Snails
There's a flight of stairs that connects Marikina to Ateneo de Manila. I usually pass through there when I go to school, as I did today. On approximately the twentieth step I found a big snail, the kind with a twirled shell, slimefully dragging itself and its load of a house across the ground. I looked at it for a while, then went ahead. Not more than five seconds later I heard a fairly loud crunch, and saw a high school student walking up the stairs, who passed me indifferently and continued on. The snail was dead. I'm not going to write about a mystical connection with the snail through metaphorizing the stairs or the slaughtering adolescent. Only that last night as I struggled to sleep I kept thinking how different I am in this place, and how different this place is, and I no longer know how to identify differences any more than I can gauge how far stars are.