Pre-Valentine Treat

MORNING

I was watching a movie from a very big tv screen in the waiting lounge of a hospital's laboratory when a man I almost hated sat at the bench next to where I was. It was such a hard work containing my patience because my feet were screaming to kick his butt in public. I put on a very straight face and thought 'vengeance has it's own time'. My day started badly.

AFTERNOON

I roamed around the National Bookstore trying to kill the time while waiting for the result of the lab tests. I found it rather funny because the month's bestseller is El Amor En Los Tiempos Del Colera ( Love In The Time of Cholera) a book authored by my best drinking buddy Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This book was published in 1988 and the copy I have is a First Vintage International Edition dated October 2003. On how it became a National Bookstore bestseller 10 years after it was first published is puzzling. This book was even featured in the movie Serendipity, remember? It breaks my heart to know that even in literature, the Philippines is a decade or so behind.

My affair with Gabriel Garcia Marquez first began in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Being an unnatural extrovert, I picked up the book because the word "solitude" appeals to me. The phrase "100 years" was even more appealing that I was convinced I'd spend the next 100 years of my life in hell and another hundred in purgatory if I fail to read the book. Then his autobiography followed after which I committed myself fully in the disposal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as long as I live. Cholera or no cholera.

EVENING

I was on a rush trying to avoid the people who went mad over the next day's affair. I boarded a taxi and for the first time in my life seated beside the driver who only slowed down as I entered the cab. I was drenched in rain and as soon as I finished wiping myself a fast moving pick up overtook us, made a sudden halting screech and our cab kissed its bumper all broken and cracked. The drunk driver of the pick up went out and hurled expletives at my driver. I went out amidst the rain, checked myself intact and complete, hailed another taxi and wondered how my day will end.

TWILIGHT

I found myself in a vacated open field. The quarter moon was showing and the stars were twinkling gorgeously. Up at the back of (another) pick up truck were lively strumming of country folk songs in guitar. Cowboy hats and mud boots were scattered all over, the horses gallopping freely in the muddy race tracks, the air was cold and beneath us were the city lights in all its grandeur and magnificence.

When the cold was no longer bearable, everyone left except me and three others. Our adrenaline were still rushing like fools that we ended in race track trying to hurdle the obstacle using not horses but a beast called pajero. We rode through the mud, negotiated blind curves at devil's speed our shouting and screaming heard by no one but the crickets. The joy and excitement in our faces seen only by the quarter moon.

The memory is lovely. And I want the world to know.