Someday, I'll Find My Way Home

Karl listens to a confession.

A month had passed, and I was back in my apartment in UPLB. I was the first one among my roommates to arrive since I had to arrange my papers for reappointment in my tutoring job, reapply as Sir Gabe's student assistant, and inquired about my scholarship requirements that I needed to submit.

The time alone in my apartment was all I needed to refresh my mind after four months of being away from my second home. I spent most of my time outside with my earphones on, walking around the campus, gazing the stars on Freedom Park, and just being alone but not lonely.

I tried the new restaurants that popped up when I came back. I always wanted to try and sleep naked in my apartment--and yes, I did that too before they come back. Then more walking, talking to my professors, and walking. I was hailed as the official ICS Student Assistant by my profs, since I didn't notice I was spending too much time hanging out with my professors than usual last semester.

Marvin and my other roommates came back for manual registration three days before the start of the semester, since all of us failed to get some of our GE courses in SystemOne. So, all of us have to ask for teacher's prerogative (or Prerog).

Paula and I were superclassmates again in my major subjects, just because we were both unlucky on SystemOne. We planned for the five of us to be classmates on all laboratory sections, but only Axel and Marvin got lucky. Candace was the unluckiest, since she was left behind on all of us and had to manually register for laboratory sections. 

This was the year that we also get to enroll in our electives. I chose SOC 130 (Social Psychology) for this semester since that was a topic I was passionate about (plus Ma'am Julianda, my previous professor in SOSC1 with Axel, was also the teacher--another thing to be excited about).  

The only thing that I didn't look forward to this month was my birthday. I still hadn't told any of my friends, except for Axel, when my birthday was. I kept on sliding the topic away whenever they were asking about it, or butt in a joke just to evade the question. 

However, I thought... it was my 18th birthday. At the very least, I wanted to celebrate it with Axel alone. I might treat him dinner at Selinas if the bugdet persists. That was the time I would finally be of legal age, and treating it as another normal day would be a total waste.

A huge part of me still believed that I didn't want to increase my expectations on remembering my birthday that people should treat it as a big deal, even though it was just another day.

Well, maybe except Axel. If he would greet me without me telling him to do so, it would make my day better instantly.

Then again, I didn't want to raise my expectations, or else I'd end up being disappointed.

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At our very first day of classes, we had a 7AM class--CMSC 127 with Sir Gabe. I was his student assistant on his other lecture series, CMSC 11. Marvin and I walked together to Physci, where we met with Paula and Candace (who are both in dresses to celebrate the first day of classes) in front of the steps. As usual, Axel was late, so we just reserved him a seat.

Until Sir Gabe asked us to change seats by lab section. Thankfully, I was still seatmates with Paula.

I whispered a curse when I saw Marc three rows away from the both of us. I knew he was looking at me. Our friendship took a hard hit after turning him down. He was purposely ignoring me after Valentine's Day. He stopped sending me texts (which was a good thing, since I didn't really want to talk to him after that).

During the break, he tried to connect with me on Facebook, and I just sent him the dullest of all replies that I could send to someone. Most of the time, I left his message as Seen. If he asked a question, I would limit my answers to five to fifteen characters only (a challenge I was happy to partake; a step up to Twitter's 140 characters).