The Walking Wounded

When I was younger, I would ride buses that ran the length of EDSA whenever I get hit by life’s curved balls. Buses back then were reconditioned and refurbished army trucks and re-fitted with Lawanit body panels; the floor were wood planks; seats were wooden park benches; and most were red in color. I prefer to sit up front beside the engine mound. While it’s hot due to the escaping heat from the engine, it had a window all its own that could be opened or closed as the passenger pleases. I keep it wide open to feel the blasts of wind on my face; I'd keep my face on the window until my eyes tear up then I would half close my eyes and everything would be a blur. It was also a good way of covering up my tears when I cry. I'm not exactly certain why I rode buses back then; maybe it was not unlike a mustang’s wild run to a comfort zone.
Now I drive. It is, I should say, I step up but it is still a medium for flight. I'm still running away, but today I actually have a purpose and a destination. I’m heading for a clinic down south. The drive on the SLEX was easy and in a matter of minutes I have eased out of the highway and the concrete is slowly giving way to provincial vistas. I was making good time.
The clinic wasn’t hard to find and I arrived much earlier than expected. It’s not hard to miss. Curiously rendered in orange and green; it stuck out like an afterthought on the front lawn of a bungalow along the highway. It was still early and it's bolted shut. In a while, people congregated on the two bamboo benches out front. An overhang offers shade but it also funneled the heat— much like a chimney, unto the waiting area.
The heat was getting to me so I walked to a nearby sari-sari store and bought a bottle of water; I drank most of it then offered what’s left to a man who was nervously smoking beside me; I saw him earlier sitting on the waiting area with a girl. I casually asked him what’s up. He said, still with a nervous twitch, that he just accompanied the woman with the girl. I inquired further and learned that the girl— barely in her teens; in scruffy cheap bootleg jeans and a still scruffier bootleg shirt, was raped by a fifty year old man. The girl looks a bit emaciated, had an ordinary looking face bordering on ugly and looks like she terribly needs a good scrub. These say much of the kind of predator her attacker was— not that the animal completely robbed her of her future for clearly she had none. The girl looked oblivious of what had happened or what was happening on that particular afternoon, but the people with her seemed more lost than she was.
In a while, two women walked in with a teenage boy in wrinkly high school uniform. He had a tattered backpack for a school bag and shoes with uneven wear on the heel and sole echoing the boy’s clumsy and hobbling gait. The trio sat on a bench across from where I sat. I would catch the boy, who held on to the woman beside him, repeatedly sneaking a glance at me with increasing uneasiness. The boy would whisper to the woman’s ear and the woman would nod with assurance and sometimes a sheepish smile would break up her tired face. The other woman is a generation older than the other and had a stolid countenance. Both women are modestly dressed that would have been more appropriate in a funeral. The boy looked sad and seemed to know that something was definitely wrong with him.
Hovering at the periphery of the assemblage’s guarded social interaction is a ghost of a young man— in a gray walking shorts and white cotton T-shirt. He had a decent wristwatch, an item missing from the other people there. He kept on looking at his watch as if he would rather be anywhere but there. Obviously a regular for he had that blank intense look of a young man seemingly balanced on a tightrope strung between cockiness and despair. In his hand he held a crumpled piece of paper— he was there to re-fill his prescription.
It was a circus of the walking wounded— a boy with a bleak future of pain, ridicule and shame; a half-wit rag doll whose only respite from deprivation is sexual abuse; and a young man looking forward to a lifetime of steady doses of controlled substances. I could feel a headache coming on...