Gumption

It is 2 in the morning as I write this. Before me, this scene.

A gibbous moon, hanging low, gorged and almost full. Lights from a construction site from across the street that curves to my right. A few cars on the road. A gas station half-asleep. Most of the city in dreams. Silence.

I take a long time to write. It is hard to sort out the many thoughts roiling in my head. Even harder to find the words.

I can always make a convenient excuse: I’ve recently undergone anesthesia, as well as had a drug injected into my forearm to make me forget the indignities the medical staff did to prep me for surgery—a date-rape drug, the anesthesiologist told me. His name is Christian Doctor. Really. He is Doctor Doctor, my doctor. I met him right when they wheeled me into the O.R. Laid out flat on the gurney I felt an urge to create a limerick. When you’re about to face uncertainty and still feel like reaching for a pen and paper, that makes you, in my book, a writer.

In my first year in creative writing school, Butch Dalisay had told us, his timorous class, “Have the gumption to call yourself a writer.” Of course I didn’t believe him. Two years later, I did. I was watching an Ateneo-La Salle game from the referee’s table next to the Ateneo bench when a scuffle among the on-court players erupted into a free-for-all. Alums from both schools charged into the court. From the audience behind us, Rico Villanueva and someone else—maybe Rainier Sison?—vaulted over the railing, swinging. It was blue and green mayhem. I scrambled under the table, took out my Palm and tap-tapped about the chaos around me. That’s when I knew, for sure, that I was a writer, when the only way for me to make sense of things was to reduce them to words, when the words were almost, almost as meaningful as the event unfolding.

I regret abandoning this blog for such a long time. My life has, since October, been suspended by a court case, an operation last February, and yet another surgery this May. It is hard to make plans. But I can write about it, perhaps to help me find a way, some way, to navigate through my why’s.