a defense

I walked with a friend on the way back to my dorm, and we were laughing and regaling each other with tales about engineering subjects. It was about 8 o’clock. We weren’t drunk, though with the recent developments in both our academic pursuits, it would have been understandable if we were.

“’Yung kasunod ko sa pila, magshishift din sa Film.”

“Heh. Gagraduate din naman tayo eventually.”

I believed that. But it didn’t make me any less sad. It was UPCAT results season again, and some tens of thousands of hopefuls have made it past the hurdle. They will soon be joining our numbers in the University. With such a huge pool of new students, the chances of having cases like ours among them are statistically assured. Like us they will enter the university with big dreams and the belief that their ambitions are unassailable. But the system will be too much for them, too—they will see things they never dreamed they would. They will falter. They might even fall.

I liked to think it was all because the system is wrong. People like me chose to take up engineering because it’s a very “marketable” degree. A good investment for my parents. I was told: these kinds of jobs could pay a lot even when I’d just be sitting at a desk signing papers. As a kid, all the adults were painting this paradise for me.

But you wake up one day and you realize it was all fake. I was sitting in my Calculus class when realized it. I stared at the integrals on the blackboard and thought, my God, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that shit. I realized I had something else that I wanted to do, some other dreams I wanted to chase.

I wanted a life I could call mine. I wanted to be happy, and useful, and I don’t know… I wanted to know I existed, in a sense—that by the end of my life I could say I wasn’t just one of them who were swayed by the whims and the wills of the majority. That I had a will of my own. And that it was strong enough that I could brandish it like a weapon in defense of what I believed in.

But what could I do? What defense could I have made of my actions then? On that night when we were walking, there were only shadows and blinking streetlights listening to us as we outlined the new paths our dreams will follow. Who will understand us?