Birth

Fronting him was a wall. It was a black and white picture of a road in Vietnam with a large pine tree in the middle. The road was strewn with motorcycles. One of his closest friends had taken that picture on a trip to Vietnam. He liked that picture. In his mind he felt like it made his little breakfast nook feel like an outdoor café.

To his right he had a metal ashtray another friend had given him from a trip to Singapore. You couldn’t see it anymore, but embossed on the bottom of it was the Singapore Merlion. Around its rim were carved different Singaporean sites. One side of the rim had the word “Singapore” carved on it. Three cigarette butts were crumpled in it. By night’s end, he assumed, the ashtray would be filled.

To his left, two packs of Marlboro Reds lay, one wasting away with just a single stick in it, waiting for the inevitable crumple and throw that would be the end of its brief time with him. The other was fat and proud, unopened. He looked at the blue seal that crowned the top of both packs, heralding them as “Class A” cigarettes and that they were “Fine Tobacco”.

“Get back to me after ten years when I’m withering away with lung cancer.” He wanted to tell these seals.

His electric fan hummed at his side as he typed away on his Mac. He had no bright ideas right now. There were no clever one-liners or searing stories that fueled his creative juices. He was just typing away for lack of anything better to do. He looked around him, thinking of clever descriptives to apply to the everyday objects that surrounded him.

He glanced at a nearby bottle of Absolut Rasberri, on its last leg with just a few good gulps in it. In front of it was a framed picture of his family; his mother and father, brother and three sisters aside from himself. The picture was taken on his parents’ golden wedding anniversary, so all of them looked particularly cleaned-up.

He had a strange relationship with his parents and his siblings. Partly it was because he was the youngest and his parents were both forty by the time they had him. His eldest sister was already fifteen at the time. His youngest sister was nine years his senior. As a child, he felt more like his eldest sister’s child than his mother’s. His parents spoiled him the way grandparents would spoil their first grandchild. It was only in recent years that his parents and siblings actually treated him in a more normal sense. Still, they honestly knew next to nothing about him. They didn’t even know he smoked like a chimney in winter.

Oddly enough, as his thoughts drifted into winter and the holidays, firecrackers sounded on top of the melee of car horns and motors from the streets below his condominium unit. He glanced outside his window at the cacophony outside. Ah, his window. This was the reason he decided to live in this particular building, in this particular unit. From his window tonight the city lights sprawled out like a night sky scattered with stars. During those mornings when insomnia still had its grip on him, the stars would flicker one by one into oblivion as a yellow-purple sky slowly faded in, revealing buildings nestled between trees. Acting as a backdrop to this cityscape, two separate mountain ranges cradled his city.

He said as much as he typed away. He had a lot of negative characteristics, most of which he proudly wore like a badge of honor. He was pessimistic most times, and aggressively short-tempered. Still, if there was one thing he was good at, it was seeing the beauty and interest in the mundane. This made him love this city, the city he was born and raised in. He found beauty in its hustle as well as its bustle. Its odd nooks and crannies were a treasure trove of exoticism for him.

He loved to pretend he was a tourist sometimes, seeing his city for the very first time. He would walk around his neighborhood looking at huge trees that lay scattered at odd intervals around 1970s and 1980s houses slowly being upended by newer condominiums. His own building stood where a bus line had once made its home during the 80s. The old as well as the new fascinated him. This sense of wonder was a treasure he kept that only reared its head when he was either writing or painting.

By point of fact, he was always somehow involved with this area of the city in one way or another all throughout his life. He was actually born in a hospital a few streets away from the building where he lived now. He grew up in a house a few houses away from that selfsame building. When they moved from that house into another farther away, his parents still owned several businesses in the area, and he would visit often. Suffice it to say; he never imagined living anywhere else but this city in this neighborhood. Even if he did, he never followed through.

Upon graduating college, he found work in a television station as a graphic and digital effects artist. It was not a coincidence that this particular television station’s offices can be found a hop, skip and a jump away from the house he grew up in. During particularly mild days he would walk the one block from his building to his workplace.

During the past decade, his city had been undergoing a sort of renaissance. In his neighborhood alone, where once there were houses, multicolored restaurants and bars sprouted like mushrooms after a warm summer rain. Condominiums sprouted with them. He wasn’t particularly alarmed by all of this. His city still knew how to keep its character in the face of all of this, and he loved that.

He surveyed what he had typed so far. Not much. It read more like a love letter to his city than anything else. He felt he got too rambling at times. Still, he felt that was part of the charm of his particular writer’s voice. It was like listening to an impassioned story being told by a very talkative friend. There were lots of detours and flourishes that didn’t actually belong, but they at least added flavor to it.

He yawned. He looked at the clock on his wall that heralded the 11^th hour. He wasn’t supposed to be writing tonight, but his internet connection had gone haywire so there would be no playing his RPGs on his iPad. There would also be no surfing for porn. The latter didn’t bother him as much as the former though. Starting young had made him an old man at 38. His libido had followed suit.

He arched his back to relieve the stress on his spine from being in one position for the longest time. He wondered to himself where this particular story would end up. He stood up, scratching his buttocks. From the nearby fridge, silver like most of the things in his tiny kitchen, he poured himself some Coke into a blood-red cup. He looked at the cup. It clashed with everything in his house. Still, in his mind he admired its impertinence at being the only red object in the sea of black, white, dark brown and aqua that was his condominium unit. He smiled a little at his cup. His cup had moxie.

After a sip of Coke, he lit another cigarette. At this point, the distended pack of Marlboro Reds had given up its last stick to his lips and he had already gone through three sticks from its proud brother. He pushed on the button to open his internet modem, hoping against hope that a connection would ensue. He was met with the flickering, unsteady second light of disappointment.

He turned off the modem in abject defeat and wondered about this day and age’s particular need for internet connectivity. He had never been an avid chatter, especially since he typed with just one hand, so he never understood other people’s obsessions with living their lives online. He did have a Facebook account and a Blog page as well as Twitter and Pinterest, but he saw them as tools for sharing his thought and his art, not for actually talking to people. If you went to his blog or his Facebook page you’d find half of the content are painting he had done or poetry he’d written. If he wanted to talk to people, he’d go visit his friends or call them on the phone.

The importance of the internet for him was different. As a boy, he had two sets of encyclopedias he poured over on his spare time. He would research about Greek gods and ancient Egypt and planets. The internet was an updated version of an encyclopedia to him. Sometimes, while watching television, he would Google a certain actor that struck his fancy, or a particular place that sparked his interest. It was wonderful. Well, that and his little Smurf and Hello Kitty villages were, he felt, what the internet was for.

He did love his RPG games. He took great pains placing every last house within his little villages and cities and boutiques and restaurants and zoos. He let his artistic eye guide him through planning and execution of these. A friend once asked him what the fascination was with these games. At the time he was maintaining a total of twenty separate games. His answer was clear. It was the closest thing to being God as he was ever going to get.

He looked up from what he was typing and looked around. The path his prose took was meandering yet poetic. At least now he was clear what this exercise was about. Mostly it was an exposition on how he viewed the world. He had covered a multitude of disparate topics ranging from his condominium unit and its contents to his love for the city he lived in to the internet and what it was to him. He looked closely at what he wrote, his one-handed style of typing allowing him to puff on his cigarette and sip Coke from his cheeky red cup while managing to click a few more words away. What had seemed an exercise in futility on the onset had taken a surprising turn that delighted him.

Yes, it was a prose of seemingly unrelated subjects rendered more interesting than it actually was by his florid words and sense of melodrama. Yes, it was a 45-minute excerpt from the life of a bored artist hoping against hope that his internet connectivity would magically fix itself. Yes, half the time he was typing he was wondering whether or not his Smurf Village honeydews weren’t already withered up. Still, more than that it did end up being a story unto itself…

It was the story of a man writing a story.