(no subject)
An Attempt in Four
Genre: Drama.
Word count: ~2000
The first attempt is always unsuccessful:
It was his first day off from work in twelve years. The numerous stacks of paper on his little desk was not intimidating him for the first time in a long while and the ticking on the bland white-and-gray clock somewhere behind him did not taunt. The window that looked out to an army of uniform white skyscrapers was not as bland.
Today, he was free to take the elevator from the twelve years he’s spent on the fifteenth floor and walk out of the office before the lunch hour started. It was ten-fifteen in the morning, and he was not craving for caffeine. He was out of his seat before everyone else and the cubicles of hunched heads and flawed mathematical equations he could see from that corner of the room, for the first time in twelve ridiculously long and tiring years, was comforting.
Today, he could write.
Barely an hour later, he was finally in the position to.
Tagaytay isn’t very far from the business district. It’s a forty-five minute drive with his five-year-old Honda Civic and a post-morning traffic South expressway. So he was sat at outside the Carlo’s Pizza that overlooked the Taal; the breeze was cool, his tie was undone.
A melody was already pulling into coherent chords in his head as he looked down at the blank piece of A4 paper he snagged from his drawer of office supplies. With his newly-sharpened pencil in one hand, he hunched over the table. He thought, long and hard, as unfocused eyes stared at the lead tip of his pencil.
He had thought for well over the afternoon. By this time, the sun has already touched the endless landscape and the evening buzz of the after-office crowd has begun to fill the tables nearby. The breeze had long since turned freezing and the wind, merciless, has numbed the tip of his nose.
The paper remained blank, his pencil unused.
With a clatter, he left both on the table and stalked, disheartened, back to his car. The melody in his head had already screeched to a stop and the silence in his ears was plugged not by the high Tagaytay altitude but the thought that this day was his first day off in twelve years and the twelve hours he had planned to spend it had already passed.
He wondered, as he stabbed the key in the ignition, if he would have to wait another twelve years for another twelve hours spent staring at a blank piece of thin office paper.
The second attempt is always easily forgotten:
He’s married now, with two children both under the age of five. It was a Saturday afternoon and the family of four was seated somewhere in the middle of a Jollibee branch. This Jollibee used to be old, with the upper floor serving as a party place. It had always smelled of cramped space and air-con dried mopped floors. This time, the noon light filtered in from the glass walls, opening to a view of a lazy stretch of street and a lazy crowd of students.
Easily, he took out the hastily crumpled Jollibee receipt from his breast pocket as well as the small ball point pen he’s carried with him since four years ago, when his wife had despaired over a forgotten pastry shop delivery number. (Fortunately, the pastry shop has chosen that afternoon four years ago to litter the television with mindless advertisements that flashed their catchy delivery number--lalala-delivery!--once every five minutes.)
This time, maybe, he could write.
“Dad, what are you doing?” His son, three-year-old Marco, piped in from beside him. He was holding his spaghetti fork in one hand and the cheap Jollibee Shrek toy in the other. Marco’s eager eyes were already peering into the blank receipt his father has been trying to smooth out on the table.
“Nothing,” he replied quickly, hunching over slightly in the way he used to when roaming teachers had begun to check their students’ test papers over their shoulders. “I’m just thinking about-“ he trailed off, knowing Marco would lose interest quickly enough.
Marco did, but his wife didn’t.
From across the table, Thelma looked at him oddly as she struggled with the equally struggling one-year-old Frances on her lap. Both were struggling with spaghetti and as she looked at him and he looked back, he could only dare to fathom how Thelma could possibly juggle feeding a struggling child while keeping her husband in check.
“What?” he asked before she could.
“You’re not eating,” Thelma said plainly, glancing at his untouched two-piece fried chicken meal-still unopened-on the orange tray at his elbow.
He shrugged, and then made a show of picking up the Styrofoam packaging. The chicken was already cold, the pack of rice too stiff for a satisfyingly appetizing meal but he looked down at the receipt and quickly made out the sum price of their meals and thought that he would have to eat this and, looking at his kids, they should damn well eat their meals as well. The six hundred pesos, bolded and underlined on the receipt, was no easy six hundred pesos to earn.
He picked up his plastic utensils and dug in, the receipt falling to the floor as soon as he pulled the meal closer to him and ate.
The third time is always unlucky:
The yearly Christmas party he and his college friends have had for the past twenty years was going to be held at his humble three-bedroom home in the less flattering part of Commonwealth Avenue. Before the clock had struck one in the afternoon, he was already dressed down to his pambahay shirt and shorts, assembling the plastic tables dropped off the night before.
His home did not have a garden. It had a parking space barely big enough for his second-hand Starex and Marco’s two bicycles. Today, he parked the Starex across the street and pulled his son’s bicycles in the stuffed closet in the ‘dirty kitchen’ and strategized: three tables, fifteen chairs, one space: it wasn’t going to be easy but the Sunday atmosphere that smelled of stuffed bangus on the grill and cases of Coca-cola bottles on the sidewalk made the man-of-the-house in him to do something extraordinarily productive.
“Dad, come inside for a drink of water first!” Thelma called from the open living room windows. She couldn’t see her face through the dusty screen but her voice was enough to make no room for argument.
So he did what all men did and grunted, guttural and annoyed, before abandoning his six unpacked chairs and three two-legged tables.
The glass of water wasn’t cold, but the soft couch compensated what the refreshments lacked in refreshing. He sighed, his knees aching slightly at the strain of lifting plastic furniture around for the better part of the morning. Eat Bulaga was on loud enough in the room upstairs, entertaining his kids with a round of Joey de Leon comedy. With the cool glass in one hand, the scent of a Sunday noon meal, and the sounds of television personalities ramming up the excitement on his behalf, he felt relaxed and refreshed in ways that tube ice submerged in Coke couldn’t manage in one gulp.
Marco’s Grade 4 writing pad was on the coffee table. The blank page and the clean lines caught his eye. His fingers itched and the atmosphere around him shifted, drawing out a tentative outpour of whatever his head has been saving up for these past few years.
He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.
“O, Dad, Pino’s leaving for San Francisco tomorrow. Did you know?” Thelma’s voice wove in and out of earshot as she busied herself in the kitchen. Clatters of porcelain plates against spoons and forks accented her light voice.
“Not to mention Andy-“ he heard her break off. The pop of the opened refrigerator door filled the second-long gap. “-He’s migrating to Canada with his kids. Can you believe it?”
He swallowed. The glass of water was already empty and he found it pointless to hold it in his lap so he set it down. If he put it down, coaster-less, near the blank pad of paper, it wasn’t his fault. The coffee table was much nearer than the kitchen sink anyway. If he picked up the pad, it wasn’t to write on it but to prevent it from getting wet.
So he placed that on his lap and fingered the edges. It had already thinned, the surface not smooth. Marco had a heavy hand and he liked to emphasize this fact with an equally heavy writing hand that forced letters into several layers of notebook paper and scratched paragraphs on tables. So he fingered that, as well.
A pregnant silence, familiar for its unnatural weight, settled on his shoulders.
Then suddenly, in a rush of sound, the air shifted back to Eat Bulaga’s cheesy music and Thelma’s Hoy, Daddy, nakikinig ka ba?, and his fingers, once vacant, have found a pencil quickly enough to jot down the rush of words from silent lips.
That night, as the Christmas party swung alongside the moon to their zeniths, the pad of paper was littered with cross-outs, circles, small notes, chords, and disjointed verses. He was outside, enjoying his fifth bottle of Pale Pilsen as Pao, Miko, Louie, and Bheng shared stories of high school mishaps. At that time, everything else was forgotten, and Marco, bored with re-runs of Disney movies, had hobbled his way down the stairs, took his pad of paper, and thought of the many things he could draw with the new case of 36 Crayola colors he received for Christmas.
The fourth and final time is always unexpected:
“Pa! Wow, I’m so glad you’re here!” The noise at the bar was deafening and if not for the voice he’s heard and loved for all of twenty-five years, he wouldn’t have picked it up over the buzz of boisterous laughs and drunken slurs.
Frances, his newly-engaged daughter, was in her simple black dress when she waded through the crowd towards him. The brilliant smile on her face made the bar less dark, the dazzling green lights overhead less dizzying.
He smiled back and pulled her into a hug. “Of course, anak. If I can’t be with you for the rest of your life then I’d be at your despedida,” he replied, his smile turning sad yet wistful.
Her daughter pouted playfully at him and he could almost hear her thoughts: Oh, si Pa, being melodramatic again. But then she laughed, full and bright, and pulled his arm to some unknown direction he could only hope was less claustrophobic than the sea of rowdy bodies he’s already gone through to get there.
But all of a sudden, a beam of light shone on his head and for a moment, he thought she had led them out to the street and a pair of headlights were about to run him over.
“Frances! Akyat ka naman dito! Sing for us! Clap for Frances, everybody!” The light dimmed slightly as it shifted from him to Frances, blushing and bristling, beside him. Catcalls and cheers rippled through the seated crowd as all heads turned to them and he thought that maybe this was when he could slip away from the action, nurse a drink, and wait for his wife to finish in the comfort room so he could convince her to head back home. But Frances’ grip on his hand hasn’t loosened in the slightest. If anything, it only held him in place even more firmly than he thought possible for Frances, still blushing, at the center of everyone’s attention.
Before he knew it, he was being led on stage. Him, in his graying and balding head, with his unflattering shirt and his scratchy throat, was being led on stage with his young daughter and the crowd of her young friends and their young dates.
Soon enough, they were standing before everyone and young men holding their acoustic guitars quickly set microphone stands in front of them.
He looked at Frances, then at the crowd, then at the smiling face of his wife at the far end of the room. He let go of his daughter’s hand, grabbed the nearest guitar he could blindly reach for, and sang. Melody, lyric, love and all; it was perfect and neither paper nor pencil was in sight.
Genre: Drama.
Word count: ~2000
The first attempt is always unsuccessful:
It was his first day off from work in twelve years. The numerous stacks of paper on his little desk was not intimidating him for the first time in a long while and the ticking on the bland white-and-gray clock somewhere behind him did not taunt. The window that looked out to an army of uniform white skyscrapers was not as bland.
Today, he was free to take the elevator from the twelve years he’s spent on the fifteenth floor and walk out of the office before the lunch hour started. It was ten-fifteen in the morning, and he was not craving for caffeine. He was out of his seat before everyone else and the cubicles of hunched heads and flawed mathematical equations he could see from that corner of the room, for the first time in twelve ridiculously long and tiring years, was comforting.
Today, he could write.
Barely an hour later, he was finally in the position to.
Tagaytay isn’t very far from the business district. It’s a forty-five minute drive with his five-year-old Honda Civic and a post-morning traffic South expressway. So he was sat at outside the Carlo’s Pizza that overlooked the Taal; the breeze was cool, his tie was undone.
A melody was already pulling into coherent chords in his head as he looked down at the blank piece of A4 paper he snagged from his drawer of office supplies. With his newly-sharpened pencil in one hand, he hunched over the table. He thought, long and hard, as unfocused eyes stared at the lead tip of his pencil.
He had thought for well over the afternoon. By this time, the sun has already touched the endless landscape and the evening buzz of the after-office crowd has begun to fill the tables nearby. The breeze had long since turned freezing and the wind, merciless, has numbed the tip of his nose.
The paper remained blank, his pencil unused.
With a clatter, he left both on the table and stalked, disheartened, back to his car. The melody in his head had already screeched to a stop and the silence in his ears was plugged not by the high Tagaytay altitude but the thought that this day was his first day off in twelve years and the twelve hours he had planned to spend it had already passed.
He wondered, as he stabbed the key in the ignition, if he would have to wait another twelve years for another twelve hours spent staring at a blank piece of thin office paper.
The second attempt is always easily forgotten:
He’s married now, with two children both under the age of five. It was a Saturday afternoon and the family of four was seated somewhere in the middle of a Jollibee branch. This Jollibee used to be old, with the upper floor serving as a party place. It had always smelled of cramped space and air-con dried mopped floors. This time, the noon light filtered in from the glass walls, opening to a view of a lazy stretch of street and a lazy crowd of students.
Easily, he took out the hastily crumpled Jollibee receipt from his breast pocket as well as the small ball point pen he’s carried with him since four years ago, when his wife had despaired over a forgotten pastry shop delivery number. (Fortunately, the pastry shop has chosen that afternoon four years ago to litter the television with mindless advertisements that flashed their catchy delivery number--lalala-delivery!--once every five minutes.)
This time, maybe, he could write.
“Dad, what are you doing?” His son, three-year-old Marco, piped in from beside him. He was holding his spaghetti fork in one hand and the cheap Jollibee Shrek toy in the other. Marco’s eager eyes were already peering into the blank receipt his father has been trying to smooth out on the table.
“Nothing,” he replied quickly, hunching over slightly in the way he used to when roaming teachers had begun to check their students’ test papers over their shoulders. “I’m just thinking about-“ he trailed off, knowing Marco would lose interest quickly enough.
Marco did, but his wife didn’t.
From across the table, Thelma looked at him oddly as she struggled with the equally struggling one-year-old Frances on her lap. Both were struggling with spaghetti and as she looked at him and he looked back, he could only dare to fathom how Thelma could possibly juggle feeding a struggling child while keeping her husband in check.
“What?” he asked before she could.
“You’re not eating,” Thelma said plainly, glancing at his untouched two-piece fried chicken meal-still unopened-on the orange tray at his elbow.
He shrugged, and then made a show of picking up the Styrofoam packaging. The chicken was already cold, the pack of rice too stiff for a satisfyingly appetizing meal but he looked down at the receipt and quickly made out the sum price of their meals and thought that he would have to eat this and, looking at his kids, they should damn well eat their meals as well. The six hundred pesos, bolded and underlined on the receipt, was no easy six hundred pesos to earn.
He picked up his plastic utensils and dug in, the receipt falling to the floor as soon as he pulled the meal closer to him and ate.
The third time is always unlucky:
The yearly Christmas party he and his college friends have had for the past twenty years was going to be held at his humble three-bedroom home in the less flattering part of Commonwealth Avenue. Before the clock had struck one in the afternoon, he was already dressed down to his pambahay shirt and shorts, assembling the plastic tables dropped off the night before.
His home did not have a garden. It had a parking space barely big enough for his second-hand Starex and Marco’s two bicycles. Today, he parked the Starex across the street and pulled his son’s bicycles in the stuffed closet in the ‘dirty kitchen’ and strategized: three tables, fifteen chairs, one space: it wasn’t going to be easy but the Sunday atmosphere that smelled of stuffed bangus on the grill and cases of Coca-cola bottles on the sidewalk made the man-of-the-house in him to do something extraordinarily productive.
“Dad, come inside for a drink of water first!” Thelma called from the open living room windows. She couldn’t see her face through the dusty screen but her voice was enough to make no room for argument.
So he did what all men did and grunted, guttural and annoyed, before abandoning his six unpacked chairs and three two-legged tables.
The glass of water wasn’t cold, but the soft couch compensated what the refreshments lacked in refreshing. He sighed, his knees aching slightly at the strain of lifting plastic furniture around for the better part of the morning. Eat Bulaga was on loud enough in the room upstairs, entertaining his kids with a round of Joey de Leon comedy. With the cool glass in one hand, the scent of a Sunday noon meal, and the sounds of television personalities ramming up the excitement on his behalf, he felt relaxed and refreshed in ways that tube ice submerged in Coke couldn’t manage in one gulp.
Marco’s Grade 4 writing pad was on the coffee table. The blank page and the clean lines caught his eye. His fingers itched and the atmosphere around him shifted, drawing out a tentative outpour of whatever his head has been saving up for these past few years.
He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.
“O, Dad, Pino’s leaving for San Francisco tomorrow. Did you know?” Thelma’s voice wove in and out of earshot as she busied herself in the kitchen. Clatters of porcelain plates against spoons and forks accented her light voice.
“Not to mention Andy-“ he heard her break off. The pop of the opened refrigerator door filled the second-long gap. “-He’s migrating to Canada with his kids. Can you believe it?”
He swallowed. The glass of water was already empty and he found it pointless to hold it in his lap so he set it down. If he put it down, coaster-less, near the blank pad of paper, it wasn’t his fault. The coffee table was much nearer than the kitchen sink anyway. If he picked up the pad, it wasn’t to write on it but to prevent it from getting wet.
So he placed that on his lap and fingered the edges. It had already thinned, the surface not smooth. Marco had a heavy hand and he liked to emphasize this fact with an equally heavy writing hand that forced letters into several layers of notebook paper and scratched paragraphs on tables. So he fingered that, as well.
A pregnant silence, familiar for its unnatural weight, settled on his shoulders.
Then suddenly, in a rush of sound, the air shifted back to Eat Bulaga’s cheesy music and Thelma’s Hoy, Daddy, nakikinig ka ba?, and his fingers, once vacant, have found a pencil quickly enough to jot down the rush of words from silent lips.
That night, as the Christmas party swung alongside the moon to their zeniths, the pad of paper was littered with cross-outs, circles, small notes, chords, and disjointed verses. He was outside, enjoying his fifth bottle of Pale Pilsen as Pao, Miko, Louie, and Bheng shared stories of high school mishaps. At that time, everything else was forgotten, and Marco, bored with re-runs of Disney movies, had hobbled his way down the stairs, took his pad of paper, and thought of the many things he could draw with the new case of 36 Crayola colors he received for Christmas.
The fourth and final time is always unexpected:
“Pa! Wow, I’m so glad you’re here!” The noise at the bar was deafening and if not for the voice he’s heard and loved for all of twenty-five years, he wouldn’t have picked it up over the buzz of boisterous laughs and drunken slurs.
Frances, his newly-engaged daughter, was in her simple black dress when she waded through the crowd towards him. The brilliant smile on her face made the bar less dark, the dazzling green lights overhead less dizzying.
He smiled back and pulled her into a hug. “Of course, anak. If I can’t be with you for the rest of your life then I’d be at your despedida,” he replied, his smile turning sad yet wistful.
Her daughter pouted playfully at him and he could almost hear her thoughts: Oh, si Pa, being melodramatic again. But then she laughed, full and bright, and pulled his arm to some unknown direction he could only hope was less claustrophobic than the sea of rowdy bodies he’s already gone through to get there.
But all of a sudden, a beam of light shone on his head and for a moment, he thought she had led them out to the street and a pair of headlights were about to run him over.
“Frances! Akyat ka naman dito! Sing for us! Clap for Frances, everybody!” The light dimmed slightly as it shifted from him to Frances, blushing and bristling, beside him. Catcalls and cheers rippled through the seated crowd as all heads turned to them and he thought that maybe this was when he could slip away from the action, nurse a drink, and wait for his wife to finish in the comfort room so he could convince her to head back home. But Frances’ grip on his hand hasn’t loosened in the slightest. If anything, it only held him in place even more firmly than he thought possible for Frances, still blushing, at the center of everyone’s attention.
Before he knew it, he was being led on stage. Him, in his graying and balding head, with his unflattering shirt and his scratchy throat, was being led on stage with his young daughter and the crowd of her young friends and their young dates.
Soon enough, they were standing before everyone and young men holding their acoustic guitars quickly set microphone stands in front of them.
He looked at Frances, then at the crowd, then at the smiling face of his wife at the far end of the room. He let go of his daughter’s hand, grabbed the nearest guitar he could blindly reach for, and sang. Melody, lyric, love and all; it was perfect and neither paper nor pencil was in sight.