EACH DAY IS UNIQUE

November 14, 2015

Every day is different.  This for one, started out warm, then overcast, then warm again.  On other days, it could be cloudy and humid, then hot, then downpours come.  Even each moment is once in a lifetime.

Mom asked if I had no regrets with how I related to some people in the past, who would have felt better had I been a little more conscious and sensitive.  I honestly cannot answer her.

I realized that as I was growing up, I spent more time being a child than transitioning into an adult.  I think I missed some parts of those moments that every other person has, except that I never really felt I missed them because I was busy doing the things I liked doing in my own little world.  I really played a lot--inside playing house, playing store or playing school, and under the sun--with friends when I was a kid.  But when they outgrew being children, I continued in that stage, now with younger playmates.  I remember being so good and earnest at making paper-dolls and paper-doll dresses that my cousins used to ask me to make theirs.  When they grew up and had other friends and threw away their paper dolls, I continued to be asked by the neighbours’ kids to make paper-doll sets even when I was in college.

Where other people are actively in the dating game, I spend my hours burying my nose inside a book.  Where other people spend their time going to the malls, people-watching and hunting for the next significant other, I am busy being a home-body--reading, drawing, colouring, making wall decals, posters and scrapbooks, sewing, gardening or watching home videos.  I do go to the mall every weekend, but then again, my slice of retail therapy are the supermarkets, the video shops, the school and art supplies stores and the bookstores. 

Maybe it comes with the upbringing.  Since I was raised from a poor family with a lot of relatives, and had to become the breadwinner since the first day I started working, I’d feel bad spending so much on activities that will not go down to the innermost parts of my soul after.  Meaning, I’d rather absorb the ideas in the book, be delighted by the colours of the rainbow coming out of my pens, be proud wearing my very own remodelled dress, and the wonderful possibilities a collage of cut-out pictures can bring.  (Good thing other people are picking up interests on colouring with the ever-growing phenomenon of adult colouring and the proliferation of adult colouring books nowadays.  Welcome back to childhood, guys!).

And I believe I’d continue being so.  Since I was born on the cusp, I would always be on the sidelines—an observer of life’s parade, and a recorder—whether in words or sketches—how each moment makes its impression.