untouchable

19

It's truly hopeless.

Even the PPCRV manual tally says that M*rc*s Jr. still leads the presidential race while S*r* D*t*rt* wins the vice presidency.

You stare bitterly at your laptop screen. Of course, the cheater would get the upper hand on this sham elections.

Your month-long leave is almost ending and you're not too excited at the mountain of backlogs waiting for you once you return this Monday. But also, it's a welcome distraction from the looming unease about the coming days of their governance. You won't accept it until the end. Why would you when it was clearly fraudulent?

The Leni-Kiko thanksgiving rally was moved from QC Memorial Circle to the Ateneo grounds today. You and your friends will attend right after work, would scramble quickly to Katipunan as soon as they can. You're just waiting for their signal at the GC and you'll go to the rendezvous point. You're home in Krus na Ligas right now, took in some light freelance work so your brain is busy working instead of pondering.

Since May 10, you haven't exchanged a word with any of your campaign teammates again, aside from your longtime friends obviously. One of your coping (but also toxic) mechanisms is isolating yourself from everyone when you're being unstable. You're not in condition of keeping a conversation, too exhausted to do niceties, or just being in the presence of other people. When building yourself up, you prefer doing it alone and in silence. It's not that you hate asking for help and don't want to bother anyone, but yeah, that's kinda it. You've always been a loner after all, whether you're fine and stable, or depressed and overwhelmed. This is only temporary, hopefully. Your friends understand and you're grateful they're willing to give you the space you need in the meantime. They're used to your sporadic ghosting.

Sometimes when thoughts consume you, you can't shake off how eerie it is that you find comfort on being alone even on your worst days. Sure, you can get this checked out and see a therapist but you're not financially privileged to do such thing. Best measure you can do is let the emptiness caress you and bask in it, not overthink how comfortable it feels. It still keeps you going. After indulging for a while, you'll dust yourself off and show up. You'll be fine.

You sent in your finished work to your client. Freelancing has done you good on days you badly need extra cash, but also, it entirely depends on your wheel of luck. Sometimes you have the worst clients ever, the demands for the job don't equate your rate, sometimes you have the kindest and most considerate clients ever who tip very well. Today, you have the latter.

"I've read about the elections on your country. I'm so sorry about it."

This client of yours is a "regular". It's a business account so they always need to go to the site for virtual assisting needs. You've worked with them before, sometimes outside the site when the workload is a little heavier, and since then, whenever you log in on the site, they would always hire you. They're a perfectionist, but is generous and easy to work with. One of your favorites.

You stared at the words on your screen. One of the reasons why you sort of disconnected with your newfound friends is because you want to not talk about the recent happenings. Yes, turning to apathy and bottling it up aren't at all healthy, but you don't really know how to handle this grief. Trying to momentarily forget and live in blissful delusion momentarily relieves you of pain. This won't work in the long run, though this quick fix is enough for now.

But here you are, licking your fresh wounds that was just poked. Mind you, this client of yours is an American, and Americans are usually so self-absorbed that they're unaware there are countries outside the North American and white European continents. But there are foreigners who keep tabs with world current events and 2022 is one hell of a year for there are elections almost all over the world. The fact that that wretched family line is infamous globally due to their reputation as an evil and corrupt family, constantly being used as an 80's pop culture reference, you're not so surprised that the rest of the world is watching the Philippines. The rest of the world also didn't forget, sadly, your own country has.