duskwatcher

Walked through the office building's glass door just as the gray of day faded into the deep blue of twilight. Turned right and headed for the underpass that would take me to the other side of Ayala Avenue.

As I passed by one of the older buildings in the area, someone decided to flip a switch.

And a row of Christmas lanterns flickered to life above me.

They were star-shaped. Old-school parols. The type that students had to make (but more often than not, simply purchased from the palengke) as a project about this time of the year.

That moment, I forgot how the season I used to look forward to as early as September had morphed into a mess of hollow rituals, forced merriment and artificially heightened emotions I'd dread as early as the previous December.

For a moment, I simply stood underneath yellow, green, blue and red stars while the rest of Makati hurried by.

Aside from eating up what was left of the long weekend, having to reformat my PC at home plunged me into a day of introspection.

I had to go through hundreds of files hastily transferred into a borrowed back-up drive. In them, I was confronted with the remains of games long uninstalled from my system – saves, campaign maps and audio files that have since lost propose and meaning; downloads both naughty and nice (with about 90% predictably on the naughty side); documents from forgotten projects; several stories, most of them in need of decent endings or even substantial middles.

Then I had to install various programs and drivers. It was a bit of a shock doing this all at once for, as with the case of my printer and scanner, they had originally entered my system one at a time. I also realized that for some, like my email account, the cd installers I had were obsolete because newer versions and upgrades had automatically been downloaded through the span of years.

The general effect was that of flipping through a photo album, or, more accurately, cleaning out an old wallet. The last few years of my life, told with frozen ones and zeroes, flashed before my eyes.

My pc became some dusty specter from Dickens that showed me what I had become. Or what I was turning into. It was an unsettling analogy that made me realize just how much the world had changed while I remained blissfully stuck somewhere around 2001 and 2003. I had seen the signs these past months, but chose to ignore them: being too comfortable watching movies alone or having lunch by myself, not minding if a Friday night was more often than not spent at home, accepting being solitary and single calmly, almost graciously.

And all the while, the people who mattered in my life had moved on, acquired new or simply different priorities. Met new people.

Sure, they’d hear from me from time to time. But then, I was turning into a revenant. An abandoned website still up on the internet. A lifeless program that will have the answers but only for the right questions. A shadow from the past. An ancient whisper lingering in a cavern.

Time to reboot.

Last night, I passed through the elevated walkway on my way to Greenbelt Mall.

There, I saw a forty-something man swinging his racket, smashing imaginary (or, heaven forbid, invisible) tennis balls as he walked the other way.

Creepy.

After nearly slipping (my reflexes actually seem to be improving as the years go by) on wet cobblestone paving last night, I realized what words I would most likely utter should death come all of a sudden.

"Awwww fuck."