S(w)ervice

When the world was younger and smaller than how I see it now, there had always been a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. Consequently, it was never quite clear which rainbow everyone had been talking about. As I pranced through jumpers and flared denims, the world started to lose a bit of orange and started to gain more blues. Before the colors coalesced into a muck of gray and grime, I had already donned the royal blue skirts of my high school. It was then that I found out that rainbows in Taft Avenue had seven magnificent shades of grey.

There are lessons we learn through the years that tend to stick to us in times when we have scarce need for them. In the first half of the eight years that I have known Taft Avenue, I learned that UNLITEXT is one of the top ways of getting who and what you want. It’s just a matter of planning out a perfect first message and the rest just seem to fall into place. Another thing I learned is that the city wakes up at 6PM and not at 6AM. 6AM is one of the safest hours in the peripherals of the Metro and this should be used and abused wisely. At 6PM, Taft Avenue becomes something out of your strangest dreams where people get taken away because of a whisper in the wrong ear. At 7PM, life starts for most people; most people being one of the best in their trade given the right amount of incentive. For the rest of the night, the city feeds off your dreams.

Beyond all the things that would happen in the latter portion of my supposed eight-year stay in the streets of Taft Avenue, the conflict of interests still reigns supreme inside my head. On one side, it’s a love-hate relationship between me and city. On another hand, it’s a battle for the title of the most apathetic. You learn to let your humanity go for the better part of the day. When you learn the tricks behind that, you’re probably half-way down a hell hole but you’re already so far gone that it stops to matter. It’s never a win-win or win-some-and-lose-more situation. It’s always a compromise where all parties will leave dissatisfied and grumbling. Somewhere along the line, you’ll get all that you wanted and more. But when you started to cross the line, you already lost the things that mattered.

But it’s the price we pay that defines the value of that which we covet. We just have to be aware when we are getting more (or less) than what we bargained for. In my case, it will be years before I find out whether all the things that I did are worth something. Right now, I can’t even segregate the wrong ones from the right.

The eight years are drawing to a close. The night wanes as the flooded streets of the metro bustle with man and water. Soon, the rainbow will come in its majestic greyness. I think I’m jaded but maybe it’s the humidity that’s talking. Come the morrow, it would not even matter. Somewhere along the streets, a kid’s following me and I wonder if I’ll ever have the courage to tell her all the things that she would become. I wonder if she can still see the colors of the rainbow.

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Something awesome’s happening.