header image

HOME

This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

Interested in What I Create?



Bibliography

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

entry arrow1:26 AM | Epiphany on an Early August

All of us are capable of being decisive, sharply even, and with a forcefulness and resolute steadfastness that can bow even mountains. Once, when I was young and trudging on a path that was leading me to such depths of sorrow -- to be exact: I was a Physical Therapy student on the edge of madness, uncertain why I was I figuratively flogging myself with a future I was sure I did not want -- I went on my first hospital duty, dressed in that uniform white smock that marked most medical people, my stethoscope around my neck, my other medical apparatuses in the bag I derisively called my "manicure kit." I was assigned to check on an old patient, a woman, and was told to get her vital signs, which would include taking her blood pressure and her pulse. She was fat, and looked angry. I trudged on. But I could not find her pulse anywhere, and so, proper bedside manners all in display, I pretended to have found it, and noted an imaginary number together with her "blood pressure." A few minutes later, I found myself back in the hospital corridor. I just stood there, immobile, a quiet epiphany slowly dawning on me, and I thought: This is sadness. I must have stood there for minutes, hours. I stared at nothing, taking note, by and by, how long the corridor seemed, how anti-septic it looked under the wash of cold, white fluorescent light. And I decided this was not how I imagined my life to be, trapped in a possible future in a place such as this. The next day, on a December, I decided to drop out of school, and change course. I think of that as one of the greatest triumphs of my life -- because I was unafraid, and I had taken firm control of my life. Today is the first of August, and in a few more days, I will turn 32 -- "finally out of the calendar," so they will say. And somehow I wonder: how I do channel once again that vigorous fearlessness when I was a younger man? Because there is a voice inside me telling me to take control once again a life slowly descending into a grinding sadness. I know what makes me unhappy. Now, if only I can turn seriously away.

Labels:


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich




GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS