I’ve started reading a book called Daily Rituals, it chronicles different writers’ daily rituals for writing but I only read the women’s.
Yesterday I took a walk at noon with my sister and niece, It was windy and overcast with a drizzle. My niece did not want to stop playing. She jumped on puddles and picked up sticks, pretended to cook vegetables with her mom.
Swish swish, she motioned the stick into a swirl.
We told her it was time to go. “But I still want to play!” she cried out. “Me too,” I sighed. “Me too,” her mother chimed.
Right after reaching the doorstep, I burst into tears. I had made my sister feel bad and yet I was the one bawling. The pressure of an upcoming trip weighed heavily on us. My sister was fronting the expense and it triggered traumatic memories for her. My entire unemployment period had been making me feel bad. Why did I even decide to go on this trip?
We sat down to talk and figured out what had made us both upset. In the grander scheme of things, this was just any other annual trip. One I could afford when I had a job. The timing just wasn’t right. We were just getting triggered by our past traumas.
A day before, I had purchased travel insurance and I had told my agent that I was quite worried. I didn’t expect to be out of a job when I planned this vacation.
“You can’t get back time. Money can be earned,” she told me.
I knew that intellectually, but maybe I needed to hear it from someone who worked in an industry where she had to hand payouts to beneficiaries of the dead.
Anyway, after a hearty lunch of nilagang baka, I went back to my room to continue working on an article I was writing for a magazine. I could have finished it in an hour but I don’t know why I spent four hours fixing it up.
After all was done, I scheduled it to be sent out at 8 a.m. the next day. Ah, one out and two more to go for this week.
I took a short break in the evening, and had a hodgepodge dinner of air-fried sausages and leftover vegetables.
I came back to my desk at 11 in the evening, now ready to transcribe the documentary that had been cut down to two hours. I finished at one in the morning and was able to translate one-fourth of the material.
I stayed in bed reading through random manhwas until three when I drifted off to sleep.
This morning I woke up at 10 AM and proceeded to ransack my drawers. I was looking for a missing ID but got distracted and framed my “most engaging writing” from the time I was a student journalist.
I played with my niece a bit, borrowing her toy piano where I randomly stroked the keys and made up songs as she showed me her next item.
“Watermelon!” she squealed.
“Watermeloooon, in the summer the fruit is sweet!” I sang out of tune. We made tunnels out of jenga blocks while her puzzle animals passed underneath it.
“Thank you for playing with me,” I tell her as I bid goodbye.
“It’s time I go back to work.”
She gives me an appreciative hug. Most days she looks at me indifferently and says “no!”
I go back to my computer to start working on the next story.
My ID is still missing.
