antecoitus

I always thought I was lucky, I always thought that I was born with a four leaf clover stuck up my ass. However, recent events are shouting loudly into my ear that maybe I did not give my rabbit’s foot to someone else too quickly, I kept it too long. I have been blessed with a ‘glass is half-full’ personality, and have always pictured a horse when I see horse dung, and depending on the amount, I most of the time picture a vivacious person when I see spit stains. For some time, recently, I just see spit and crap.

-         We have had two car accidents with my boyfriend in a span of a month, both crashing the car from the rear, both not our fault and both involving two nineteen year old guys playing loud hiphop music on the car radio.

-         For the past two months, two of my anchors in the office resigned, one of them being my first real career-mentor, leaving me with my hands full and my mind in complete disarray.

-         A week ago the flat got broken into; they were amateurs, maybe even junkies who just needed a fix. This is not normal in the neighborhood we live in, they even had to crash the whole door to take only a couple of items and ran out, it probably did not even take them five minutes.

-         We were looking for a flat to transfer to, but a couple of days ago we lost the chance to give an offer on the flat we extremely liked, with a pool, a garage, a winter/summer garden and security. Apparently a woman who did not know what to do with her money offered and signed before she even saw the place, (*itch).

-         And like a sprinkle of parsley bits and a cherry topping, my laptop’s hard disk crashed yesterday 5 hours from a major sales meeting which I am supposed to chair and facilitate for the whole day. I had to redo my presentation and my strategic, eherm, manipulative ways to convince people to sell and to fulfill the budget I made.

I wanted to start running around the office in a shrill voice walloping everyone with his own monitor and giving them wedgies.

They say that to teach an infant to swim, the best thing to do is to throw him right into the water because they have a natural drive to survive. To teach a full grown person to swim you would have to either arrange for professional instruction or cover your ears to protect them from all that wailing and whining while you wade in a four feet swimming pool with him. I want to be like an infant, but I guess I would have to pass through the full grown person stage first before I re-learn my natural capacities. 

There are times in our lives when we start questioning our decisions. This is my time. When unpleasant events happen one after another like a formidable streak signaling that your foot could be stepping out of the border of divine protection, my tendency (and probably most people’s) is two-way: to think that God is punishing me for something I did inadvertently that I was not penitent for, that these are signs (ugh) that I am doing something appallingly wrong, taking a path leading to my demise OR that God is testing me, making me stronger in order to face more challenges in my future, like an extra push to prove to me that if I overcome this, then I have made the best choice. I wonder what the secret code is this time. When should one hold on and when should one let go? It might be sacrilegious to say (and I hope that God reconsiders that he only gave me limited brain power) — but faith tells you that it is never God’s fault. When wrong things happen, it’s either because you were too stubborn to listen to his signs or too weak to hold on. What is it for me?  

My past two years of living alone were definitely not as challenging as the past three months. My past ten years of living was definitely not as educational and as honing as the past four years. I did not grow up pampered, but the Philippine culture made sure that my family, my comfort zones and my support system was available to me 25/7. 101%. Here all I can do is shut up, breathe and deal. Well, maybe my boyfriend will tell you something different, he does swallow some of my bitter pills for me.

I have never felt so many extremes in such a short period of time — of pain and of happiness, of anger and of love, of survival and accomplishment — everything is just above average, even the ugly ones.  I had my reasons why I chose to stay here, but yes, my relationship was clearly my main motivation. I wanted to stay and give it a shot because it was just too wonderful to let go. With him, I always feel like I am playing house, living to take care of me, of him, of the future– paying the bills, caring about the budget and planning every year together until we are thirty. (I feel that this is a big deal, because although I have grown self-reliant, I was never snotty about my independence; I still give credit to my parents who did the raising of their kids.)

However, for the past two days, I cannot keep myself from asking if I am on the right path or if I should turn back. Go home and lead the life I was supposed to lead. I was cussing in my head, trying to begin this piece that now has gotten very long just complaining about a series of unfortunate events, letting my superstitious self take over, looking for signs in the air and in the stars — when my phone rang and he said — ‘babuy, I’m coming for you’. I said yes with a smile that could have ripped my face apart, and suddenly I forgot about the car crash and computer crash, the flat the got broken into and the flat that did not even have the chance to know us. Suddenly, I was brought back to that night when I started crying in the middle of my room feeling invaded as the policemen turned stuff over looking for fingerprints and feeling him hug me from behind not saying anything. Suddenly, I remembered that moment in the crash when the first thing he did was grope to check my seatbelt and the back of my head. I saw us solving our expenses if we take on that flat we liked over dinner and laughing at all the saving schemes we can think of. Through all of it, I have seen a man that will never make me feel alone or scared or hopeless.

So I ask, am I now going to stop whining? Come to think of it, I am not whining about what I lost but why events are happening to me like a meat skewer. So yeah, maybe I need to stop.

I think… God is that smart that he designed our minds to choose among branches of several metaphysical and logical paths to use, whichever way we are more comfortable. So in the end, how you rationalize your luck, failures and triumphs depend solely on your thinking process and your attitude towards life.

I think I choose this as a challenge to hold on. If it’s the wrong choice, I will not know now, so I will indulge in this connection, it’s something I do not see as sinful anyway. Besides, I told you I’m not the ‘half-empty’ type.