Saturday, January 2, 2010

Day 16: Year 2553 and the Impending End of My Vacation

No more shopping for me! As it is, with just the clothes I've worn for the past two weeks I already have ten freaking kilos in my check-in luggage. Add my recent purchases from two weeks of shopping madness, and it's up to almost twenty. That still does not include the pasalubong I need to buy within the next few days. It's final: shopping is DEAD! I have issued myself a TRO...

Did not leave the house yesterday, except to bring Mom and Bradir's bags to the driveway. Had papaya for lunch... I noticed that I have eaten tons of papaya since I got here two weeks ago. It's quickly becoming my favorite food, which is totally unexpected since I was never such a huge fan of the uber-seeded fruit. The papaya here is a deep red-orange, sweet as heck and as juicy as papayas come! At ten baht per piece (served chilled, cut into bite-size pieces and with a wooden skewer to shove each piece into your gaping maw), it's a steal!

For dinner, Mom made chicken-macaroni soup. This is my ultimate comfort food: chicken wings, liver and heart in a milky broth with chunks of cabbage and bits of carrot. Momsie made a huge batch, which I think we'll be consuming in the next few days. There's only four of us left in the house now: my dad, my two sisters and myself.

It's gonna be really quiet next weekend, am sure...

Mom and Bradir leave for Manila today... Their plane leaves Thai soil at 12:35am. Boohoohoo, not because I'll miss them, but because I'll be seeing them again in exactly seven days. Boohoohoo, not because I don't want to see them, but because a big part of me does not want to go back to Manila.

Too much confusion. Too many memories. Too many decisions to make. Too many lives affected.


True, most of my friends are there. True, my loved and beloved ones are there. True, a huge chunk of my life as I know it is there.


But that is also the exact same reason why I don't want to go back. For the past two weeks, I feel like I've started over again. In a new place I know almost nothing about, where nobody knows my name, where I've been and what I have and have not done. It's a place where almost everyone is a stranger and I am back to square one.

Why can't we do that with our lives - go back to Start, the way we do on countless videogames? Why can't we hide parts of our lives, as we could take down selected posts on our blogs? Why can't we delete certain memories, the way we can remove emails from our mail database at work? Why can't we make things to be the way we want them to be, like Photo-shopping our favorite snapshots?


Why can't I just click "Cancel" when asked to decide between A and B? What if I don't want to choose? What if I want the choice to be taken out of my hands, for once?
What if I want a fresh start, not only for myself, but for the people whose lives are entwined with mine (whether by choice or by sheer circumstance) ... the people whose lives I have damaged for eternity (whether I meant to or not)?

We Pinoys (and the rest of the world) may be celebrating the year 2010 right now, but for the Thai peeps it's already 2553. Strange, eh? I wonder how it'd feel to fall asleep now and wake up in 2553, when everything I know and everyone who knows me are long gone? I wonder if that would be the fresh start I need...

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