And as if in the movies, a dog at the corner barked at me for calling it a day at 7am. I could imagine it: the pathway, narrowing to the far end, a long shot. At the far end, a taxi stops, the a door opens, i come down, whistle a happy tune, walk (almost to a gallop) and then by the time i reach the middle of the covered walk a white dog barks at me and i am startled, i stop, look at the dog, walk slowly, start up the path again.
And then we come to a rewind of the past few hours.
Dog, could i help it if April Fools' Day was a reason to celebrate?
Some legends have it that April Fools was for the misinformed, or the deviants, who celebrated the new year on that day just when people adopted the Gregorian calendar. I say new beginnings need not fall on the first of January.
So Liyo, Vera and I decided to get us a bottle of wine, a few things to munch on while we filled the night with talk of oddities and taboo. And among the [tired] gullible who fell prey to hoaxes and Famas-award winning acting in the wee hours of April first: Paulo and Ariel.
Taught Vera how to smoke, though i told her not to get hooked on it, because if she did it will be for my conscience to bear, and quitting is such a hard job, a day job you want to get over with every single day where waking up is such an ordeal; you might as well have been hooked to coke or shabu, except that death is slower with nicotine and you enjoy sessions of thinking in the extreme, no blurry visuals and hallucinations, no walls that quiver and colors that burst like fireworks and make you say life is fucking great.
I couldn't teach her how to kiss though – she'd have to get it from a man who wouldn't be too chicken shit to take her on. Toasted to the shit and insanity of life, because to find a home you have to go on a quest; or to find a good guy the best you can do is look for the most eligible jerk; because you gotta let go if you want to kiss a man, or life; because you gotta have sex with yourself before you have sex with anyone; and some men just have small dicks (i say this literally and figuratively); because roads aren't for destinations, they're for journeys, like the movie said.
We waited on the gutters for The Fool's Sun to come up. Then we walked to her office where her bag was, because her mother had just sent her a message saying “Berali,” (see, this is how Vera Leigh is called at home, two separate words like Siamese twins they sound distorted) “asa na ang yellow nga bag?”
So we walked in the cold air, rode the elevator as if it were taking us to the moon, took the stairs to her floor and stopped at the best parts of her hell house (i think even hell has cold places where you can be lonely).