the past three weeks have been pretty hectic. i’ve managed to fall down a flight of stairs right in front of my office, and i’ve been living my life in boxes. i’m saying goodbye to my old room. it’s a long and tedious process, these goodbyes. my closet looks too bare. i’ve gotten rid of more than half the rags i’ve accumulated for the past five years. i really must develop a talent for choosing better clothes. while digging through my rags, i realized how my shirts look more or less the same, i’ve more than two drawers full of black garments, and my pants are all sloppy. i bet people here in the office have memorized the clothes i wear. or maybe no one really cares and this paranoia is brought about by too many sachets of 3-in-1 coffee i like to nibble in the afternoons. it makes my heart skip and my ears pop. it’s a pretty wonderful feeling, once you get used to it.
this will be our eighth move. i’ve lived an average of three years per house in my life. my family is a family of gypsies and we’re finally trying to settle some place. finally. maybe i can call this space mine, for good. maybe.
the house sits in the borderline of pasig and cainta,rizal. the house is in pasig, the garage is in cainta. it’s farther from where i work if you like taking beaten down old jeepneys. by cab, it’s an additional 15 minutes per trip, given that the roads are all pretty accessible.
it also lies beside a dead creek. i don’t know why they called it “dead” to begin with. sure, i can hardly see the water through the thick overgrowth but i think it’s still alive. one day i’ll give it a name. when i first met the house, which was last saturday, it made its presence felt pretty strongly the entire time we were moving furnitures. i’ve never smelled anything more attacking than that ”dead creek” smell.
but maybe it does die once in a while. when i came to visit the house again yesterday, the smell was gone.
i haven’t really talked about the house yet, have i? it looks like food. the walls are orange and salmon. it’s as shocking as my mother, and just like her, the house looks bigger than it actually is. we have 15 more days to sell all of our old stuff. after easter sunday, we’re supposed to pack everything up and stay in the new one.
i’ll post pictures soon. just for show and tell.
