Powerless Now, Soon To Be Bold

It was like everything that I saw was dark. A non stop eclipse. Seemed I was a blind who wanted a guide to go somewhere that could make me happy. I'd been sacrificing a lot. I was crawling to a rocky mountain of hardship with my tears pouring down as I mumbled this with my trembling voice of anguish:

Alone with my sobs

My existence in this world

is obviously not to laugh but to cry...

~~~~

The CD player plays

a mellow music,

I can see mania birds resting on the window grill.

I don't know exactly what they are listening to:

Is it the Iovely lyrics of the song

or the sobbing of my heart?

I already accepted the fact that my destiny was really to cry. I even wrote this poem to express my pain and sadness. Imprinting the wounds and scars in me. Like a machosist, kept tolerating the agony. Through this piece I felt my heart was crumpled and thrown away. I felt powerless and hopeless at the same time on how to become better in the future.

Someone asked me this:

Why everytime I see you in the pavement walking, you seemed not in your mind? You felt lonely. I could see that in your eyes."

My answer then was just a deep breath. My life had been a drama that even if I would offer my story to a writer she would ignore it for she didn't want her pen cried of so much woe.

This conversation suddenly popped up in my weird brain.Probably I would tell this just to convince her:

The ballpen really cries because of its ink. So why you don't want to? 

"Hmmm...A philophisical question is not a reason to answer you a yes. That I am going to accept your story. I don't want to feel heavy and like pricking me everytime I will do my writing."

"Why a journalist told me once that sadness is an art?" I insisted.

"Well it depends. Yours is torturing. I don't want to feel that way as I've said earlier."

"I understand. I will just write my own story even if it hurts me to the core." 

My thumb was numb. My eyes just spared a gaze on the blank pages of the paperpads that I prepared on my table. The ballpen seemed refusing to stand up. As if a lazy child just lying on her bed, as lonely as the dried leaves that fall on her transparent window, then on the grassy ground. Quiet.Sad.

I talk to my pilot pen as though a driver who commanded her jeepney.

"Stand up, I want you to cooperate with me!"

It had no ears, no mouth to speak. I didn't want to be like my pen. A powerless too.

I picked it up, I started the first word in my mind. I prepared a box of tissue as well because I knew that my tears would automatically fall down. 

"Should I prepare a pail too?" My crazy mind asked this. I sighed. I was thinking thoroughly on how to begin with it. My decision was final. A poem then a question. 

Sad Memories of a Poor Child

A lass who only wanted to survive,

she did everything for her family,

climbed grassy mountain with great vibe,

took each way right with empty tummy.

Firewoods on her two thin small shoulders,

her cool father would smile wouldn't cry,

she carried to the market to sell, no fares;

life full of tough times but she wasn't shy.

She bought a cheap corn rice with salted fish,

so happy with her single centavo,

gave to her mother

for her long time wish,

her twisted hurdle was quite hard to undo.

She learned a lot in this terrible world,

dark days make her fiesty, patient, and bold.

When would this curse stop? It was easy to conceal weaknesses in a poem just to uplift my spirit.

My childhood was as gloomy as those clouds in the storm; with lighting and thunder. With raindrops that were like pointed nails hitting my body. Why this affliction was still here until in my marriage life?

I went home from the other country. I worked there as a domestic helper. All I thought the people who I could count on and a shoulder to lean on were the ones who hugely and terribly hurt me. 

I could not talk here in our house. If I my mouth started to open, my kids answered me as if they were my parents. They even shouted at me everytime I had something to say. Perhaps you would surprise why they were like that. It was already a no wonder for me because my husband's family were also like them. I've been living in the place of my behalf for years. No relatives. Nothing at all.

From the day I lived here, I already felt their cringing treatment to me. I had been through a lot of trials raising my kids but no one of his family was there for me. I was just alone then for my husband was in abroad. A solo flight fight. As my memory recalling it all. 

I worked for almost eight straight year in one boss only in Hongkong. It was the first time I stayed longer. Everything they did towards me was extremely hurting. No respect at all. My sacrifice was taken for granted. Seemed they forgot my relationship with them. That was the hardest thing to imagine and the most pricking. They just wanted money from me. They even blamed me because they were broke. How about myself? I went home because of the masses in my breasts. I needed to rest and to stress free myself from work but those thoughts were totally the contrary.

I had already a big problem with my kids; but my husband still tolerated them. Their yelling at me and everything. The worse part was that in my one year and a month of stay here, he never gave me money without paying it back. If I asked, it would automatically a debt.

So when I worked as a call center representative last year. I paid it all. No single centavo was left unpaid. I paid what I owed from him. When the Covid -19 was starting to devastate every source of living and life-here and abroad, he was more severe. I forced myself to understand even if he had a lot of money from his home service work as a technician. If I would try to ask even a coin, he would reply me to get coins that he put somewhere -- for me to have money. It was not about the money that hurt me but it was about how he tolerated my children even if he knew exactly that it was wrong. They could reason out but not to the point that they had to shout or say things that were so hurting to me as their mother. I felt powerless.

Until this very moment of writing, I never eat what their meals are. I buy my own food and stuff. I feel weak but I have to stand up by my own someday and give myself happiness that nobody can ever give to me. I have to reach what I aimed before when I was small. I have to love myself more because nobody will love me except me and those few people who are just my aquaintances but value me as a person. 

Now, I am in this room writing again a sad poem- wishing that somehow after this murky and blustery surroundings of my life there's still a rainbow after the rain:

im surrounded

by these four walls

planning to paste

poems of pain

on its facade

trying to count

the countless