THE BLOSSOMING CAMELLIA FLOWER (カメリア)

Chapter 18

"in the eyes I can

Look thee now, now that I have

Surely laboured hard"

-EARLY 2014-

-one year later-

(Cami) after graduation, I moved in into a new apartment in Tokyo near where my sister is at, Alyssa also moved in with me after leaving Kyoto, the both of us studied for the admissions test of our chosen university, few weeks after that we took the admissions test and got our result the following day, both of us passed the admissions and we'll be starting school in the next couple of days.

On our first day of school, we met a lot of other students in the university, most of them are exchanged students too, the university was mixed of different ethnicities, cultures and other students like us who are studying here, the first couple of months of our college years was smooth and easy, the social science degree we got back in senior high was helping us a lot in our college years, after a whole year in the university, I've made a lot of friends from my study circle, they we're fun to have around and we're very smart, we would form a study group when exams we're coming up for us.

-two years later-

Two years has passed and I've been doing greatly in college, there we're sometimes that I was tired and I couldn't get any proper sleep from the mountains of projects, research, presentations and quizzes we had, but I still persevered through (half of me was starting to hate myself for doing this).

Some of my friends in our friend group are from the Philippines, they would always treat me with their local foods there parent sent them during the summer, they would always talk about their home country and how beautiful the beach are there, just listening to them made me want to go there but I'm still on welfare so I can't afford to go there right now.

After moving to Tokyo two years ago I started to work as an part-timer at a café near my apartment, after school I would go there and work, sometimes during the week-ends I would be sing at bars and clubs that paid me to sing there, I did earn some decent amount from working on those two jobs but all of them went to apartment rent, school allowances, and other things I needed to pay for, my sister went to Korea after she got promoted a year ago and mom would occasionally give me money when I asked her for.

Ever since I started college, I haven't gotten any calls from him since then, I mean both of us are in college now so it's going to be hard for us to call each other and study at the same time, one time I asked him what college he went to...I said he went to UST (university of Santo Thomas) I asked my friends here if UST is a good school in the Philippines.

*friend* yeah! It's one of the prestigious schools in our country, you're lucky enough to get into those kinds of school

*cami* so how long is law school there?

*friend* well if I remember...four years of law school and then another couple of years of a juris doctrine degree and then the bar

*cami* that long?!

*friend* yeah

(cami) thank god I didn't decided to go law school, just being here is already hard enough but...that long to become a lawyer? I would already be dead from exhaustion already.

My friends all know about Alex, I've told them about him since our friend group began, they also understand why he had to left, according to them some families in the Philippines force their children to become high paying professionals to pay for their own families burden, some would even leave their families to get away from those financial burdens of their families, listening to them made me wonder a lot of thing about him, did he really ran away from his family? Who was after him? A lot of question flooded my head but I just had to shrug it off, he has his reasons so I understand it very much.