So, I'm still fucking depressed.

Suicide

There are three completely different conversations with three completely different people within the span of one week, and all mention the s-word in passing. The other participants laugh and shake their heads.
Someone is trying to send a message to you, but you're not fucking laughing.

Drinking Fails

Screw you, world, you decide, and plan to spend your nights in dissolute, wretched-glorious inebriation. After all, you've stayed squeaky clean for a goddamned quarter of a century—hell, one vice might add character.
That night, you could barely finish the bottle.

Surfing

You are soothed, alternatively, by pictures of squishy animals, and tales of blood and gore. It makes for a strange browsing history, but hey, bitch, they all think you're a fucking loon anyway.

Profanity

MOTHERFUCKING SHITHEAD JACKASS DOUCHEBAG CUMGUZZLER SLUTWHORE BITCHES.
Nope. Screaming all the curses in the sanctity of your apartment doesn't help. You've checked.

Glue

Your holidays were spent in isolation, and honestly, half of you preferred it that way. For the rest of the time, you focused your latest “work of art,” slowly stroking the acrylic into the canvas, cutting other people's trash into itty bitty triangles, contorting your body into easel-like positions.
If tears mixed in with the glue, no one should be able to tell.

Talentless Hack

1.Ballet

There's a home video of a brightly lit stage, filled with rows of little girls in sparkly, shiny tutus. The camera shifts its focus to an adorable dumpling, a roll of white encased in leotards. The recital goes well for a while. Suddenly, there's a loud crash, and a similar creampuff girl is seen stumbling at the edge of the frame.

The clumsy girl is you, and the one behind the camera, your dad.

Go figure.

2.Voice
All your cousins have been in choirs. Your friends do theatre, and glee club, and intermissions in school programs.

Like them, you love to sing. You have an entire repertoire that ranges from Broadway to Backstreet to Beastie Boys. You automatically sprinkle your conversation with lyrics. Alas, you are tone deaf, and people wince when you open your mouth.

In this, as in other things, you blame your mother.

3.Horseback riding
Some of your fondest childhood memories were going up north, and riding ponies (nags) while your parents followed in cars. Visions of wielding lances or befriending unicorns pranced in your head.

A few years later, as your father's face turned alarmingly red and he started gasping for breath, you found out why they needed cars.

And there went your equestrienne dreams.

4.Theater

Despite your (absolute)(deplorable) lack of singing talent, you have a streak of melodrama and flair for the fabulous. Sometimes, it comes in handy—you're a far better actor (LIAR) than anyone knows. But it's a sneaky skill that comes and goes, as you found out the one and only time you joined a drama club.

Under the hot lights, in front of your Mean Girls peers, you employ nothing but a deer-in-the-headlights gaze.

5.Painting
Of all the lessons, every summer, the ones that stuck with you the most involved pigment and paper.

Now, ink often stains your fingers, and the smell of acrylic has replaced bygone turpentine and coffee grounds. Every chance you get—which is now, once in every blue moon—you sketch and glue on makeshift canvasses.

Centering your soul on the brushstrokes.

She comes in colors

Purple rain

There was a cool shower outside, the kind that makes you crawl into your blankets and dream the afternoon away. In an effort to remain (semi-) productive, you power up your laptop and start reading your old stories.

Almost immediately you wince, and your fingers twitch, longing to delete the lurid manifestations of your younger self's fantasies.

The prose is so purple, you expect eggplants to start shooting out of the screen.

Yellow fever

Shivery hot, hot, hot.

Against your better judgment (lies–you have no better judgment), you watched “Ninja Assassin,” a film about a Japanese nin out for vengeance, played by a Korean popstar.

It was as you expected–stilted dialogues, wooden chemistry, and decent fight scenes. Still, you enjoyed it, if only for the Korean's pretty, pretty face and dynamite abs.

Damn, son.

Green Mile

As you drive home from school, you sing along with the radio. You giggle, snort, and yell out profanities. You snicker aloud at unknown Freudian slips, but when you tell the joke next day, you receive blank faces.

It's not easy being green.

White Horses

It's almost Valentine's Day, and you brace yourself for the Mushy. All around you, your she-friends giggle over their boyfriends, guys A-B-C, random encounters with the other kind, and the “sexy-eyes” technique, while man-pals talk of reservations, pretty girls on a Saturday night, sans the sexy-eyes technique.

You fail at love life.

Still, you console yourself.

Of them all, you're the only one who can still touch a unicorn.

Red Head

Election season is upon you.

Two years ago, you viewed the circus with a mixture of dread and exhilaration. With friends Left and Right (and those politically directionless), there were always clashes of colors and principles, with you splattered with the remnant pigments. On your part, you were steadfastly orange, slightly tinged with more vermillion.

Now, you look around and see blue. Blue alumni, blue parties, BlueSkies. And you are content.

But sometimes, secretly, your heart beats red.

Fail, or, How I Spent My Summer Vacation

1. Laptop
As if sensing there was no more need for frantic thesis typings, it died a day after graduation, and only resumed life two days ago.
The isolation has been good, you think. Detoxifying, even.

2. Dye Job
You casually mentioned to your mother that you wanted a change. Maybe Barney purple. Screaming red. Not quite taking the drastic-cry-for-help-hint, Ma opted for "golden brown." Despite this, however, the herbal mixture didn't take, and it's only in direct sunlight that you can see a reddish tinge.
Go figure.

3. Maturity
The fist slide of your hand on smooth, silk-flesh makes you cringe, and it takes you back, back to that awful moment when you were thirteen that you've never told an adult (that you subsequently spilled to your cousins and closest friends), and that less traumatizing but still mortifying moment when you were twenty (two years ago).
You cringe, you stammer, you rock back and forth, and the come to your rescue, saying you're still a minor.
In essence, you probably are.

4. In sickness and in health
You vomited, had irregular bowel movements, and the aches and the pressure seemed as saturated as your sweat. Then you got better, as you do every month.
*
Four years ago, you underwent this very same exam, with hardly any changes. Well, you think in retrospect, at least there aren't any leering frat boys.
*
A week later, you vomit and egest again.

5. Knowledge
Is power.
Not that it's apparent, aimlessly channel-surfing documentaries and science programs with your body lying supine on the bed, slowly melting from the summer heat.

Friendships

1. You guys missed a spot in my back. Grind the knife hard and deep, okay? I enjoy the pain.
2. After all these years, I guess I don't merit even one sorry.
3. I really, really, really miss you.
4. My God, you are shallow.
5. In retrospect, you did a real number on my psyche. No wonder I have commitment issues.
   
6. One of these days, I'm probably going to irritate you too.
7. For all the defending I do, I wish someone would for once stand up and stick up for me. Which is an entirely wrong mindset, because hey, independence and courage and inner strength and all that jazz, but Lord, I wish someone would say I'm worth fighting for, and worth being a true friend to.
8. Stop making me cry, dammit. I get the worst case of sniffles.
   

T.I.I.S.

(There's supposed to be a picture with this, but hell, I'm far too lazy. And my sister has my Tablet. Oh well. Let the neurotic bitterness commence!)

Wedding dress

Because your sister had her prom night, your mother placed a bridal magazine on the dinner table. Because it was there, you read it. And because you read it, you now find yourself obsessed with the topic, scrutinizing brightly-colored saris, frantically searching for the Labyrinth gown in the dream sequence, sighing over Grace Kelly’s lacy profile as she wed her literal prince.
This is rapidly becoming alarming.

Text message

You’re happy for her, of course. After roughly two years of declaiming and cursing lovelives—lack thereof—you’re glad at least one of you will finally no longer be TIIS.
Then again…

Bitter

Upon reflection, you conclude. Mr. Darcy is an elitist ass, Heathcliff an obsessive sociopath, and Crisostomo Ibarra (cough, cough) a misogynistic playboy who is obviously a vehicle for the desires of his creator. You blame Byron—the cad—for your weakness to pretty antisocial bastards in books and television and movies, and rightfully scorn true love as nothing more than a construct devised by Western, he-man-as-hero-woman-as-weaker-vessel, hegemony on society.
The conspicuous stack of curly-scripted books below your bed says otherwise.

Virgin goddess

Sometimes, in your (not so) brief moments of delusion, you wonder if you’ll stay in this state forever. Constrained by your chaste upbringing and paranoia of anything remotely approaching commitment, you’d like to run forever, like Artemis illuminated by the moon, or as Athenaeternally wrap yourself up in books and justice.
Your namesake, you also note, is the Maiden of Celtic mythology, the proclaimed queen of the fairies.
Since high school, your friends have been calling you Immaculate Mother, for reasons best left unexplained.
It appears you’re stuck in the tower.

Dream

When all is said and done, however, you still fall to pieces upon waking.
Your lips still tingle from the imaginary kiss.

Text message

You stare at the glowing screen in shock.

A ear-piercing scream echoes through the house a nano-second later.

Hours later, all your back-up plans have gone to hell, and you're not quite sure how to feel about that (there goes the job abroad, the skills laboriously honed in four painstaking years, the sheer freedom from academia).

Still, seeing your name in that list, you can almost see your future writ large.

You've made your father quite proud.

21 sentences for a 21-year-old dreamer

(Clearly, in desperate need for an intervention)

1. Yell
On the nights when her mother shrieks and wails and she can’t do anything to help, she quietly cries in her room.
2. Roulette
It seems so easy, she thinks, to let it all slip away, and her mind allows the possibilities were she to play that game with her life; lately, she’s been gambling more and more.
3. Klaxon
In the weeks immediately following the day she nearly killed a man, and the odd day after, she wakes in terror at the sound of a horn.
4. Mirror
In her mind, inner has always trumped outer, and she searches her reflection in vain for some semblance of beauty within.
5. Vomit
As she spews the remains of the day and her stomach pulses and heaves, disjointed statistics on poverty and anecdotes on poor little girls (because needy and poor aren’t one and the same) collapse and congeal in her head.
6. Communication
She was once told she was a hard person to love by one of the people she loved most in the world, and for this reason, and many others, silence lays thick between them; the irony is made complete when she enters her course.
7. Pedal
Someday, when a souped-up motorcycle lies between salvation and a thirty-ton tyrannosaurs rex, she will end up regretting she never learned how to bike.
8. Hand
She hates incompetence, she hates stupidity, she hates the slack-jawed expression on her classmates’ faces, but most of all she hates that crestfallen look on her professor’s face; and so she raises her hand, hating they’ll now brand her a arrogant snotty know-it-all.
9. Fatalism
She believes that whatever Power-that-Is likes to toy with her for Its own sick amusement, and addresses Murphy as if he were an old friend.
10. Ate (Greek)
If she were born in another time and place, she would have made a fine Amazon, right breast notwithstanding.
11. Ate (Filipino)
Many have remarked on their similar mannerisms, some had raised eyebrows on their sibling spats, yet few know that she would murder—eviscerate, disembowel, and make a party hat out of innards—anyone who dared touch a hair on her sisters’ heads.
12. Romantic
She knows waiting for the right one would be utterly idiotic, but she can’t bring herself to pretend about the boys around her even just a little.
13. Nun
When she’s not the smartest or the most artistic or musically talented or prettiest or even the most capable, she wonders if being the most socially aware counts for something in her odd little family.
14. Picture
She doesn’t want to admit to missing them, because dammit they were the ones who hurt her, and shouldn’t they be crawling on their hands and knees after all she’s done for them, yet she still can’t delete the image of two smiling girls.
15. Funeral
In her personal life soundtrack, she had just recently crossed off “Another One Bites the Dust” from her dirge list.
16. Superhero
She prepares elaborate scenarios and backup plans for if and when her cover identity is blown, and most of them aren’t serious.
17. Maiden
A secret suspicion is that she’ll end up being the crabby old virgin with twenty cats; this pisses her off, but mostly because she’d prefer dogs.
18. Roulette (II)
In an entrance exam to another college long ago, she threw her life to the wind and devoted her essay to detailing extraterrestrial life forms in tertiary education; it utterly nonplussed her when said school recommended her for advanced placement.
19. Zephyr
She wants to run and never look back, and drink in the beauty of the world in her wake.
20. Security blanket
Sometimes, change terrifies her, so she keeps her mouth closed and her burdens heavy.
21. Change
But life still goes one, and eventually she shuts out all the clamoring inner voices and goes.

There’s a reason I’ve never had a love life (and his name is Murphy)

(no judgment. Please.)

Artiste

You met him in class. You—young, fresh-faced, naïve (dense). He—effeminate, poetic, apparently interested in the same gender. Coming from a nearly convent-like existence, and with a nearly bone-deep wariness of testosterone, you deemed him safe.

Little did you know that your cousin and several other acquaintances fell for the same trick.

It did not go down well when you saw the pictures on his website.

Jock

Your fellow virgins (never-been-touched, never-been-kissed, never0been-out-on-a-date) have certain “types.” One, a friend with Amazon-like proportions, always falls for beautiful boys shorter than her (and the average man). Another likes a touch of “ruggedness”—for her, a leather jacket will suffice. One sister want manly footballers, another erudite pretty men with snobbish, Mr. Darcy airs.

You never thought you’d fall for an athlete. But the very first thing you noticed, about the very first boy you nearly gave your heart to, was not his wit or his poems to another girl (that came later).

His arms were iron.


Gravelly

When you first heard his deep voice in a school meeting, you thought, “Hurrah. Handsome. Intelligent, because he’s in this university. Straight, despite being in this college. Dear girl, there may be hope for you yet.”

Alas, when you shyly confessed your infatuation to your persistent friend, as the object of your affections strides past…

“___? He’s GAY!”

Your track record remains unchanged.


Boss man

In an online conversation, you and your fellow flighty friend (though she doesn’t quite look it) giggle over a man—more out of something to do, though, than any real attraction. You dissect his habits, speculate about his love-life, and cringe (or laugh heartlessly, depending on the girl) about recent events. In one sheer stroke of stupidity, you post it on your online journal.

And forget that he’s as tech-savvy as the two of you.


Asthma

It is the best and worst moment, sexually speaking, of your young life.

In moments like these, and the ones that follow, you wonder if the fates purposely mess with you for their sick amusement.

The bare expanse of flesh. The mutual friend (and his subsequent message). What the mutual friend saw the summer ago.

When you retell the story, a year after, to someone who turns out to be his second cousin, you conclude.

Murphy is a bloody rat bastard.

Because I Enjoy Being It

(a girl, that is)

Dress

You wanted to be a fashion designer when you grew up.

Earlier, you wanted to be a model.

There are pictures of you, a chubby—but fierce—girl, hip thrust out in an indefinable angle, dainty (pudgy) hands dramatically splayed, in ruffles or polka dots or hideous organza.

Those days are gone. You now have a standard uniform (jeans and t-shirt), which is a far cry from the-middle-school-tomboy-years, but just as changed from your frilly, fabulous prepubescence.

(But secretly, you’re still the girl who loves to wear dresses.)

Lipstick

You’ve made a whore out of Snow White.

You think that as you stare at the prints, photos, apparently, designed to show your creativity. (Or lack thereof).

As you look at your picture, wincing upon imagining your mother’s reaction, you decide it’s probably that particular shade of crimson.

You knew the makeup artist had an in for you.


Flirting

Don’t think no one has noticed. (Or do. It makes for great romantic comedy, if celluloid would translate into real life).

Tucking your hair behind your hear, you gaze coquettishly at the object(s) of your affection. The glance lingers slowly, slowly down. Making sure you are the only person in that stall, you approach. Slowly. Sway your hips.

Once in front, a hand rises to lingeringly touch. The caress is almost obscene, but once again, you think no one’s watching, and so you make your move. Leaning forward, chest exposed, you pick up…

…the book, and gleefully skim through it.

You are an absurd little creature when it comes to bookstores.


Blushing

It’s the envy of many, especially in this white-obsessed, foreign-beauty-loving country of yours.
Clear, pale skin isn’t all that great, though, particularly if it reddens easily and you (used to) train often.

The men think you’re flushed because of them, which makes you want to stab them through the heart with the phallic symbols they’re so fond of, or shriek and pretend to be lesbian just to get them off the notion you may have a teeny (eensy) crush on them

Never mind that it’s actually true.


Period

It’s burning white vision bursting at the tops of your eyes. It’s nausea, shivering and plunging at ten thousand feet. Pulsing, pounding pressure, starting from the low centre of your body and radiating downwards until you can’t move, can’t do anything but lie limply on the bed. Every step taken is an epic battle in itself. Cold sweat becomes rivulets pouring down your spine.

Considering this happens once a month, it’s shocking how you’re considered “the weaker sex.”