There is almost nothing of significance to gaze at outside my bedroom window, a bedroom which I share with two other friends. Beyond the dirty window screen and glass jalousie windows which had somehow gained a permanent patina of dust, there is always that large gray concrete wall having a large square hole patched with plywood, which was probably meant to be a window and that large gate with the cliched peeling paint and rusted joints. Unchanging and changing in the few years I have grown accustomed to it.
Oftentimes this view would still be complicated by drying laundry, parked tricycles or recently that fish delivery truck. This is the sight I always wake up to after I open my eyes and I am facing my left. If I wake facing my right then a wooden faded pink wall would greet me.
But apart from this view there is also something apart from the grayness outside and this is a view that affords me a glimpse of the sky from the top of my double deck; a slivered view framed by the gate, the dilapidated roof of an abandoned sweatshop and the rusting extended eave of our roof. This little scene of the heavens then becomes the only saving grace of the crowded decadent tableau outside; and that little irregular slice of the sky is where I always lose myself in thought, in my imaginings, in sometimes quiet despair, in hopefulness, in melancholy and most often that small unreachable place is where I space out.
But more significantly this is the space where I find you when I am here inside the room when I am looking for some semblance of silence here in Manila, when I am waiting for Solitude, when I am wanting for even the smallest feeling of being home. Even when the curtain sometimes blocks the view or sometimes when I cannot see it at all because it is dark, or when that view is blurred because I am crying, I always know that place is there; always and because you are there.
The only time the place outside my bedroom windows gains a sense of grandeur or perhaps a sense of beauty is when it rains, because then you're also there, raining inside me.
Oftentimes this view would still be complicated by drying laundry, parked tricycles or recently that fish delivery truck. This is the sight I always wake up to after I open my eyes and I am facing my left. If I wake facing my right then a wooden faded pink wall would greet me.
But apart from this view there is also something apart from the grayness outside and this is a view that affords me a glimpse of the sky from the top of my double deck; a slivered view framed by the gate, the dilapidated roof of an abandoned sweatshop and the rusting extended eave of our roof. This little scene of the heavens then becomes the only saving grace of the crowded decadent tableau outside; and that little irregular slice of the sky is where I always lose myself in thought, in my imaginings, in sometimes quiet despair, in hopefulness, in melancholy and most often that small unreachable place is where I space out.
But more significantly this is the space where I find you when I am here inside the room when I am looking for some semblance of silence here in Manila, when I am waiting for Solitude, when I am wanting for even the smallest feeling of being home. Even when the curtain sometimes blocks the view or sometimes when I cannot see it at all because it is dark, or when that view is blurred because I am crying, I always know that place is there; always and because you are there.
The only time the place outside my bedroom windows gains a sense of grandeur or perhaps a sense of beauty is when it rains, because then you're also there, raining inside me.
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