A Home in the Rain

There's a typhoon today, and so no volleyball, just hour after hour of lying in bed, with the sheets tangled round my feet, and channel-surfing. It's not so bad, actually. I like curling up in bed with a nice book, reading in the weak aquatic light coming from the window. It brings to mind those slow, lazy college days at the boarding house, when I would just press my nose against a newly acquired copy of a Milan Kundera book while listening to Tracy Chapman and the rain. Or walking under the acacia trees along the UP oval, trying with the help of a puny umbrella to reach AS with my clothes dry. It reminds me of a boy I adored, when I was still just a boy, and how one time we made love in my kubo while a storm turned the world upside down outside. Later, when the rain subsided and he'd fallen asleep, I sat by the door just watching the broken twigs and bougainvilla blooms strewn in the yard. That was a strange time, a time of uncertainties and hurts, but also of poetry and song and foolish hope.

Now, so many years later, I'm here in the orange room of my apartment, listening to "Fix You" by Coldplay, which is a perfect bad weather song, if ever there was one. And suspended in the hammock of memory, I feel neither happy nor sad, but at home, which is not a bad place to be.