I watched Harrison Ford in his youth, swinging through vines, dodging arrows laden with Curacao poisons. My sister told me, though, that I should be more careful now with Harrison Ford's face, I should not scratch him, I should not lose him somewhere or pass him around like a commodity.

And I just nodded as I looked at the old man, slipped him inside my pocket, and, later in the day, all I could ever do was to bite through custard cakes as I watch him digging for the Ark of the Covenant.

Yesterday when my younger niece had the itch for some lactum ingestion, we cut our sibling walk short and sped through Mindanao Avenue in hushed engine puffs as the kids sang songs and laughed. And when we reached their home I browsed through racks of DVDs, examining each one with careful flipping and prying, expecting to see Gossip Girl's second season or the latest in the ever unheard TV show, Eureka.

But I found this Indiana Jones Trilogy set, in cold glossy metal case, Harrison Ford's youthful faced splashed over beneath prominen thumb marks. If I didn't watch the 'Crystal Skull', I would never have bothered grabbing the thing, after overcharging my sister's videocam, leaving the screen yellowish and pale, only to find out later that she and her husband quarrelled over such a petty thing. Petty things spurned from my carelessness, petty things that splurted out from the fact that oftentimes, I just don't give a damn about things.

So at day's end I was able to watch one movie, mortified of such horror that one film was more than two hours, even more infuriated because I can't have this Monday as a free day, I have to study for Math and Accounting if I want to make my mother and father retire with convenience.
It then flashed upon me one evening's conversation with my father, from his nostalgic spree in Tabaco, in our house where all eight of us grew up, where I learned to ride a bike, where he always goes back to at late evenings, drunk and near dozing off.

He told me that it will make him and Mama really happy if I graduate Summa cum Laude.

I told him being drunk and being such a providing father didn't give him any excuse to ask from me such impossible things.

He laughed and said it's possible, if only I work hard.

And I didn't bother to say anything again, I just looked at jeepneys speeding through, listened to him laughing again, and mumbled something about me always disliking it whenever he calls all of us drunk and disoriented.

Of course it wasn't my father. It was him and alcohol, it was him and reality, and the lack of obstruction for truth to flow out.

And in this evening I look back at hushed days, suppressed in my own sense of remembering, when my eldest brother called me up telling me how disappointed my father was when he learned I was taking subjects so I can shift to Philosophy. He told me my father can never tell me bluntly what he wanted me to be.

So here I am, borrowing portable DSL connections, slapping the keyboards, glancing at my Math notes at my left side, trying to picture out what becomes of these seconds as the night breezes through. Here I am pouring myself into words, squinting my eyes from the brightness of the fluorescent bulb, unmoved my crickets humming and the promise of what is yet to come.

Here I am looking back, juggling thoughts, repainting memories. Not because I am nostalgic and not because the hours and minutes tickle me to remember.

But because the night seems so barren and long, and the weeks and years seem to dance away too slowly, too silently.