Horrid pieces of images still hang around my mind every time I recall that email message with morbid pictures of a man crushed by a bus along Ayala Avenue. I couldn’t afford to peek on the other scenes and immediately erased the sick message.
I just pray whenever the visual horror flashes my trance. Haunted by my fear of crossing a road, street, or highway, I have to preoccupy my thoughts on other things than thinking of the pictures. I became more of a parallel person because of that trepidation. That’s one of my phobias. I still think twice, glance thrice, and run fast on taking on a line. With those depictions, stream of memories will run fresh again. I had enough pain. I had my second life. I crossed that line.
My apprehensive reverie takes me back ten years ago, on that sunny day in September where people were busy at home for the coming town festivities. We had our chores during that time. Everyone was moving fast paced. Things were happening in festive flashes. I was crossing the main road on a fee highway and got hit by a car. I was unconscious. I just woke up in the emergency room with an excruciating headache, a deep wound in my left leg, and bruised body. I couldn’t hear anything because my left ear was filled with dust, my brain felt numb. It was very painful.
Back in the hospital a day after the accident, I was so eager to write an article for our school paper. My mind can’t work that time. I just lay down, staring at the ceiling watching the lines of the blinds crossing the checkered gypsum boards. How could the sunbeams passing by the window through every line of the blinds leave the ceiling unaffected? The color of the sunset decreases when another line formed after it was cut. Why is it safer to walk the line? Continue to go parallel? I might as well ask myself if there was meaning in my suffering. Pathetic.
Maybe, that time, I was in the state of mental delusion. On the other hand, I was very wrong. Witnesses of the accident told me that I didn’t go for the pedestrian lane. But the pedestrian lane in five hundred meters away. I didn’t allow myself to walk that far in order to traverse. Alas, my questions were answered. Everything has to pass through a line or several of it before pointing on a destination. I took pity on myself for spoiling the holiday because of my mistake. The festivities on that day would just fade out. Nevertheless, the experience would not. I learned my lesson.
Today, I’m very thankful that whenever I cross a line in life’s grid-like pattern, I’m always spared. Thank God, I crossed several obstacles that make me realize every step counts.
