Excerpt: The Center

My mornings follow a pretty set routine: I always set the alarm to play some radio station I hate. Usually it’s the one with the loud evangelical preacher guy. I can’t stand that guy. Even if he says something I totally agree with; even if he says that babies are cute and we should all be nice to each other, the way he says things gets my blood boiling, which gets me up. Not happy, but out of bed, and that’s usually good enough.
Sometimes I’m feeling lazy, so I just turn the radio to some other station. Most of the time it’s a rock station, playing songs about boys falling in love with girls, or boys having lost girls, or girls singing about how dumb boys are. This leads me to believe that if the boys would spend more time once they’ve found a girl actually talking to that girl and getting to know her there would be less of the second and third types of songs. This type of contemplation, however, rarely leads to me getting out of bed, and I’m almost always late for work if I do that. I consider turning it to a Latin station instead, but even though the beats are better and I can’t understand the words, I’m pretty sure that they’re singing about the same things.
So most days I just turn off the radio before the preacher guy has time to say anything to which I object, or indeed anything at all, and head for the shower. That’s where I really wake up; under the cascade of hot water and the mindless routine of washing is what gives me time to remember who I am, why I’m here and what I’m doing with my life.
That’s how it usually happens, anyway. There was something wrong with the whole process on that day, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it seemed to be the radio was wrong. The guy wasn’t singing in English, but I could understand what he was saying. So that means I’m bilingual. Good to know. He was singing—I stopped and listened to a few bars—yes, he was singing about losing a girl. So even in Tagalog, boys can’t figure out how to hold on to girls once they’ve found them. Tagalog. That must be my second language. Good to know. Where do they speak Tagalog, anyway, and what am I doing in such a place? These, I decided, were questions that could wait until I had a shower and got my brain into gear. With that aim in mind I swung my feet out of bed, stood up, and promptly crashed to the ground amidst a clatter of two or three metal things that I couldn’t immediately identify because I hadn’t opened my eyes. There was also a searing, tearing pain in my midsection that definitely seemed out of place.
“Ay, nako! Ang tangang tanga mo! Ano bang ginagawa mo?”[1] Something short and brown was haranguing me while helping me back into what I now perceived to be a hospital bed. I lay back and probed at my midsection gently. There was gauze and tape covering a very painful area on my right side, and an IV tube in my left hand. None of me felt very well.

[1] My goodness, how dumb are you? What do you think you’re doing?