I spent the rest of the afternoon holed up in the debilitating coldness of the student lounge, trying to study while trying to ignore the lure of the couch. By 4 PM, rain pours down in torrents and washes away eighty pesos worth of car wash. Oh well, at least the car was clean for a couple of hours.
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I haven't been to the bookstore in about three weeks - and that's a long time considering its proximity to the place where I live along with the fact that I used to drop by the bookstore twice a week to browse through new titles, snag a few free reads and, of course, smell book paper.
On my way home, I decided to make a quick stop to my favorite place on this side of the world. After all the week had been a pain in the derriere and I did deserve a break. Besides, I could use the time to check out which books I could get with packet of gift cards I got from my parents and my GG-mates on my birthday (arguably the best gift anyone could ever get me). I did end up getting C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" and Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" and I was walking out with what could be my weekend reprieve, I looked up and saw the falling drops of rain reflected on a street lamp. Back where I'm from, old people attribute gender to a lot of things, even rain and the rain tonight perfectly fit the "male" type - small, thin pinpricks which hit the ground with silence. This was in contrast to the "female" variant which consisted of huge, fat drops which plopped like water-filled balloons erupting when hit by darts.
Maybe it was the yellow light from the lamp post against the darkness of the sky but the rain tonight seemed to fall with such softness, it almost felt wispy, lightweight, like snow piling quietly over a rooftop (not that I've actually seen snow fall but the movies do seem to show it). The raindrops looked so delicate they could have disappeared like vapor the minute they hit my "Mickey Mouse's dismembered parts" umbrella.
On my way back to the parking lot, sloshing through the street in the rain that looked like snow was practically therapeutic.
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Weird story coming up.
I think I might have a stalker.
A bunch of pigeons live somewhere in that space above the ceiling of the law school building. They practically fly over my head when I walk across the oft-deserted hallway of the third floor while toting my dismembered "Rules of Court." Sometimes, sparrows join them in some game of hide-and-seek but generally, the birds pretty much keep to themselves. That's something that I am comfortable with because I have this unexplained fear of the avian kind. Blame it on Alfred Hitchcock's "Birds" or that movie about ghosts manifesting themselves as hawks or something. The eyes scare me and the way they cock their heads in an almost robotic fashion give me the creeps.
Yesterday was a day like any other in my rather somber existence in law school. I was standing on the open area across the hall from my third floor classroom, parroting provisions I had committed to memory when I looked up to see a pigeon perched on a water pipe above me. That would have been nothing extraordinary had I not realized that the pigeon was staring at me with its unblinking little eyes! It sat on the pipe, neck unmoving as if it had bird paralysis or something and its eyes fixed on what seemed to be my face. I moved my head to the right, to the left, bobbed it forward then backward but the pigeon still sat there, staring at me intently. Then with its beady eyes still fixed on me, it started opening its pink little beak as if it was trying to say something to me, as if I could comprehend the slightest smattering of bird speak.
"Cha..." I called out to my friend. "You've got to see this. The pigeon's looking at me."
"Well, there's no reason why they they shouldn't be there. They live there, you know," Cha answered me.
"I know," I said, aware that I sounded obviously silly. Maybe all the memorization and talk about the Corfu Channel was making my synapses overheat, resulting to illusions about a white bird with a stiff neck and a hyperactive beak.
"But, really, it's staring at me...and it's opening its mouth too."
Cha looked up to the ceiling and started laughing. "You didn't see the other one?"
Bewildered, I followed her gaze. "What other one?"
True enough, there was another pigeon sitting right above my first captive audience, its head and neck somewhat snuggled into its breast yet still obviously staring at me with the same beady eyes and intent gaze.
"This isn't funny, Cha," I said as I began to move away from the ledge. What if the birds were delusional and were seeing me as a large piece of bird food? I started singing the pigeon fling its white body into me like a compies leaping into their prey. Okay, I was being ridiculous.
Cha said maybe I was channelling Snow White. Dahlia, another friend, offered an interesting suggestion which, if I did take up, was going to be as weird as having two pigeons for a captive audience - try singing "Happy Working Song" with the matching "Aaaahh-aaahh." It just might bring in more members of their flock and more bird stalkers to freak me out.
Maybe I am going insane. Or just being over-imaginative.
Weird story over. But that does not change the fact that the birds were still staring at me.
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