Ryan Amor

There was a time when I really hated Mondays. I worked in Manila for a while and made the commute from Pangasinan every week, and the Sundays for me, felt like a prisoner on death row’s final day.

I would see the sun set after having gone out cycling with the boys, smell the pork barbecue grilling along with fat milk-fish for dinner, and thought, these are life’s final joys before death/darkness set in.

And worse, the work I did wasn’t even that great. It was abysmal. I worked for an advertising agency and it was awful. My copy was awful. Our accounts were dumb. And the clients were ugly and dumb. I was miserable and lost and my dad somehow knew because he would discreetly still give me allowance money (yeah, I wasn’t paid well obviously) and yes, I took it without any sense of shame, because it was the only thing that made things a little better. To me it was more than a hand-out; the gesture was a confirmation that someone was looking out for me and cared.

But really, the worst thing about it was that feeling of helplessness, of being trapped in a situation I didn’t know how to change. When my alarm would go off at 4am Monday, I would lie there in the darkness of my room agonizing if I should get up. Should I, or should I not get on that bus today? And this would be repeated every single week for the next two years until my dad stepped in again to bail me out, with a job at the Provincial capitol.

These days, I don’t mind Mondays, or any day of the week for that matter. It took time, but we all eventually get to a point, where we finally have some control over our life, because you know, we have a choice. That’s the only key out of that locked room- you can choose the life you want, for better or for worse.

To this day, I still get dreams where I’m back in the old bedroom in Pangasinan with its tall jalousie windows. The roosters are crowing and it’s timed, like a clock’s. I feel the urgency to get up- I’m going to be late for the bus- but I can’t seem to move.

Well, fuck that, I’m going back to sleep, and I do.