CIGARETTE BUTTS AND SENSELESS TANGENTIALITIES

I was slouched at my sofa eating some pieces of cookies i bought two weeks ago while looking at the window and watching the melancholic view of the snow falling from the sky. It continuously fall from the sky, enveloping everything with a crystalline sheath of ice. Oh, what a desolate day it is...

I continued to munch on the few remaining crumbled pieces of cookies. My temporary solitary life right now plus the lonesome atmosphere made my thought wander, back to the time when my life was just forlorn.

2001 took almost everything from me. All of things I once thought was permanent  changed and with a blink of an eye, my family went from having financial security and stable life to having no kind of security whatsoever. It started with our electricity being cut for a month. I have to go to our neighbors to ask them if we could squeeze in some of our perishable foods on their freezers and refs, and my mother would go to another neighbor asking if she could iron our uniforms in their house. Then my older sister started to have fever which turned out to be Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever so we were left with no options but to confine her to a nearby hospital. There were times that I would come home to school and find an empty house, no food to eat, no companion to help me on my assignments. I would then go to the hospital where my mom is watching over my sick sister. I did so, so that I could just have a decent meal at the hospital's canteen.

When my sister was discharged from the hospital, it was exactly the day our electricity came back, and once again, we were one complete humble family, having our dinner together. But it wasn't the end as I perceived it to be. Soon, our family was faced with another dilemma. We have to move out of our house and rent an apartment because of a road widening project. I grew up in that address and it was surely a drastic change. My father's work was transferred to a different site so far from our  new apartment (Pasig). And to save some money, My dad would start biking at 4:30 am, and cycle all the way from Pasig to Parañaque near the Coastal Mall. How could life get any more unpredictable and harder?

These has been a source of a lot of sadness for me. Back then,  I've been focusing a lot of energy and thought on looking back at all the "cookies" I lost and I'd have to give up. I'd held resentment to life itself and everything that it has done to me and my family and I lost many nights' sleep to depression.

The year turned over and I began to realize how much of me was lost tied up in negative thoughts. I told myself as the year flips over that I was leaving 2001 behind me. "It's all in the past", I told myself. "It can't hurt me anymore".

The fact is, I should even feel happy. Some people are living worse lives than ours. We only have to think of which cheap apartment must we move into while there are families living along streets or under a bridge. We only have to take care of my sister while she recovers from dengue while other people are battling against unrecoverable sickness. We are still very lucky in so many ways. We have our health, we live under 1 roof and most importantly, we have each other. We have life, and we have "cookies".

Maybe that was what we were to gain from that experience. Perhaps it was a reminder that life is not its trappings. Life is not the house, electricity, sickness, job or the stuff. I used to say that my life got turned upside down . But no, it wasn't my life-it was the temporary cookies, the ones that can crumble or break.

Now after a decade, I've taken to calling 2012 The Year of Hope and Good Things. I decided to continue to live life in its fullest, leaving the past (and the negativity contained therein) behind me. More positivity can only lead to a better and more satisfying cookie.

“…If you had the cookie, things were good. If you didn’t have the cookie, life wasn’t worth a damn. Unfortunately, the cookie kept changing. Some of the time it was money, sometimes power, sometimes sex. At other times, it was the new car, the biggest contract, the most prestigious address. …you have to give up a lot of things to take care of the cookie, to keep it from crumbling and be sure that no one takes it away from you. You may not even get a chance to eat it because you are so busy just trying not to lose it. Having the cookie is not what life is about"