Stick some liberty on my mouth, will ya?

Last week was my first time not to go home (in Bulacan) due to these reasons:

• An impending Scientific Paper on Crop Science I due on the seventeenth
• That Chess tournament which killed my Friday Freedom with its nine-hour span
• In preparation for an upcoming Career Orientation launched by my organization

What made things worse is that my Sci Paper turned useless when my laptop got fatal errors from the number of viruses it has from the past few months. It went haywire last Thursday. So maybe this is a “calling for me to do the usual cramming and procrastination” rather than anticipate things and go two steps ahead.

I don’t really know why, but during those two straight weeks of staying in LB for the first time, I forgot to text my Dad. I do have this delusion that I’m a self-sustaining entity; a lonely sphere surrounded by the flickering ones. Like, whatever. I just have this weird imagination which made me swear to live with it.

So that’s it. I forgot to update my Dad with all the shits happening in my so-called College life. One thing I hate about my Dad is that he’s this emotional father (who’s way beyond my mother’s sentimentality) who easily gets frustrated about something. Or maybe – no offense meant – the natural process of aging caused him to act that way. Or maybe his thoughts are just too overwhelming that he tend to overreact on simple mistakes.

It’s just today that I’ve arrived with my humongous Nike duffel bag packed with my newly-laundered clothes (I’m slowly emptying my dormitory cabinets since I don’t have any plans on taking extra units this summer) and the hassles of the concluded Career Orientation. I stormed straight to the living room with that tired look on my eyes. Then, while preparing myself for supper…

Me: Hanggang Wednesday nga pala class ko this week..

Dad: Akala ko ba WALA kang pasok sa Holy Week?
Me: Dad, wala akong pasok sa Maundy Thursday at Good Friday. Pero meron pa rin akong klase from Monday to Wednesday.
Dad: *sighs* Ang corny..

According to my father’s quintessential dictionary, corny means something really insulting. I often hear him say it whenever he’s downright mad or in a state of awful feeling. Add to the fact that he says it in an eyebrow-raising tone, like he really wants to show his profane intentions.

I don’t really know why he’s mad and all, why he went ballistic after my Holy Week announcement of no classes for two days.

Then I found out he punched my brother on his cranium. It was really ironic that the damage was heavy on the offender: the punch cracked some bone on my Dad’s fist-forming hand (he has this swollen wrist and metacarpals, lol). So it’s a problem that made him… well, act so depressed when I came into the scene of our beloved home.

But I really want to raise the argument regarding my own liberty. I heard rumors from my aunt (who lives on our house right now) that my Dad’s downright depressed nowadays, so I claimed that it was maybe my fault out of my two-week absence in the house. Maybe my absence attributed to his loneliness. How sad. Okay, so it was really my fault not to inform him of my unexpected two-week stay in LB, but I just hope he could cope up with these minor fractures between our fatherly relationship. I just hope he could at least understand that I do have my academics (and the fact that I seldom prioritize them makes me wish to start it all over again) and I care for it.

And I remember one of his lines during supper that pierced the inner independent me:

“Naghahanda na yan para next semester, maka-bukod na siya saken.“

I felt my eyes bulged out of the searing heat of the words, and it reverberated like an earsplitting sound of a jet engine as it takes off. The decibels!

Please, Dad. Don’t do melodrama right now ‘coz I swear I’m not in the mood to hear these things. I just really HAVE TO sacrifice my weekend visit just to cope up with the fast-paced world I am running right now. Don’t you just get it!?