Achieving Happiness

Saturday afternoon. It’s hot out, and I feel decidedly lazy. I’ve cleared out my desk and began putting all the book I’ve bought in the last seven months that I’ve been here in this big balikbayan box.

The box is so big that I would fit in it, and I need at least four rolls of packing tape to secure the sides and the top. Gad, I wouldn’t mind so much if I lose my clothes and shoes in transit from here to the Philippines; but heck, I will raise bloody hell if my books get lost. Most of them got second hand, and picking them out from the precarious stacks  and rickety shelves of books in Flow was a major effort. Each one of them is actually worth so much more than the few dollars I shelled out — I practically shed tears of joy after finding each book ("Aaaargh! Haruki Murakami!" ).

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My turtle Enrique died yesterday. He was eight years old. I can’t write a proper eulogy right now because I might end up weeping over my keyboard. For now I will write just this: I loved him very, very much and I will never keep another turtle because Enrique is irreplaceable.

——–

Some days I feel like I will never write anything really happy again. On those days, I feel like I could write so many things. Happiness is such a boring subject, there’s never any real need to expound on it. To go on and on describing it is to risk writing purple prose, to read like a syrupy sap. It takes really good writers to describe happiness in its pure and naked form, without the embelishment of too many words. It’s like describing warm sunshine and light streaming through an open window at 6am.

Anyways, I am sad right now because of my dead turtle. Yes, I know I wrote just a few paragraphs back that I wouldn’t write about it, but jeez, it’s all I can think about right now. My Enrique — grumpy, grouchy turtle whom I took care of since he was the size of an old one-peso coin. When he died he was bigger than my palm.

Aaaargh. I used to clean him up under the tap and he would hiss and fret and struggle to get away. He was never afraid of me — he had a grouchy personality even as a baby, and he never once hid inside his shell when I was giving him a bath (to get the scum off his shell and from between his feet). I would talk to him all the while as I rubbed his shell dry with an old towel —- "Settle down, settle down! You want me to drop you accidentally? You’ll break open like Humpty Dumpty!"

He never minded me. He would just struggle and twist in his my hand, and he would crane his long neck and look at me straight in the eye, looking mean, hissing.

"Don’t look at me like that!’

He would continue staring at me, never once retreating into his shell.

Then I would put him back in his aquarium. As soon he settled at the bottom he would start walking around or swimming like crazy, banging himself against the glass.

He also knew how to wake me up when he was hungry.

When he was still a baby, he had a shiny, flat rock to rest on when he wasn’t swimming. Every morning at 6:30 he would push the rock against the glass of the fish bowl and it would make a clinking sound. Clink-clink-clink, increasingly louder until it sounded like the glass would soon break. I would wake up and feed him his terrapin pellets. As I dropped the pellets into the water (I would change the water every day), he would hisssssss.

Gad. I feel so sad.

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