The Aquarium

I WAS TWENTY-TWO then when one of the biggest achievements in my life came about. To most people, it wasn't particularly an astonishing feat as I simply made a casual, run-of-the-mill, indoor aquarium. I was not bestowed with any prepossessing craftsmanship, yet somehow I managed to make one. I knew my project wasn't that substantial for which they could easily dismiss, it's not something to be extolled, let alone be the meat of every conversation. An aquarium made by a neophyte, of all the wonderful things in the world, it wasn't exactly worthy of appreciation.

To me at the very least, the product was indispensable. A prized possession; it was something that belonged to me. I produced it from my own painstaking labor; I made it with my own hands. Not only was it an accomplishment, it was a reward besides. I couldn't be more proud. But like all other things, there's an inevitable polarity. There were people who found it quite opposite to what I deemed it as and there were some who considered it as shrewd.

One of those was my mother. You assume she's my parent and she's incredibly proud of what I have made. Not actually. In fact, she detested my project for a reason that's vague to me—or lack thereof—which at that instant, she might have disowned his eldest son once and for all. For building an aquarium, you ask yourself, that's a little too extreme? But she did disagree and loathe me for it. Hence, due to an insufficiency of concrete reasons, I didn't try to understand her rancor.

People said the undertaking was a complete waste of time, some left remarks that weren't nearly as constructive, they were plainly berating me. And there were compliments, too. They said I was clever and cunning for making it happen, which no one in their life would ever brew such an exceptional concept. Talk about a person with no background in building things, creating an aquarium out of scrap was somewhat extraordinary. So I guess I get where they're coming from with those commentaries. The bottom line was I didn't care what they thought of me. I was just doing my own thing.

I couldn't take the credits all to myself, of course, the idea was all mine and I did most of the work, but the aquarium wouldn't have gone into fruition without a little help. My younger brother—fifteen at the time—was my only companion in this pursuit. A burgeoning yes-man I should say. He helped me in every step of the way. That being said, he became one of my heroes.

The aquarium was made of glasses, obviously, and I chose the type that I believe was durable, and in a nutshell, I attached them together with a superglue and then put in some appurtenances for the fishes to acclimatize to the new environment. The size was that of a typical dinner table that can accommodate up to six people; it was rectangular. It was very heavy of course, height approximately akin to that of my younger brother and he was tall, and the width, like I said, comparable to a table. Not to mention, the weight of one glass alone was grueling enough to lift. It's a no-brainer I needed help. I realized constructing a tank was all the more exacting, and it wasn't for the pessimists and the defeatists alike.

The idea of building an aquarium was a sort of epiphany; it came to me at a lightning speed when I saw a part of a nondescript Filipino documentary about not entirely of fishes, but about a subject I couldn't recall. Hell, I couldn't even remember its name. The only thing I could remember about the show was that it was painful to watch—painful in the sense that it's not what I'm especially inclined to watch till the end. It's the type you skip to the next channel hoping to find a show that will amuse you for the next hour or so. But the documentary was crucial to me anyway. It was this one scene that ensnared my attention: a local citizen having a leisure time catching fishes with a tackle on a lake. In slow motion, he yanked the tackle out of the water with a fish at the end of the thin cord. It was one transient montage, maybe not even connected to the entirety of the documentary itself, perhaps it had existed merely for transitional purposes and for better cinematography. While I wasn't so certain, yet out of that, came to me strangely a sudden desire to build my own aquarium.