Sunday Morning Walks

By R.A.B.

Sunday mornings for Terry have always involved a morning ritual of going to the grocery store for grocery and passing towards the park on the way there to feed the pigeons that loiter around the park bench. He’s always had a soft spot for all kinds of animals in his heart and pigeons are no exception, not to mention the five-foot boa he keeps in a terrarium inside his two-bedroom loft down here at Manhattan. For Terry life should always have its oddities, no one should seek to become average for he’s always believed that mediocrity is a major source of dullness and dullness can sometimes be deadly-he knows, he’s been there.

Seven years ago, not long before he migrated to the United States from the Philippine Islands, he’s had a run in with suicidal tendencies. Apparently he’s grown weary of his life’s dullness, which was based on routines and over-security. The constant cycle of endless boredom coupled with near perfect altercations within his adventurous and timid persona had driven him to the brink of no return. Thank god his friend forgot his wallet at his house where if he hadn’t he wouldn’t have come back to get it and he wouldn’t have seen Terry, dying, lying on the kitchen floor over the pool of his own blood which was spewing over a self-inflicted wound over his right wrist. Well, thank god those days are over now.

Ever since he settled here in New York he’s made a few changes in his life. Weekly activities with friends and relatives replaced his reclusive activity of spending most of his free time lingering around the four corners of his house while indulging in the self destructing activity of using the idiot box, drinking beer and thinking about how redundant and miserable his life has been. The nightly ritual of sitting beside the sound system just before the depressing scene in front of the television begins, listening to dark gothic music was replaced by the habit of reading different genres of books and listening to a somewhat lighter blend of indie-rock music which not just detest how bad life is like what gothic music does. And most of all the night by night thinking of death and fantasizing over dying in his sleep that night was actually replaced by looking forward to tomorrow; finally he could wake up in the morning, excited to get up and see the sun instead of wanting to get up and see the eternal darkness that he wished for the other night. Oh yes things have been that good for him.

Now most of the routine in Terry’s life had been erased- he’s learned to live with spontaneity and excitement and has embraced the very essence of life itself which is loving life itself; except for these Sunday trips to the grocer’s which he hope would end when he’s moved on from admiring the grocer’s daughter’s beauty into finally mustering the needed amount of courage to ask her out for a date and hopefully the more demanding task of asking her out on a date. Anyway life is too big to be lived in a routine, if you live it in a routine it would always find its way to escape from your routine whether in the form as light as realization over coffee or as extreme as actually surviving a self-inflicted wound on the wrist, like Terry- who was lucky enough to be given a second chance.

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