There are days when I think, Manila is growing on me.
In all its squalor, streets that smell of urine and burnt cooking oil, dark fumes expelled by vehicles, colorful garbage of plastic, cigarette stubs, paper cups, tetra packs, barbeque sticks strewn around or infiltrating a black pool of flood, and natural music made of half naked barkers, vendors with little makeshift tables, roaring engines driven by foul mouthed motorists, it embodies resilience and little hope.
On days that nothing makes sense, all I hear is a noise barrage of different means of survival and I breathe on smog.
**
What if Nature is its own deity?
It existed before us and it will exist again. Man had been constantly trying to defy its laws, ravaging its resources like a starved hyena devouring on human flesh, carving out mountains, banishing every life on it in expense for a tiny rock of gold. We’ve gone under water where no light has shed to dig the oil we exhausted from the surface, exploited what wasn’t ours to begin with.
Things must’ve look trivial from space.
A giant water ball harboring intelligent creatures, and one in particular standing out. He learned how to fly, swim, and run at great speed, went over the moon, divided lands, created atomic energy, invented the internet, and was obsessed with accomplishing greater possibilities to the point of depleting earth’s capacity to sustain life. Sometimes when he’s not busy fulfilling a need he made-up, he occupies himself with emotions, complicate things, forget that he’s just a temporary habitant, and nothing is his own.
Scientists said the sixth mass extinction can happen in as early as 300 years, and for the first time it's anthropogenic.
When all of us are wiped out, nature will heal itself.
