January

Januaries are my favorite months in a year. It’s not because my birthday falls on a January, though that might form part of the reason. It’s because Januaries are beginnings. And for this year, it’s like – this January is the beginning of the story of 2012.

I have always loved beginnings. I find them so exciting. For me, it calls to mind that time when I was 13 and school was to start the next morning and I ended up not sleeping the whole night because I was so eager.

Januaries are like when you’re holding a book in your hands for the first time and you’re opening it to the very first page. You get to know the characters and the story for the very first time. It’s magic.

But real-life beginnings and real-life Januaries though are not as well-laid out and well-structured as in books and stories. I mean, if God and mankind had not conspired to organize time, you’d never have known one day of December from one day of January.

And we usually try to employ metaphors like the birth of a butterfly and concepts like reincarnation in order to more properly represent and talk about beginnings and re-beginnings. But when I think about it, my lived “beginning” was nowhere near as defined and clear-cut as those concepts. It didn’t present itself as such. Heck, it didn’t even present itself as anywhere close to magic.

So I veer away from the writerly penchant for metaphors (which I was never good at anyway) and peer more closely at what my January beginning did actually look like.

Well, situated in real life, my first week of January saw me reading the seven books of Narnia. It was incredible. It felt like I was practically walking in the midst of its woods. And C. S. Lewis was so grandfatherly. He just basically sat me by the fire and told me about life. And I love being taught and being told about life. It’s the inner child in me. Children love morals.

The second week saw me fanatically trying to make real life magical. And I was thinking that the most obvious way to begin achieving that was a clean house. And I don’t think I’m being completely off the mark here. Love, after all, is what makes things magical. It’s a thought that strikes me at times.

Whenever I come home and notice the decors put on the walls and placed around the house, I’ve always thought that we were lucky our landlady thoughtfully sends her love from afar. People always find it so nice to step into places and nooks that are filled and brimful of love. It’s part of our humanity.

Thus, in formulations that seem to occur only in my brain, I basically equated a clean house with love. Following that thought process, it would only seem logical that it would strike me that a dirty kitchen is so uninspired.

So spurred on by the idea that a clean kitchen is love, I set about scrubbing clean of any dirt and grime every object there that I could get my hands on. And in the process, I left Clyde observing me and privately wondering what sort of enlightenment had come over me.

“Why are you cleaning the kitchen, Cor?” she asked me.

“Shouldn’t we?” I said in turn.

“We usually don’t,” she replied.

But no matter. I was just trying to shine my halo and I was rewarded for it when Cherryanne arrived home from work, saw the kitchen, and gratifyingly gasped, “Ang linis!”

However, hardly had 24 hours passed and gone that the sparklingly clean sink and countertops were once again unceremoniously covered by a small avalanche of unwashed dishes and other kinds of utensil, the mess of which no one wanted to own up to.

There goes my idea of discreet love. But that’s okay. I always knew cleaning house was an act of sacrifice.

The most awful part of my week was the part when I felt very despondent. It’s the moment when you feel like sheets of rain are pouring down on you unrelentingly and you’re wondering if you’ll ever make it through. And for a moment there, you’re thinking that you and your life are just a fallout waiting to happen. It’s so hard. This is so hard.

However, I knew that fallout or not, I was still going to continue. I had already thrown my last tantrum. There aren’t going to be any more in the future. That’s what this writing is for.

But there is no way of ending this post. It’s to be left hanging, open-ended. We aren’t at the middle, we're not at the ending. We have no way of knowing what’s to happen next. After all, it’s only January. We’re still just at the beginning, and at the starting point of the task of turning each day into a song.

Happy story to us all. :)

Comments

  1. This is so inspiring! Sakto, Monday ko pa siya nabasa. Now, I'm inspired to start my week right, and probably to start cleaning my house again. Thank you, Cor!

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  3. thank you, kuya...that's the most flattering thing... :)

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