Manila Stories (A Country Girl's Mirror)

When I ponder Manila, I cogitate on rivers. Attempt to think of visions that become missions and missions that become reality/ies. The city may or may not be habile of these things. Still, it comes from a fellow's frame of reference, rather, frame of mind. Think of all the bright places you‘ve been, and you come to drop it off at a setting where all things happened magically. Like Tay's Enchanted, it met you longing for something else. It’s an infinite setting, no morning nor night, it meant hours never ending.

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MRT. The abbreviation I come to remember most, though I still note IDK, ISTG, FR, NGL. Typical 'probinsyana' (country gilr) in the city you'd give your all to be at the core of that rapid moving vehicle. I've experienced all Filipno commutes, forbye this one. Perks of trying it during COVID, I didn't ordeal how 'siksikan' (too tight) or 'sardinas' (sardines) is. I remember buying two tickets to keep one as souvenir. I mean, cringe, but you know, your girl needs all receipts of whatnots. We've planned a day of road trip, but, to give it a twist, why not try it the Filipino way. And I can tell too many stories about how I see this city, how I feel about these people.

They're not living at home, everyone's on the road with agendas going on inside their heads and you can't tell what is: traffic jam, walking up and down the stairs to get to the train station, school, office work, or the biggest maybe: maybe spending almost all your day riding all sorts of transportation in order to save money. You go in and out of the auto, cross the road and you can portray a hundred different stories in one look. It's never quiet, and that kept me awake all night. How can people tell what's day and night? I can't even say.

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Here's one interesting fact I figured you might want to know. When you're on the road, try looking around your surroundings, nobody cares about your presence - GREAT DEAL! Everybody has this one reality they have to keep living. It's a rival of a lifestyle. You go out, pass by people, come back home and that's it, you do you, they do them. But there's a huge gap about all these: keep your pace and let your monologue come through until you make your story.

I remember trying to get on a jeep and then a man walks clothed with stitches of flour sacks, long grey hair holding a cross and walked continuously not caring about people on his surroundings. Before getting inside the jeepney, I saw him putting this big cross on his cart, trying to get his slippers off to get some rest. I thought, no matter how hard life worked for him he chose to work hard to keep life. I mean, talk about perspective.

It's an epitome of hope l'd carry the rest of mine. Believing doesn't measure life's status; it measures span of patience, determination and desperation. You can't go on not knowing where you're headed, but you also can't go on knowing where you're headed. You can't overboard your actions and practices as by the time you get there, you wouldn't feel the excitement, you wouldn't enjoy the beauty of your hard work for by then - it'll mean nothing. "At least you tried.” The best yet worst thing you'd be hearing from yourself.

Like that man clothed in stitches, he'll educate you that life doesn't count on you, you count on life and you can't change that. The moment you want life to depend on you, is the same moment you'll wake up losing a dream unconsciously because your subconscious mind thinks that it wouldn't matter anyway, and there's no escape on that. You constantly reject the idea of trying not knowing the grounds, but the actual logic is that you also gave up not only on this dream but on yourself and you can't admit it inside you because it involves your inner character.

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December 19, I recall running from the ground floor to get to the first floor to take a photo of the lights outside Alabang's Mall Fest. I was stuck on traffic, kidding, I saw this young girl scared to try the 'moving stairs’ (escalator), as she preferred to call it, then his ‘Papang’, grabbed her hand trying to help her. I excused myself and when I came back, they were trying to get up and down the escalator obliterating this girl's fear.

I contemplate of this little girl as the paragon of knowing her capabilities. As we grow, we fear/ at an aspect we have this pride, a brick of wall that's built with written causes on it or embarrassed to ask for support. We romanticize being 'independent' as we think we're adult enough to be a part of it, which is (maybe) also a huge blunder.

Reminisce the days where you jockeyed but you chose to keep going with the reason being diffident to ask for assistance, scared - maybe. This could be my largest wrong and right, as this affects my inner child.

On the you side, you‘d appear more mature but on the social side, you'd choose to do things on your own rather than getting others involved to get the job done. You're at the point where you think, as long as I'm capable, as long as I'm not crying over something I can reach, I won't need them, but would this help you 10 years from now? As long as we know our support, who we ask for help, and we know the rule of limitation there would be

a huge room for success.

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Life is full of probabilities, its mathematics itself-complicated when well thought of. There’s a lot of rules you need to bend to achieve. Everybody has it - monologue, reality, and story - what we do is to rethink their imaginations and turn it into something meaningful but colorful. A lot of us see all the negatives we allowed to keep, a few of us see the other side of the circumstance. We keep running on the wheel of life thinking we don't have time to waste, as we need to achieve something at a specific time frame. So we keep on moving in order to keep up. But too often, rush's outcome crashes and burns you. The reality about keeping up with the momentum of life is to STOP. Hopping off, of the wheel to determine what to keep and what needs to change. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting

different outcomes - this is on me. How do you envisage life?