I looked forward to living alone but I ended up in a house that's never empty.
I'm sharing a cheap condo unit with fifteen strangers.
Yeah, fifteen.
I wish I was kidding. It's pretty much like a low-budget Pinoy Big Brother. So none of the fancy stuff -- just double-decks, curtain partitions, Orocans, and a poorly-maintained public pool.
I miss home, but I like this kind of independence.
I do my laundry every Thursday. I (still) hate doing other people's dishes. Grocery shopping excites me, except for the part when I have to pay for everything in my cart.
I like being able to stay out late for no reason. I like meeting new people and exploring new places (even if it means getting lost).
But I miss having a space to create, too. Or a space to move about, in general.
The thing about being a bedspacer is that neither of those is included in the monthly rent. This means I'm sleeping with half of my stuff at the foot of my bed.
And if I need to work, it's either on a bed table that isn't even sturdy enough for my laptop or on a kitchen table that's always littered with leftovers and unwashed dishes.
So I go out. My weekend constants are overstaying at Bo's and having jeepney joyrides (because I couldn't be bothered to learn the route until now).
I'm trying to be more honest with my feelings.
My almost instinctive tendency to set aside what I'm feeling for the sake of getting through the day is, I admit, quite bothersome. I can't make sense of anything until I write it down, and even then I'm still bad at doing so. So there's the problem.
This obsession with writing things down is not anymore a healthy habit. It's supposedly for quiet internalization, but instead it's become an outright refusal to deal with my feelings as they come. An excuse to ignore it until I forget it ever happened.
So I'm fixing that. Or at least trying to.
There's a different kind of solitude that comes with being alone during a holiday when people cross oceans to come together.
And I'm strangely fine with it. Sure, today's been pretty shitty but it has nothing to do with the holidays -- just my usual carelessness intensified by homesickness.
And I've always liked NYE better, anyway!
That said, I hope you all get to make the most of your holiday break (if you have any!). Now I'm going to go ahead and watch sad movies just for the sake of catharsis.
