Rocking Sichuan

If you want to know one pathetic truth about me, its that I’m a really big sucker for flowers, I like picking and buying the good looking ones and getting them altogether on a goddam bouquet, its not that I like flowers for myself but during past unfortunate events that I fell in love with a girl, I have this intuition of sending her flowers because I’m just one hell of a hopeless romantic that I’m stuck with this idea that girls like getting flowers.

I was flying back to manila from hong kong and I always made it a habit to go see their flower market before I leave the place, I am not seeing anybody but its one of the places where I think they had the best flowers.

There’s this bundle of roses I found there which were very pretty, it was pink and it turned dark purple into its petal edges, I wanted to buy it though I didn’t have anybody to give it to, perhaps to that cute girl who frequents ariel’s internet café but what the hell. I was staring at that bundle long enough that I almost pulled it out and the florist even asked me in mandarin if I wanted it.

I left the place and took the subway back, and the past few days that I was taking the subway I could notice that there are a lot of these donation boxes scattered around the place for the earthquake disaster in sichuan a month ago, they almost had one in every mcdonalds and every corner you could just turn to. Because a month ago there was this one hell of a earthquake that rocked sichuan province in china back to the ming dynasty, the news reported that the earthquake blew up the richter scale but maybe because of the suppression of the press in red china I didn’t get to see much pictures of the earthquake devastation in the news back home, all they gave you were numbers like millions worth of property lost and ten thousands of chinamen getting killed in the earthshake, and seeing numbers didn’t struck your sentiments rather than seeing real pictures of a crushed townscape along with its humanity. But in hong kong there were always pictures at their late night news and their morning papers and posters everywhere that the disaster surprised me too soon already.

I even tried giving a donation two days ago, I was walking and I passed by this shrine where some chinamen were praying to their oriental side of heaven, there was a big steel sichuan donation box beside the shrine that caught my attention, I had one penny from my country’s currency and decided to drop it inside, they couldn’t buy anything worthwhile with it anyway but I was making some sort of a wishful thought with my penny to them like how losers drop coins to wells and fountains. I struck a pose during the moment when I was about to drop my coin and took a picture of it with my mobile phone.

When I dropped my coin, it hit the bottom of the steel donation box with a loud resounding ‘TONGGG’ and I found out that the goddam donation box was empty, and the sound of my coin was awfully loud because of the silence in the shrine that everybody who was praying turned to me and saw me with legs apart holding my mobile phone and making that glorious dropping-coin pose, all those chinamen could have done was clap for me, they didn't but nonetheless it was embarrassing, I smiled back anyway. I should have dropped my coin someplace else like in the noisy subways.

I did get the flowers, but hell I will just have to let them rot at my desk.