While people turned from festive to maudlin drunk in all the revel, I was losing my voice, my patience, my brain cells over half a bottle of an excess dose of beer (from the one bottle allowance according to health standards), my wallet, all energy and temporary bliss in my not-so-merry encounters.
At 4am, the city was a sprawled out, wasted woman, unaware of her horrendous nudity. My Sinulog spirit could have been there rotting amongst the foul lot of garbage, rain-soaked and unread flyers, vomitus and spit. I never really caught it, what with work hampering me from this once-a-year body-slamming merry-making with the whole city. A few hours earlier, I was hoping to have a limb of it at the end of the day just so I could say I enjoyed something. Then en route to achieving that goal at Outpost, burnout drove me to glorious danghag-ness.
Weary and roughed up as I was, I zoomed out in the middle of a Happy Days set all the way to Kadangyan, and all them party people looked the same to me: dancing ants.
And after all that, I still have a couple of deadlines to beat, but already I can hardly hear myself when I speak. If exhaustion snapped that call center agent dead a few months back, then I must start fretting, unless I willingly accept the afterlife and repent for all my trespasses wholeheartedly, like what I did to the box of scrumptious and tempting chewy Gobstoppers that one of them Sinulog party people accidentally left in our booth. Pader, porgive me, sumakabilang buhay ang kendi.
But I can't, because I'm still vile and villainous, hoping that the person who now has a hold of my 2-peso-bill will fall into a manhole and break a limb, get stuck there for-EVERRRRRRRR, grow a beard (his nails too perhaps) spending the Golden Years and beyond in that odoriferous sewer and finally become the world's first man-hole hermit enlightened by my very dead Grand-aunt from whom the mentioned antique item came, and who then wheezed into the otherworld by way of an asthma attack.
Kidding aside, I'll keep in mind the line Cynthia Alexander signed on my God-forsaken cellphone cover years back: For everything a reason.
Or so I console myself.
So I've resolved to give myself reprieve from misfortune, file me a leave in the tedious mid-week, and as always, rise from the ashes: here comes the most beautiful manananggal in the city. I shall rip your viscera out and offer them to the devil in frenzied dancing and wild wicked lunatic cackling.
