Tonight, from Mickey:
Hello, Mia my friend. How are you? Is this still your number?
I’m well. Out of Dumaguete right now (and at workshop time too!) with a team fulfilling a computer contract in Negros Occidental. But I’ll still catch the latter half of the workshop, and meantime the money for this job is good. At ikaw, may balak ba na pumasyal dito? Inuman tayo.
Sige, asa na lang tayo, we’ll get to where we can do something. Just hold your own.
These sometime flirtations with matters corporate, they’re good for a little income here and there, but they do nothing for the soul. I often wonder how routines this mind-numbing can, at the same time, move at such an almost-killing pace. How do millions of office workers survive years of this?
In other words, they sells their human souls, they makes their piles of cash. Yes, it IS funny in a grisly kind of way. But I’m so glad you’re alive.
Always. Ever. I hope I see you again soon. We’re going to have so much fun then, and the horror can go to hell. Where, I believe, it really belongs.
And to you too. I’ll ferret out that issue. And whatever else may or may not be, my friend, remember that I love you very much. Mizpah. PAX.
He had laughed when I said that humans metamorphose/degenerate into rats and how it almost killed me and I quoted “Hell is other people.” He was the one who taught me to call the John the James instead and he drinks like a lord.
Before I slept, I said to my friend, “Thank you for loving me…I feel loved by you. Sleep well, dream well, wake well.”
I slept smiling, my soul soothed.
My friend loves without expecting to be loved back.
When I met him on my third night in Dumaguete, I saw the old man’s soul--- only younger and much wiser than the old man’s when he was Mickey’s age.
When he met me on my third night in Dumaguete, he laughed, “Ah, now I’m with the veteran!”
Of course veterans are never subjected to the “Want to smoke up?” test.
Mickey had said that night, “Anytime you want to talk. I’m here.”
I smiled, “We’ll see.”
After Dumaguete, we still talked through text messages. He was one of the first ones I told “I got my short fiction mojo back!” He was so happy then I bedeviled him, “Ever thought of cutting your hair or trimming your beard? New vibe, might be good for you. Don’t hide that beautiful face! Times of change, my friend. Unless you fancy yourself as Lord Samson?” That made him call me, sputtering with laughter.
My friend has a beautiful soul and too many were and still are too blind to see.
What a pity.
When I’m exasperated, I call the blind “stupid” instead.
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