revisiting

The pounding started in the middle of the night and that woke Mae up. Blinded by the darkness, together with her mom and her siblings, they rendezvous with peace in another house, snuggled safe in someone’s bed, without slippers to protect the innocent soles of their feet. It was not a drastic change. It was rather a slow, easing, wretched change of seasons.

The morning after, they return to the bleak house. The smell as ash trays and thrashed and splinters.  They entered quietly. Chaos was apparent. It was as if a storm passed and the eye was everything around them. The plates lay broken on the floor. How can they repair things that were innately broken? Her father prohibits them from talking things over during mealtimes. Dinner was always the clinks of china and metal or the occasional chatter of the commentators as to which team won and lost. Her mother takes care of them by preparing their food and clothing. That also includes whipping them with thick leather belts and telling them how she would have had a better life if they were non-existent. Mae does not really know how a family functions. The books describe it as ‘’the smallest unit of the society.’’ How does the smallest unit functions? She would only discover the answer a few years later after entering college, but at that time, her definition was a paper and pitched black ink all over the page.

It was not always this bleak in the house. In fact, they talk about different stuff – how the president decided badly to take the other side, the inflation, the rising waters, trouble about her father’s work, how to subdue the rising protests against the government – these and different opinions on various things. Her father and mother once told them how lucky they were to be eating rice every meal, eating good food every payday, not having financial troubles to hinder their education and above all, how they should be thankful.

Gratitude was not functionally instilled in the household, telling kids to be thankful was just another trick to subdue rebellions. They do things separately. They have different hobbies. They have clashing opinions. Each individual has to wash their own clothes and wash their own plates. Mae, usually, on nights when silence tries to fight the bustling cities, lies in bed, a hand in her forehead, thinking how amazing would it be to go to college in the central. No one would be there to tell her when to sleep, what programs to watch and what kind of people to watch out for. She thought the world is her oyster. She thought she should be out there conquering what is needed to be conquered. Greed has taken over her rational thinking. College was freedom.

Mae cannot go out, truth be told, the siblings cannot go out there and seek new connections. Why do people seek connections outside? Spend more time outside? Is it because they cannot find it within the foundations of the roof they sleep in? Every time they sneak outside and hear the sound of a motorcycle, they hurriedly run uphill using the other path which was mostly stones and moss. It was a relief to change into fresh clothes watching their father park the motorcycle without being caught. There were times the parents were out. Her younger sibling challenged her patience – it was the first time she knew what a human being is capable of. They held knives against each other, yelling, threatening. Why cannot they? They only copied the action given the false belief that holding a knife against someone would make you superior and on the winning side of the argument. Where was coming from? It was on the news, the police fired at someone just because. Later that day, both of the sisters would be seen kneeling down in front of the altar. It was painful enough to be kneeling in mung beans; it was even more painful to be shouted at while being whipped with the belt. The screams of her sister made her bit her cry back. It was painful to hold back a tear. It was painful to pretend that the household was an enchanted kingdom.

She had close friends thought there were only a few of them. The closest she had was a girl her age with dark-brown complexion who always comes to her house before going to school together. They waited on each other and talked on the way about stuff. ‘’My father went home drunk last night,’’ Cassy would tell her. ‘’Mine too,’’ she refused to look away. It was not embarrassing to talk about these things with Cassy as they would even tell each other whose father was more drunk, whose mother cried more, earned more bruises and beatings, losing more bearing, or whose sibling got thrown into a corner after being slapped for talking back. It was a contest of whose household was more dejected. A family was the smallest unit of dysfunctionality.  

When people talk, they gossip, whisper about, but if you collect all of that, it becomes one big lump of hypocrisy at its finest. During her sophomore year, Mae was absent for a day. The friends she had in her class said she was grounded for something. It was more than that. Being grounded was much better than sleeping again in someone’s bed, eating someone’s food, sneaking out in broad daylight to flee while they just looked on. It was just another show. Her father broke the bathroom door this time. This time, her mother resorted to calling the police. She went to the police station with her mother. It was more than embarrassing – it was vexing because people went about their usual routines. A couple was fighting. A lanky man was thrashing while two policemen tries to hold him and calm him down. These and other else, the world was busy with their own miseries to notice them. How stupid God made the world. Her father cried that night. He was begging to them while she was half awake.

She considered all those years of her life as if being imprisoned. There is a guard. Food and clothing provided. They go to school without much problem. The problem was the family. It was already broken from the inside. The individuals were masking themselves away from the horrors brought about by wrong decisions and mistakes that melded them into dysfunctional beings. What seemed to be years ago, was only weeks now. She decided to claim her freedom as defined by her to be in a faraway place, away from traditions, culture and language. When the plane landed in the foreign country, she did not realize right away that it was just another prison only with  wardens speaking in a different tongue, living a different culture, practicing different traditions.

She went on through the days more disappointed than the previous ones. Why do they do what they do? Why are the minds enclosed in boxes of steel? They do not share the same values and they do not value things with high regard.  It was suffocating. Walking alone by the seashore, it was time to unravel the good things that was present in the family she considered a prison. She began calling them more frequent than she was within reach. Encouraging her siblings to do more, do more and be disappointed less. What was the psychology behind this situation? How could she crave the same feeling, even though it was more misery than what is held conventional and proper? Is this a new form of disorder? This complexity was both perplexing and fascinating. The mind is both curious and miserable by its own device.

The pounding started in the middle of the night and that woke Mae up. It was just a nightmare from a distance.