti house. I looked across, looking, not watching. And saw you there.

*****

Shuffle slowly, flip-flops on wooden floor. Grainy scratches of sand scattered randomly between floorboards. Trying to pick up some grains of rice and then watching the grains get wedged between wooden floorboards. Fingernails to try to pry them out and then, giving up.

The skirt I once wore to dinner. Bohemian, sequined on the base, rumpled, crumpled. You can’t wear a rumpled skirt with an equally rumpled top. Laughs, pauses. We laugh at those we scorn, whom we do not understand.

A pull, a sharp muscle pull. Pain shoots up her back and she winces. Tries to get up. Looks up, and for the first time, notices dust captured against the sunlight. Forgetting the pain for the moment. Captivated by the dust floating as in captured in space and time. Noticing for a moment how the sunlight enters the windows in streaks. Clutching the side of the table. Getting a splinter in her fingers. The pain gets better. It eased off. She sat down for a while and looked around in wonder – how was it that she failed to really see what was in front of her? A year had passed, she spent her mornings in the kitchen, everyday. How was it that she failed to notice the tree outside the window, already spanning the height of the window? When she first came, it had been nothing more than a sapling.

Nothing in particular had driven her here. Work was going fine and her superiors were warm and supportive. Nothing more that she could have asked for in a company. The work was sometimes mundane. You met with the occasional horrible clients. Not much of a push factor. Yet in all that, it wasn’t all what she was cut out to do. She knew it in the joylessness of the day. The way the day could drag on at times. Scouring the house on Sunday evenings, trying to find scraps of things that perhaps could trigger something in her. Going for long runs from one neighbourhood to another. The yellow pills she had to take before she could fall asleep. The doctor was accustomed to her lies and she was sure if he had not been her family doctor for such a long time, there would be no way in which he would offer her a packet of them each time she feigned illness. Unconvincingly.

The nightmares were gone now. Not nightly. No more waking up drenched in sweat. No more the same feeling of helpless that engulfed her whenever she was alone in the passenger seat of a car. Sometimes if she convinced herself hard enough, it just seemed like a bad dream. Like some memories that were invented. She looked back on other more tangible memories and tried to simplify them as dreams too. But it obviously wasn’t doing any good. Sometimes, she convinced herself that it was all a dream, her parents, her apartment, her job, her car. Just one big dream that she could wake up from. And then that sense of helplessness again. Engulfing her. Pills to sleep then.

They were all push factors. And nothing really, to make her stay. A trip to an island of one of the neighbouring countries. Airfares were cheap since there had been two air crashes in the year ago alone. Budget terminals and tired, lost looking souls. A wry smile that crossed her face as she remembered Clark airport in Angeles. The flight had been delayed after she had rushed there from Manila. How there had been no taxis in Angeles and she had momentarily panicked, then took a jeepney for an exorbitant price. Cheap coffee dispensed from vending machines. The thin and acrid taste of instant coffee. Nothing to look back on, just a novel and her clothes thrown together in an instant. Tops and shorts. Jeans. Sundresses. A swimsuit. Sunblock lotion. A cap. Pills. How strange it was that she had forgotten to take her mobile phone along. Or perhaps it was an intentional move.

She stayed at the second floor of a tiny hotel located along the popular beach. There was no air-conditioning but she hardly cared. Two books. One typical romance novel by Luanne Rice. The other by Kazuo Ishiguro. Dogged eared. She had stopped taking care of her books a long time ago. Since the end of her first real relationship. Everything was transient, therefore, there was no need to prepare much for the future. This probably contributed largely to her view on life. And the mini crisis she was facing now.

Flying up in the air, she had hardly though about anything at all. She wasn’t in shock like most victims were. It was merely a resignation – an awareness that whatever could happen, would probably happen. And she didn’t really care what it was. He had been concentrating on reading and the car had sped round the corner, past parked cars, which had probably obscured the driver’s view of them. She had contemplated whether to push his shoulders or waist for maximum effect and then had just thrown her palms against his waist with all her might. She felt a thin film of sweat, saw sweat staining the red fabric a darker shade, and then felt the car hit her. The last thing she saw of him was him turning around in surprise and then she spun upwards in the air. She didn’t even realise that she had fallen until her head hit the front bonnet of the car with a sickening crunch. Then rolling over the bonnet, hitting the ground arm first.

Surprisingly, her arm wasn’t broken, just sprained. She was told she had been very lucky. What was all the luck for? If Death had come, it would have been silently accepted. That proverbial man in the black coat, waiting to capture souls.

She was told she had been in a coma for a week. A bandaged head, an oxygen mask. Looking back, she envisioned herself in the hospital like what was shown almost everyday on television. The thought was almost comical.