Clocks
by JB Cada

Here comes August. The digital clock on my desk – a relic from college – has been malfunctioning, running 10 times too fast. In the past 3 days the date has advanced the same number of months. As I sit at my desk staring at the digits change I feel like I'm in suspended animation, unchanged as the days hurtle by. Life runs past me. I am a spectator. Not a far stretch from reality, I'll say.

I’ve been holed up in my apartment for the better part of the weekend trying (and consistently failing) to write something. Anything. Back in college she used to say it was a sad, sad thing that I “never got up off your ass long enough to use your God-given talents” she would point with some disgust at my dusty old guitar, my dried up paintbrushes, my neglected journal. It pissed her off, she said, that I had all this creative talent where she had none, and I was pissing it all away.

She always used to tell people that I was a writer when she’d introduce me to people, and inwardly I had to cringe. She did that in the hopes of pissing me off enough to get me to actually write something. I’m a translator, not a real writer. I have not, since high school, for God’s sake, come up with anything original. I don’t even translate fiction; I do the company literature for M_______: brochures, product catalogs. Employees’ handbooks. Operating manuals. The US office sends down new material every month and I translate them into Filipino for our work force in the offices in San Juan and the new plant in Tanauan, Batangas (25 hectares. $300million. It’s insane). Some of the guys at work have joked that if the stateside bosses ever got wind that I’d grown up in Cebu they’d build the next plant there and have me translating everything twice, into Tagalog and Cebuano.

I haven’t been to the hometown in three years. Growing up, she and I always said we’d keep coming back, even when I was a rich and famous novelist and she was making a gazillion bucks in some multinational. Well now that a multinational has hired her and sent her off to Europe with a big fat salary I wonder if she’ll ever come back and visit the old town.

She and I both moved out here to the city to attend separate universities. Four years later she had her business degree and I’d somehow drunk and smoked my way only halfway to an art degree. I quit school a year later and landed my first job typesetting for a hole-in-the-wall printing outfit in Cubao. Mindless work, setting other people’s words to type, smoking too much in that fire-hazard of an “office” with cans of turpentine and volatile ink and paper stacked waist high.

The clock on top of the TV has a little red plane printed on a transparent plastic disk for a seconds hand. There's adjustable dials for telling the time overseas. Souvenir from when they first sent her off to the T_______ head office in Brussels for training. It's been stuck at 20 minutes til 3:00 for oh, half a year now, the little red plane frozen just clear of the 10, halfway to Sydney from Tokyo.

May 12, 1999. I’m at the airport seeing her off to her permanent assignment in Europe. I tell her when I finally manage to write my novel I’ll mail her a copy. She smiles somewhat sadly and surprises me by touching my cheek before walking away.

On my corkboard half-buried among the pushpins, post-its and other clutter (reminders to myself of appointments, now long past) a plastic sign says "Gone out, will return at--" and a clock face with red movable hands to tell when I’ll be back. I took it home with me after I quit the typesetting job at G_______. The clock announces that I will be back at 6:59. Said so for 4 years now. But I've gone nowhere...I'm still here.