THE EVE

It’s simply a given. When it’s Christmas, the day dictates that there be lots of warm smiles and pleasant greetings. It’s a given that there’s somehow more patience in the world than an ordinary day could hold. You are mandated by something intangible—perhaps by experience, or years of conditioned tradition or perhaps by an unyielding faith—to look deeper upon yourself and think of the many things that you ought to be thankful for and consequently celebrate; So I try to analyze it if I’m somehow disappointed that I had my Christmas Eve spent in the hospital working, and came to a conclusion that no, I am clearly not. My spirit was not even dampened but neither is it uplifted. I feel happy for the people celebrating and not one for being apathetic, I genuinely feel happy for them even when I know for a fact Christmas gets celebrated rather differently in my family. There’s also a wholehearted smile from me as I look at the people making up my life be them relatives, friends, co-workers, acquaintances… but I can never rid of the feeling that I’m hollow. I feel like a vacuum, an observant, one who rather just watches from a far as the day of celebration unfolds, watching the people and world from a different set of eyes. See, I’m the friendly sort, I revel in people contact and deeply enjoy engaging in conversation and getting to know them, but there’s also this different peace in being isolated, having the irony and being the complete opposite of thy self that interacts with others. And I feel her lurking still, the other one--the cold calculating one who’d rather be doing something else every moment that I’m actually doing the worldly things I actually need to do. This Christmas Eve, though, I’m very grateful for her presence and am relieved at not being the normal sort else I’d have probably crumbled or worse. For me, you see, Christmas Eve is receiving a message about my sister about our father getting completely crushed by his son’s blatant display of arrogance and disrespect. It’s about being told how the said brother had taken and given all the Christmas dishes my father prepared and saved up so this stupid brother of ours could throw them out to his buddies coz they are effing having a damn drinking session. I’m not condemning drinking here. I’m contemptuously spitting at the insurgence and disrespect and damn idiocy displayed by my brother. Oh I love him and I’d probably kill for him but you just don’t get to step over a family! No. You don’t trample upon them or attack them when they clearly don’t deserve it or asked for it. He was totally ignoring and missing our family code here. Granted, our family does not operate like how normal people’s family does. We’re all thoroughly broken and re-attached and twisted and knotted the right way so we could function well in society but US siblings learned to cope well by our unspoken family code. He’s irritatingly breaking all of them and is trespassing and being completely dumb. He isn’t even thinking, I’d reckon. He keeps blaming our father and our past and our family’s brokenness so bloody much that he can’t seem to see himself that he JUST actually enjoys being stupid and irresponsible as much as he’s addicted to his cigarettes and alcohol. You don’t get to insult people when you’re not qualified to launch an insult yourself. You attack other people and in turn, you open up yourself for an attack. You just don’t shoot people and not expect to be shot back at. He doesn’t have anything to show, haven’t proven anything yet. He’s reserved w/ the right to nurture or hold on to his anger but acting upon it heedlessly and needlessly is unforgivable.

I’d have broken this Christmas Eve afresh and would have probably lost my control had I not turned myself inside my mind deeper and remembered and dragged out who and how I was before. Then I remembered the importance of names and with the names come the existence. My brother must’ve forgotten of her and how Aki Strife’s a bitch. The sort of person who can exchange punches with her brother and spit like a snake. The one who can just as easily trample upon anyone else manipulatively. And it was sort of a relief to just let her take over for those precious moments when I could’ve had cried and gotten weak over our brokenness. We are all so convoluted and everyday’s just another mission of the thousands and thousands of others. Unending. The horizon but an illusion. We momentarily forget our disfigured selves, having just brushed them aside momentarily coz we’re so used to it BUT a day always come once in a while and makes us remember.