In 2009 I got this job documenting peace conferences that allowed to me to get this room which collected quite a rent in my pocket and a little after that I also got myself a discard laptop which made me stay inside the house instead of out on the street where I mostly was for years on end. It was a new situation, not bad altogether, only rather too dull too easy for comfort. It guarded me in some way, the staying-home: I felt I was in some kind of a built-in control program that kept people quiet and acquiescent. It also made me watchful of myself: did it silence the mind as well and all the intelligence that it rallies and deploys to espy upon the world?
I leaked there. But how comforting: to know that one is still their old demented self.
It is not that I stopped being insane altogether just for getting a room of my own. The truth is, the relative comfort only made me more schizophrenic. I could not get inside a big mall playing the six o’ clock angelus without thinking of smashing a glassful of cosmetics or knocking people’s bowed-down heads as they held on to their baskets and cartfuls of goods while saying their holy marys mother of God, and when I went to the counter, how I begrudged every paper money going out of my wallet: I was supposed to have those goods for free and not being made to pay. Still I paid my way and went to work day after day to write what was asked of me, and though I always intended to give them the crap that they wanted and more than deserved, I always ended up delivering more than what I got paid for.
What’s happening to me offline is something else. Most days I kept away from people. When I rode the jeep I would not even look at people around me. My head was always turned away; long before I stretched my hand to hand the driver small change, I had taken leave of everyone already. It did help that as soon as my foot touched ground, I was in my room already. If I went with a friend, I mostly sat and listened and would not talk, nodding at things I otherwise thoroughly disagreed with. It was an unfair exchange, I knew, and though it was good I had a little money to pay for my dinner and when the friend felt generous enough, for hers, too, I felt sad with the thought that if my friend found out where lied my beliefs, she would feel betrayed and take me for the cur traitor bitch that I am. I had had more than enough of bitter friendships to last me a lifetime to be making some more.
So anyway, with the job, I was aground most days and had this notion that I’d escaped or was momentarily making my way out of the precarious fuck of a life which I’d liked to believe, I’d always chosen and lived spectacularly. I remembered so well that before that room were two other rented rooms behind me, one a makeshift quarter nailed against the tall fence of plush Las Terrazas in Ma-a where I got mauled by two boys next-door, upon the request of the women at the compound; and another a ragtag upstairs affair right under the shade of a star apple tree with neither electrical sockets nor a decent ceiling. The owner was what you call fallen royalty, a local magnate in the food business once, Magnolia chicken and ice cream specifically, and did not provide light for the helps because anyway they just went home at ten or eleven to sleep, so gas lamp should be enough. I left that compound as soon as the rooms next-door got occupied by boys who liked to gather over cheap gin at the veranda right across my room’s window to talk about girls and prostitutes. That’s how I got mauled in the last compound at Las Terrazas, after all: when I started behaving like I grew prostitutes and made them so respectable too that no man may badmouth them for as long as I was in the vicinity.
So I got that nice room right across McArthur Highway in that nice compound at Oak Street in Matina and I rather liked it: white walls all over the place, a closet for clothes and a bed with a book case for a headboard, a big tiled bathroom and a kitchen with a door that looks across the green hills that is GSIS Heights. I was a long spiral case above the rest, mostly couples and families in temporary living arrangements, pending the arrival of a baby or the purchase of a house in one of the city’s ever expanding housing subdivisions. There were four of us in the loft. I occupied the room in the middle part of the house, between the kitchen and bathroom on one side and sleeping quarters on the other side. The other roomers were all young, in their twenties and early thirties, employed in one painless occupation or another, a tutorial agency, a call center selling computer parts and repair services, or a company distributing and installing house appliances. I am a writer by profession, which is, strictly speaking, no profession at all. “So where do you write? For the radio?” they asked. I write for research institutions and non-government organizations, I said. Do they pay? How much? they asked. I get by, I said.
A week into the rooming life I got into a nice conversation with Mr Congeniality. I was cleaning the window jalousies thick with dust you could sow tomato seeds into them. And why are you smiling ever so sweetly to me? I asked. I’m so happy because you are cleaning our windows, he said. Well, I’m not happy, I said, and I’m not doing it to make you or anyone happy 'derstand?
He didn’t understand and his own happiness was so fragile that we didn't get by not long after that.
