The Angel

I am out of the conversation. It's been a long time since I've been part of the normal, typical conversation. I've had a few lunches and dinners with officemates and they talk about the married life, having babies, and raising kids. They talk about tuition fees, college educations, and how children these days are so different from our generation. I play with my food and imagine the world has swallowed me whole. Especially when they remember that I'm around and then they focus on me and ask me when I'm going down the road well-travelled. Marriage, families, babies, kids, the whole package of the acceptable, responsible life.

I had been meaning to write for a long time, but the idea kept slipping away. On some random moments, I wish I had a pen and paper and I could simply write down my thoughts before they vanish. But ultimately, I let them dissipate into thin air. My mind wanders into many different things until I find myself falling asleep. I would tell myself, I am writing, forever, constantly, perpetually writing. Just not here. This part of my life, I choose to have it muted. An embargo of what goes on in every waking moment of it.

"How mean," a friend once remarked when I said how some people are such sissies. "But that's how I see it." I argued. "What is a sissy? Isn't it being cowardly? Being weak?" "Yes, but..." "So how would you consider someone who requires someone to have a list of material things to own? Oh, my boyfriend must have a car, a condo, rich, blah, blah, blah. Isn't that a sign of weakness? A sign of dependence? A kind of effeminacy, a regression to the dark ages when women were the weaker sex and they need these things as security for their future? Why should these things be on the MUST list for a boyfriend? Is he too weak to earn on his own? Is he not man enough to dream these things as something he could acquire for himself rather than necessitating these things on some dreamboat?" "Still..."