To start building our life as a family. My spouse, the baby I was carrying then, and I. It was the image envisioned in my mind. We agreed to stay in a little room in his mother’s compound in a little town outside the city.
It is actually a suburb bustling with so much activity from dawn to dusk. Its residents have lived there for several years and grown many generations.
There are a lot of structures that they can brag of. Besides the old Churches, there were the Spanish-style houses with cozy balconies and windows made of capiz shells.
As days and months passed, the simple life of its people unveiled before me. The friendly smiles of the elderlies greet me as I passed them.
Peddlers haggling stuff like tilapia, peanut butter, buttered (small) shrimps, and rags were not uncommon sights on the streets. Neither the scents of various kakanins sold from morning until afternoon.
Young children running to and pro along the eskinitas. The religious piety of both the old and young alike. The noisy bets for the battles of spiders.
The arguments between the members of the paluwagans. People hanging out by the streets in wee hours, pretending they were playing cards or darts. These were a few of the things that may remind me of that place.
But above all else, what bemused me? It was how the neighborhood cradles hucksters. Hucksters trading the country’s most prominent, most prohibited substance today. It’s Methamphetamine Hydrochloride or simply, shabu.
Drub abuse in that little town does not choose age nor gender. Men and women alike, youths, and adults. Married, widowed, separated, single, and out-of-school kids. Students, laborers, drivers, professionals, and the unemployed. The stuff could lure anyone.
The community takes care as well of some “users, runners and mongers”. I realized they were mere pawns in this somewhat big and widespread illegal trade.
It’s a trade that could tolerate even the most painful consequences to a family.
I can only recall a few. Men keeping two wives under one roof. Minors forced into illicit affairs with dealers. Battered wives, and parents axed from their jobs. Couples being separated and mothers who abandoned their children.
Every day, these were only a few of what is actually happening before my eyes. I get curious why those people can outrun the authorities. They do their transactions even in the middle of the day, even they use the simplest street language.
It was a wonder why our other neighbors could tend to evade that. Were not their own sons and daughters affected as well?
Why the residents could overlook this and go on with their lives? Isn’t the neighborhood intertwined with their lives?
I realized existing in the same place demands to act oblivious to what was happening. But I cannot do what someone usually does there and it was sad that it seems it had made things worst.
That’s why I drafted this writing. Because the system affected my own budding family. It had seized from my daughter and me the chance to live peacefully with my husband.
Drug dependence lured him again.
He was unemployed for some time now. But, he learned to steal and selling kinds of stuff. From jeans to CDs to auto spare parts to anything to support the vice.
He even got an affair with a married, much older and similarly, shabu-dependent woman. Somebody who could more satiate him with his monetary and salacious needs.
His family had warned me neither to be disturbed nor to mind him nor his ways. Since he was being his old self again, I had to stop waiting for changes and need not worry about him.
I must no longer mind if he went home at two o’clock or four o’clock in the morning. Suspicious callers must not bother me. Even they call him daily for clear “suspicious business”.
I must not nag. I must not force him to tell where else he had spent almost the 24-hour of his Sundays. Or even his Christmas and Valentines.
It’s funny that it’s still expected, or even insisted on me to remain a docile wife as ever. The house must be neat, and meals are cooked and ready. The kid is well-tended, and the wife must be cheerful and cuddly in spite of everything.
The idea seems foul enough, yet, I tried conforming to the expectations. I strive to be the embodiment of devotedness that was imposed upon me.
Yet, nothing changes.
The distance between us became much too raw and much too cold not to notice. We seldom share lunch or dinner together then.
More often, he was getting unreasonable and defensive. As if protective of something or someone.
The number of times he turned his back at night already hurts. The times our intimate relations became disgusting. He alone needs only to release the tension the substance built within him.
Our fights were another. I withdraw and explode later; while him, he started hitting me.
Apart from the vindictive words he threw, I was more insulted. I was more wounded about the idea that he wanted us to leave him all alone.
It felt as he has long given us up –our family, our relationship, and me.
It almost makes me crumble and shatter. Yet, faith reminds me not to let it defeat me.
It was when I decided, against my desire, to let go of him, and of everything that we started. Our dreams, our little family, and even our little home– if there’s used to be one.
I left that place and took my child with me.
Yet, hoping that in doing so, I am not yet giving up on him. I left vowing that I must do something about whatever happened. Or what is still happening there.
I left praying that we may still take my daughter’s father away from that deteriorating place.
Twice before, I have already tried going away with him to start a new phase of life somewhere.
Yet, he seemed scared about finally detaching himself from the charm of that place. The crutch of his frailties and of his dependency.
Anyway, who else would be brave enough to live a decent life amidst a place poisoned by cowardice and absurdity?
How many young families may still break because of the apathy of today’s society on drug abuse?
Whose children would be denied a secured future before the government will actually do something?
It is in this light that this writing is hoped to be taken.
For the purpose to go far beyond that small place. So that no more neighborhood will stage the same stories again.
That this tale would no longer repeat to another guileless young person’s life again.
©1999 M.C.Padilla
©2018 March – First to published this online
Featured image: Soragrit Wongsa on Unsplash
In response to the Daily Prompt: Restart
Perle en Stylos 
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