On my bad days, the loneliness gets overwhelming. Like there’s this gaping open wound at the very center of my soul. And I start to imagine that it’ll always be this way. That I’ll never have someone to come home to that I really, really want to be with, that I really, really want to talk to.
The thought is not supposed to make me cry, but on a day like this, it does. And on a day like this, the tears won’t stop falling …
So I walk down this familiar Timog path – one I can now almost walk with my eyes closed – and I start to see myself as this eccentric, crying lady haunting the avenue … a crazy lady with stringy, unshowered long hair, worn out blue sneakers and a very big backpack walking back and forth, and back and forth at night without any point … like that cooky costumed guy who calls himself Zorro, the one with a mask over his eyes and a bolo in hand, who hangs around UP engaging the bikers in political debate. Urban legend has it he was once a UP professor and mountaineer — but the legend doesn’t extend to explaining the reasons behind his madness.
I’d be Zorro’s equivalent on Timog Avenue, stopping now and then maybe to peer into the windows of the two Starbucks branches I used to order tall mochas from, but the guards would know from the way I smelled not to let me in. I’d then stride past the network’s main gate and give a snappy salute to the Castrillo monument, just because. And my former PAs and researchers, who would by then be the big bosses at the station, would cluck their tongues and nod in horror at the sight of me in dirty blue rags … and one of them might consider my story for a mid-century revival of Wish Ko Lang! but no, they’d drop it because they needed a celebrity case study for the ratings.
Years would pass and the crazy lady would become a moving Timog landmark. Urban legend would spread that she was once a nightclub dancer or a GRO from nearby Quezon Avenue, Klasmeyts maybe, whose heart got broken by some good-looking politician who promised to leave his wife for her but never did.
Or maybe the lady was on her way once to a 24-hour gym, when she happened to catch her lover kissing a hosto in front of one of Timog’s male strip joints. The jealousy and the shock of discovering he had all the while been gay drove her to the very edge of reason.
The broken heart would be the only constant in the stories.
A while later, people would stop asking. The crying blue lady would become just as much a taken for granted part of the landscape as the little statues of the forgotten scouts who all died in a plane accident headed to some event no one I know seems to remember anything about anymore. And one early morning, unable to breathe from too much pollution in her lungs she, or me, would finally stop haunting the avenue, dropping dead at the feet of those anonymous boy scouts.
