Love Takes Time

There's this theory I have: your entire day can be defined by its beginning. Your morning routine is a gigantic part of how you will feel when the sun finally sets. Some people choose to watch ladies get drunk on wine on television. Some people don't face the morning at all, choosing instead to wake up past noon. Some have no choice but to wake up when it's still dark out and trudge into the world.

I do none of these things.

Admittedly, I am a tad limited due to lack of cable television and flexible work hours. Sometime between nine and ten in the morning I turn off my alarm a couple minutes before it's due to sound. I've always been competitive, fighting tiny battles between people and inanimate objects with equal vigour. This current fight, me versus the alarm clock, has been going on for twelve years. I never use the snooze button; I never move it to the other side of the room to combat my natural laziness. There's no winning or losing, just the battle.

It might be better that way, actually. Winning or losing isn't the goal in life. You're already alive, you've won. It's the fight that drives you. It's the fight that proves you're living a worthwhile life.

You fight to catch the bus on time. You fight to become a better person. You fight yourself. But mostly, you fight because losing really sucks.

I used to be worse. Much worse. The daily battles I relish now were made redundant by caring parents and teachers. There has to be a possibility of losing to make the fight work. So, I channelled all that competitiveness into school work and extra-curricular activities. I had to be the best. When I look back now, I hate the girl that I was.

She wasn't a prom queen or a cheerleader. She was a nerd. She spent years wrapped up in drama club, band and science. And if those were to be her kingdoms, she wanted to rule them. She clawed her way to the top, only remaining friends with those with equal ambition. She made mistakes.

This girl, as she was, lasted approximately three years into her first decent corporate job after undergrad school when she met Troy Huffington. He lived three floors below and several social strata above her. But somehow, they became something more. So, she became Troy's girlfriend.

She fought to be the best girlfriend she could be. She wore the right clothes, did the right things, and followed all the motions. She gave him all her firsts...and for awhile, it worked. Then he met someone new, someone better, someone worth fighting for, and she was discarded. Thrown out like yesterdays newspaper, headlines no longer relevant. There had been tears, curses, and mistakes. The weird and generally horrible thing about living in the same building as your ex is that they're everywhere. Never enough distance to truly recover. The old me, that girl, didn't take it that well.

It's really difficult to determine when that girl became me. A person who knows to stick with tiny battles, where your heart is never on the line and getting hurt is unlikely. It could have been one of the many times she ran into Troy and his new love in the stairwell during the rest of that lonely first job era. Perhaps, it was the first time she failed to impress a client in a haze of overconfidence. It had been her twenty-first birthday, when she discovered alcohol and eager boys do not mix well.

It's a moot point, really. She became me, and when I went back to my momma dukes' homeland barely a month ago, I became her.

I'm a statistician now. It wasn't my original intention, but it suits me. I give numbers to life events. I can evaluate risk. What is the probability of getting hit by a car at a certain intersection as a pedestrian in downtown Manila between noon and three p.m.? What is the likelihood of developing cancer if you use a certain product? Risk is perfectly quantifiable. You can always trust Math. If you trust the Math, you don't get hurt.