Above us, the thunders hummed just a heartbeat after white pulses of lightning would burst across the clouds. I watched. Rain fell like slits of blur, an unfathomable amount of them at once. Pools of rainwater accumulated across our terrace and circles would ripple upon them like little waves.

You often told me that storms were the weep of the Earth, an entire planet cursed with eternal pain that it had grown numb, but never enough to subdue the torment of humanity. It was a reminder that the best of us would break at times. But I also knew that our kind was poison. The irony of being great builders and destroyers all at once.

The city fell around me as I rushed past. Streetlights became luminescent lines dashing against me. The world was out of focus, only slates of colors and shape. Featureless. Ahead, I saw only one thing. A gaunt man wearing a tight black mask, and on his hand was my wallet.

I glanced at the bystanders ahead, repeating the world still like it was some kind of spell I hoped to cast upon that bastard. But not one stopped. Not a single of them. Some even paved way. As I took my adrenaline-propelled step, a sting of pain burrowed into my chest and I was breathless in an instant. Air fled my lungs so rapidly that my body became fragile for only an eye-blink, and I collapsed on my knees. Ears ringing, I clutched my chest. My heart thumped, and I could feel it burst almost.

I watched the thief escape into the night, fading with the shadows. Around me, a few people circled. Idle hands hovered and they spoke, but only murmurs came to my still-ringing ears. I stood and fled gradually, unminding of the attention that I had caught. I headed home.

Bullets tricked down my face as I walked. It was the middle of summer, after all. Rain was yet to visit. And the sun scorched the earth. Even at night.

I unbuttoned my polo and sat outside a 7-11 shop, starting at my apartment on the other side of the road. I leaned on the glass, catching my breath laboriously still. I looked up and I could remember tracing lines among the glitter of stars. The task seemed more difficult than how the textbooks depict. There was no perfect pattern about them. Some hid in the roll of black clouds. Others stared at the world in a desperate attempt to illuminate the shadows that swallowed it.

“Off you go! You’re warding my customers away.” The cashier stomped out the door and growled at me, a handful of money crumpled into his fist. His face was red-hot, fuming.

I did not want any trouble and not once did I ask for it. I was timid ever since a child. Feminine, as my peers would regard me. Too soft. But I saw nothing wrong with it. You did not see it, too. Not once. You never unloved me for being different. If anything, you’ve loved me more.

So, I left without resistance, without word. I took the full assault of his hatred and whisked it away like petals lost in the storm-driven winds.

I crossed the road cautiously, eyes sweeping both sides. When things seemed clear, I proceeded to the other side of the road. My feet struck the asphalt with urgency as it had always done. When I reached the other side, I paused at the entrance of my apartment. I was reluctant. As if entering this place, returning at the place I called home, would make this horrid day realer. The thunders bellowed above me, warning of rain. At night, it was harder to anticipate its arrival. It prompted me to continue.

The stairwell reeked of rusted metal and urine, putrid on my nose. But I had grown numb to it. They no longer seemed to discomfort me. You often told me that repetition breeds normativity. How the act of undergoing the same process, the same situation would build instincts into me. It was true. I knew well after building ignorance over these distresses.

I pressed the key into the knob, twisted it open, and my studio apartment seemed dark as ever. Distant lights provided a vague sharpness to the shape that built this room. Though, if I had no memory of it, I would not know what they were.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

My hand sought the darkness almost automatically. After a snap, the single bulb overhead blinked for a heartbeat before fully bathing this room in a thin sheet of white-yellow luminescence. This was supposed to be home, but it felt like a prison. A concrete box, walls so close that even the sound of my breath would bounce before dissipating into silence. A bed without frame on one corner, a fridge in another. Right beside the small television adjacent to the bed, there was a low table filled with crumpled papers dotted with ink. I sat on the floor and pressed both elbows into the table, shuffling through the mess. At times, I would open these papers, but not today. I need not a reminder of my shortcomings.

The phone in my pocket buzzed, a current of electricity almost to my legs still pulsating from fatigue. I took it out and saw a face. Eyes gentle, cheeks flushed red, and a face that brought many memories. It was Iris, and her image was crooked by the crack of my screen. For a moment, there was only the buzz in my room. Like a little siren banishing whatever silence lingered here. My thumb hovered briefly over the screen before I finally collected the courage to answer.

“Hey,” Iris said, her soft voice mangled by static, “you done with your gigs today?”

“Yes.” I said, nodding out of habit.

“I have something to tell you. Want to come by the resto at Lualhati Avenue? The one with the chicken inasal?”

I reached for my pocket, hoping that some of the money I had lost today would be there. But there was none. My fingers bundled into a fist and my knuckles turned white as bone, an act driven by frustration.

I sighed, mustered the courage, and stirred words in my idle mouth. Only breath drew briefly, but my voice triumph in the next eventuality. “I have no more money.”

“But you just got home from a gig, right?” Iris asked, confusion clear in her tone. Some concern was also there, I could visualize it in her face.

“A thief snatched it from me earlier.” I proceeded, feeling low. Those words punctured me, renewing further my exhaustion. In the span of that sentence, I relived the unpleasantness of the situation, the hopelessness to see an abstract form of the man fleeting with a whole week’s worth of sweat and tears.

Nay, if only I could tell you how much I grind myself down to bare bones just to live long enough to aspire, I would. But I could only hope my words to reach you, somehow drift in the wind and break reality to enter whatever afterlife you have sojourned into. I’ve always found solace in you. The world is difficult, now. Especially with you gone. But I must thrive. For you, for the dreams I told you.

“I’ll pay, then.” Iris said without reluctance.

“No, no. You don’t have to. We can just meet in another time. I’ll try to land gigs for the next few days so I can have the money.”

“Raul,” she said softly, stringing my name longer than it should have.

“I know the things you sacrifice just to earn money. You should not waste it on me.”

“It’s all right. It’s just street food! We’d barely go past one hundred.”

I hesitated. Above me, the clock moved, and it caught my eye. With each tick, there was a subtle complexity to the sound: the motion of tiny gears twisting underneath just to move time a second forward, almost perpetually. The short hand snapped a fraction of an inch, and it was ten o’ clock in the evening.

The night was deepening, yet outside, the city hollered in the concoction of the unrelenting masses. The iron rumble of cars, the murmur of people, the creaking of pipes. Sumaoan City never slept, and through a half-curtained window, it glittered with the brightest lights. As if one had plucked the stars above and laced them into the streets.

My head turned towards the door, its bronze knob’s markings becoming prominent in the awakened senses that came the restlessness of fatigue. A thought settled into me, a decision.

“I’ll meet you there.” I said with half a smile. The mirror caught my reflection. A ragged man, drenched in sweat and smog. Face scribbled with wrinkles.

I was barely living, I thought, but alive. Still alive.