I finally climbed again the beloved Pampanga mountain of Sinukwan, Mount Arayat.
Here he comes again, my co-workers would sigh when they hear me talk, “Alex had just turned eighty years old. Yeah, he talks like real old, about to retire after having saved his village, now he’s an eighty year old building ready for implosion.
“Oh did I say eighty in age or IQ? He is actually eighty years old with the brain of an eight…”and so on and so forth as they tease me forever. “Are we talking about his eighty sex partners or his eighty times eight ‘getting dumped’ moments? How much strokes does it take before his orgasm, you’re right, eighty!” They laugh. They simply ignore me.
Yeah, we’ve been working together so long that sometimes I wonder if I need to work somewhere else. “It’s been a while,” I say as I sit on my chair and most of them start rolling their eyes when I start talking about how I provided for my family for the past 17 years, how I put 5 college kids through college – “
“Alex,” they want to say, “Shut up already.”
But I don’t shut up, really, because I have nothing else to talk about. Nowadays I just feel very old. Always saying, Someday, I’m going to retire. That’s easy to say, but where do I retire? I always talk of settling in the capitals of Europe, oh, yeah, like I’m a multi-millionaire Caucasian with a lot of money to spend. The best I can do for Europe is a few days there. The Philippines used to be my prime choice, but honestly, the last time I was there, between nationalism and allergies that spread all over my skin including my gums, I just couldn’t wait to get back to Florida. Alright, this is the shift. Come retirement time, I am hoping I’d be floating in this world, Europe one day, Asia the next, America mostly, like I were some damn tropical bird. Even that costs money too. How do I secure my health insurance? How do I pay my monthly mortgage? How do I… well, retiring to me is just a dream. Yeah, it’s all just a dream. And the best I can hope for is traveling now. But travel where and with whom?
I feel returning home again. Sometimes I check out the pictures I took the last time I went home to the Philippines. One thing I realized was, I did not need to go to Manila to enjoy my homecoming, which used to be the case in the old days.