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Handicapped With Wings“You’re turning eighteen, you know. Have you thought of the things you’ve done with your life? Don’t you think it’s time we get you a life?” Recently, I had coffee with a friend. He looked at me from head to foot in mid-conversation, and made this comment. As always, he managed to drive me into deep thought. After much contemplation, I now realize how much I have truly gone through. I also realize the reason for this paper: I want to tell you about my life. I want to prove to you that people like me, who are afflicted with cerebral palsy should not be demeaned, but rather looked up to for how they face the challenges life brings forth. / I remember that day. I was a baby and my eyes didn’t move. They refused to follow the finger my aunt moved back and forth. I just lay there, unmoving. My family didn’t really give much thought to it until a few months later when I began to be extremely dependent on others when it came to simple things like getting up from a fall. Right then, they knew something was wrong. I was taken to the hospital a few weeks after, and true enough I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a condition that caused me to walk on tip-toe and my legs to look like sticks due to weak muscles. / The hospital became my second home. By the time I was three, I had grown immune to the stale smell of disease and death that greeted patients at hospital entrances. I sat in wheelchairs and was a patient to three different doctors and physical therapists. Physical therapy was, and still is to this day a gruesome routine that I didn’t look forward to. Those sessions lasted for three hours, starting off with cold ultrasound gel being smeared slowly on my thigh muscles, slowly progressing into the limb-twisting that drove me into screams of excruciating pain, and then finally ending with attempts at “walking normally” with steel bars for support. Soon after, the doctors discovered that physical therapy alone was not enough, and recommended orthopedic surgery.
NostalgiaPicture yourself standing on the sidewalk of a busy, noise - polluted street somewhere in the city. Today, these streets are packed with people, all going places (some seem to just be wandering aimlessly, in deep thought), crossing streets side by side. As they pass you by, a fusion of scents greet your nostrils: the different odors of their sweat, some even chance upon passing the unholy stench of gas both ways, from up and down. This makes you dizzy, though you can’t complain (aloud at least). The rattle of a street child’s cup of coins, you ignore that. You have way too much on your mind. Yet, you stand rooted to the spot. Smoke-belching vehicles soon decide to join the scene, emitting thick, black puffs of smog enough to send an asthmatic, or anyone for that matter, to the hospital. Some pass by as slow as turtles. Most of them, however zoom past you, leaving you in a momentary state of disorientation, your heart’s drum-like pounding the only proof of their passing. In the midst of all this, you unconsciously glance at your watch. 2:30, it reads. Suddenly, it occurs to you: The world moves so fast doesn’t it? We all must be racing against the hands of time, seemingly synched to the clicking sounds of a metronome. When does this race end? How much time does the world have? You start to wonder how much time you have left. Flashbacks of your life come back at you like a collage. One second, you’re younger and innocent. The next, you are who you are now ---- and most things you wish you could change. You, as an infant banging your rattle ceaselessly, tugging at your mother’s skirt wiping your tears on the first day of school. A vivid memory of the night you downed your first bottle of beer---too fast. Your first kiss was good (or better said, imagining what it’s like to be kissed). Oh, and who could forget you egg-rolling on the grass --- drunk? Do you remember the day you fell off a chair from happiness and shock as you checked to see if you made it in --- and you did? You can almost feel the weight of the school medals you garnered for speeches and writing competitions on your neck. You can almost taste the menthol from your first and only cigarette puff on your lips. The sound of your coughing says you’re never going to do that again. Heck, yeah. You made some bad choices, huh? Some good, of course – don’t worry. You’re not that much of a mess-up. You continue your reverie on the way home on the LRT (another one of the firsts you remember --- going to Katipunan. You looked so ridiculous, the only one with a huge grin on her face as you held onto a pole, finally knowing what it felt like to be a sardine in a can). Some time in the middle of the ride, still in your nostalgic state, you notice a bumper sticker stuck on one of the windows. It read “Slow down”. Under that, “What will YOU do now?”
of a boy i used to give my heart to (a fragment)a matter of missing: the smell of cigarettes and alcohol on his skin, warm hugs that seem to make everything okay (even if in reality the world is ****** for that split second, you’re there and nothing else matters), the visits that seem to happen when you’re just about to go to sleep on a bad day, having to watch the sunrise, the sunset, the sky (anything that has to do with the sun makes you smile). you know that the most perfect moment is when he holds your hand and you’re drunk on red wine, and the world slips away because he is, and you swear you could die at that moment, happy. / a matter of not forgetting. everything will remind you of him: street children, smells on your street, coffee and pasta (something you will never do again), mentholated cigarettes, the lines about him you attempt to write, the lines that you don’t write, neruda (the only book that stays untouched on your bookshelf. you try to read it, but all you can really hear is his voice reading you “body of a woman”, from the night you didn’t sleep because the air in your dorm room was thick with something you’ve never really felt in that room, air used to be so stale. but he was there, and you watched him sleep thinking he’s beautiful that way, and you smile. / 21.09.09