Paper Carvings

I remember a classmate from high school. She used to get reprimanded by teachers for not paying attention in class. The reason? She read too much. Even during class hours, she was always reading. In retrospect, this always amused me. Imagine scolding a teen for reading too much. It’s a good problem to have. I’ve always liked to read books, even as a kid. When I was very young, before I entered kindergarten, my parents bought me children’s books by Filipino authors.

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On free afternoons, I like to stay in cafés. I don’t particularly go there for the coffee — I’m not much of a coffee snob, though I do drink coffee on the regular, unfortunately — I go there for a place to sit, for the ambiance. The drink and dessert are just a bonus. When I do this, I’m always alone. This is my alone time. Naturally in such places, people gather.

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I still don’t know what I want to do. I don’t think my problem is unique: I don’t want to claim that out of the many people who have ever lived on this earth, I’m one of the special few who have experienced this, because I know that’s not true. I feel like I’m in a strange time in my life where I’m stuck between two eras: my childhood and my adulthood.

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I’ve always had a journal for as long as I can remember. My earliest memory of a journal was back in third grade. We were tasked with keeping a diary as a requirement for one of my classes. Each section was assigned a color for their diary covers: my section was yellow. I wrote about my daily life — I remember writing about that one time when a man picked up a dropped twenty-peso bill in front of me on the street.

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