The morning after

TRAILS UP NORTH
Glo Abaeo Tuazon

Right now I write not because I am one but because in the comfort of my room with the rain pounding on the panes I know some people outside are trying to scramble for higher grounds. And I’m somehow comfortable with only the tiny water globules dripping from the ceiling, tick tocking in an amplified, thunderous clap on a pail below it.

Earlier, I was out, wet and cold thinking when I wake up the morning after, the sun would be out, peering like a naughty child gone wild and now pacified. Yesterday the flooded streets and tilting structures were the things I thought would be the worst that I’d see in this storm. Yet it never let up and still pouring and pounding like the unrelenting fury of a love cursed.

I think to myself as I awoke and stand behind the glass doors watching the world outside that maybe, in my comfort is the nagging, tugging feeling that all these are partly each and everyone’s fault. Not to have foreseen this and not having done anything at all to have prevented so much of the chaos.

For those of us trying to do something, maybe the effort wasn’t enough, that maybe it was too small to even touch base in the goals of our minds. Now the questions run around my brain, purging itself of the numbing conscience streak that like a neon sign keeps darting out bright every now and then.

Am I alone in this thoughts? Maybe and maybe not. So I ask again. Like a crazy fool pressing my face against the cold, moist glass to scare the fogs of sleep from my eyes, where was I when the world turned around me?

And where were you? Where were we when the skies opened up to let in the fury of nature we thought we could prevent with technology and knowledge and progress? Where were we when the skies poured buckets of tears to drown the innocent?

Where were we when mountains collapsed with no trees to break their fall? Where were we when the lands cried in vain to hold on to the soil that we made loose? Where were we when our brothers cried, scrambling for dry ground, carrying their life in the palms of their hands? Where was the world when the world cried, it cannot even find itself...

I was sure God wasn’t such a mess when He created this land. He made it good, and made it beautiful and bountiful and put us there and gave us emotions and put in us more brains than we could imagine. Then He sighed in relief to see us all well, and flipped a thumbs up sign. I am sure God must be bawling in Heaven right now that we have given so much pain to ourselves, trying to be gods in our own ways like we could change the world in seven days.

We have become just figures that never mattered and looked at our world as just a space to consume our time. Mindless beings that never learned to care thinking it’s another’s responsibility to do just that. For those not affected, look around, for the wandering souls lost in the rush – for the lost graces that could have made a little difference. For the wasted things and efforts and emotions that could have been saved. We have forgotten. We all have turned into beings that consume and never remembered to give back.

And maybe I’m rambling but what the heck, this might teach me a lesson or two, and maybe it would do to you too, to us all. That perhaps in the onslaught of realization and frustration when this storm is all over I might just be looking at the world in a new light, and loving it more too.

To all the victims of the worst storms to hit us in decades, may we all live and not forget the day we almost lost everything. The flooding victims of City Camp and Quarry. To those who lost their lives and homes in the various landslides in Irisan, Fairview and Quezon Hill, Bokawkan, Pinsao, Asin. To those affected in Km. 3 along the banks of Balili, in Puguis, in Pico and Buyagan. In Mankayan, in Tublay, Atok, Buguias, Sablan and Tuba. All over Baguio City and Benguet, and the Cordilleras. In Luzon. The Philippines calls for an “SOS FOR LOVE”. – Email: twilight_glo@yahoo.com