Family  

True story. When I was younger my parents used to do a lot of drugs. There was a lot of pot lying around the house when we were growing up as kids. My dad taught me how to roll my first joint. Aside from the pot, they also did a little LSD. Ano pa nga ba'ng magagawa ko? That was my family. The only thing I really knew to be concrete and real. Outside, the world proved to be a string of disappointments. I never really learned as much as I wanted to learn in school. Never really made the kind of connections I wanted to make with people. Everyone out there just tiptoed around each other. They chose their words so carefully you'd think they'd been prepped by a lawyer for a hearing. It was either that or they'd say everything they could think of to shock the pants off of you. It was all so fake.

At home, at least, we could say whatever we wanted. It might have been the effect of the weed. Who knows? It was a precarious kind of balance that we had to try to maintain as Dad would often get into his shouting moods, his hitting moods, his slam-his-kids-into-the-furniture kind of moods, while Mom watched, often too stoned to protest. Then there would also be the slow and easy kind of moments where (after the shouting, the near killing, with my Manong close to tearing his hair out because of frustration) we would all apologize and dust ourselves off to survey the damage. Most of the time it would only be a couple of chairs, a doorknob or two, a few plates or glasses, a vase that had been in the living room for as long as we could remember. I remember that vase. Carnival glass. I used to love holding it up to the light so it would change in hue. Its ugly rounded handles were tinier than my fist. They reminded me of foetuses, the way their tiny forms lie in close knots. After all of the wars we'd waged in that house, that poor house that never did anyone any wrong, we'd tidy up and talk as if nothing had happened. But things happened. You can't possibly emerge from years of that without it affecting something rooted deep inside of you.

I don't do drugs any more. It's just a personal choice. I don't have anything against them. As far as I'm concerned, people can fry their brains any way they want to. I guess I just grew tired of the numbing that I had mistaken for stability. Yeah. Sure. I don't do drugs any more but I drink so much the phrase should be "there's blood in your alcohol" instead of the other way around. Fucking hypocrite. I'm still doing the same old shit. Sabi ko na nga ba. At the end of the day, I'm still back in that same living room, 8 years old, prone on the fucking concrete floor, with my father standing above me about to hurl a vase at my head. I don't blame them. Him. Or her. Even if she stood by, unsure of how to deal with life, with the realization that her child was harboring an anger in him too huge for the living room, the house, the street, this city. Hell, I don't even blame the drugs, or the dysfunctional family dynamic we had, still have. Know what's fucked up? I still fucking blame myself.