Magda-drama ako. You've been warned.

The sun was just setting, but bright enough still; the summer to sear your eyes, the blue bluer not for Ateneo, but because it was a clear, clear day and the gold of the setting sun made everything brighter, somehow, fresher: like the stark contrast of sudden light in darkness. One thing was clear to me: I don't belong there anymore. I was no longer student, teacher, of the academe. Of that place. And I miss it.

Watching L.'s class go through powerpoint reports, performing in front of their classmates and teacher and me, or giggling inappropriately to combat stage fright, or picking up where the partner trailed off because one knows the answer, I envied them. The students, the teacher, the ID that was still valid and that said, I am a part of this.

I don't miss being a student--the deadlines, the pressure of March, the exams--, and I don't (for now) want to be a teacher again. But I walked from the Library up to the CTC building, and I am a stranger to the place. I quickened my steps because I didn't want to meet anybody and have them ask why I was there. I saw a Librarian I had dealings with many times as a student, he was going down the steps perhaps to the smocket (I've seen him there, too), and he didn't recognize me. I worried a guard would stop me and ask for an ID. I missed the place, and it wasn't mine anymore. I have my memories of it, but it had none of me.

I left Ateneo--or the academe for that matter--because I wanted... What? Experience, I guess, and truth, and reality. But as my meeting earlier in the day illustrated, the real world deals mostly in denial, and non-responsibility, and questions that are not the point. At a certain part in that afternoon, I looked out the window, and saw the steel beams on the SEC C 3rd floor afire in reddish gold from the sun. I stole out the room for a quick minute to see if I could catch it set, but I was blocked by trees and concrete. I rushed out of the room to catch a sun that sets on the same bay everyday where I work, the same sun that sets in fiery red-gold, right in the middle of my street when I'm walking home on the weekends. What made me think this one, today, would be different?

In the middle of the class, L. handed me a copy of the poems of his student the physics major, and they were brilliant. Quiet, but firm, gritty, but not brittle; a little awkward, but plenty certain. Certain of his world, and the world before him.

I imagine he doesn't question his place, or the sun for that matter. Instead, he says, Let there be, and it is.