Of Rice and Men

                I saw you.

                I saw you when you were sitting peacefully near the Carillion Tower in our University, dreaming of the future, feeling the lulling effect of that certain atmosphere that only UP can offer. Was that smile on your face contentment? Or just a sarcastic reaction to the illusion that you know is being presented to you? Do you remember when someone told you, “Mag-aral ka lang. Pag-grumaduate ka, okay na ang lahat. Wag ka nang mag-isip ng iba pang bagay. Secondary na lang yun”? Do you still believe it? I know here it seems like nothing could go wrong. You feel superior. It may be true. For now. And the truth now may not be necessarily the truth tomorrow.

                And you, a disillusioned man of 25. I can hear your wife’s naggings, your children’s insistent cries. Are you deaf to them? Or are you just lost in the past – when you and your wife first met, when you married her at 18, when you believed everything will be fine, when the word ‘love’ and ‘family’ was music to your ears unlike now that you mock and despise it? Now I can see you cringe as you roam your eyes around. Yes, I can see them as well as you do. The dilapidated make-shift houses made out of scrap materials, the filthy barefoot children running on the dirty street, the topless men with their t-shirts slung over their shoulders, holding bottles of gin, drinking like there is no tomorrow, the fist-fight going on at one side and a woman shouting at her husband at the other side.

                Don’t think I missed out on you. You may look like a dignified, accomplished career woman but I can see the stress on your face, the weariness on your eyes even if you try to hide it through make-up or your colourful speech with which you talk. I know this is not the job you wanted. This is even unrelated to the course you graduated from but it is hard to find work nowadays and what you earn is a lot more than what you would earn in other jobs. So it is just fine that you never get enough sleep, it is okay that that your intelligence dulls every passing day, and you should not complain when your kidney get affected by too much coffee and too little CR breaks.

                How about you? Yes, you with the iPhone4s and the Mac laptop. Money was never a problem to you. Financial crisis is a foreign phrase. Just last week, you went out of the country to unwind. You stay in a penthouse all by yourself. You wear signature clothes. You visit the Spa and Salon every week. But you refuse to believe that you are an ignorant spoiled brat. Why, you even know that there is such a thing as poverty because you’ve seen it through media while watching your flat-screen LED TV. It seems like you have everything yet it’s never enough. It will never be enough.

                Foreigners find it peculiar that Filipinos cannot pass a day without eating rice. It is as precious to us as jewels and it is something that is common to us. No matter if we are a student or a professional, rich or poor, Filipinos all crave for rice, in the same way that all of us people crave for something that will satisfy us, something that will make us happy and contented. More often than not, that ‘something’ is elusive. When you finally get what you wanted, you desire something else.

                I feel the same way that you do. I felt the disappointment, the pain. I laughed and smiled. I got angry too. And just as you do, I am hoping that someday, the weight from my heart will be lifted and the emptiness in it be filled.

I am like you. I am anybody. I am everybody. I am you.


Note: I know, I know, this is a bit lousy and very unorganized but the idea sprang on my mind and it refused to let go so I just had to right it. Comments are love :))))