something i wrote for class which i will not bother to title

He was always told that he was not built to just stand by the curb on days when drains turned into rivers and paper-boat races, and stare at the puddles forming by his feet reflect the scene from the park across: a swing-set teetering on hinges that thirsted for oil; a slide embellished with cracks and dents collecting puddles of muck at its base; and a year's worth of trash floating along the pathway towards a bus-stop on the other side of the park – through rows of trees balding with every gust, burdened by the weight of the ocean’s desire to occupy land.

Mingle, she would say, scaring him out from in between her legs – back when he could still hug her legs without anyone raising an eyebrow. She had then grabbed him by his cheeks and shoved him into a sandbox where a girl – whose hair made the color of chestnuts blush in shame – sat with her legs crossed. Mingle; and so he did. He counted the girl’s fingers and toes and told her she was normal before showing him the tooth he kept in his pocket. I am missing something, he had said; and the girl blinded him with sand and formed a circle with the other children while his mother poured water over his face.

He did not know, then, if he was allowed to cry.

It seemed that while the men he knew, those who forced him to nod at jokes that would have compelled his mother to wash his ears out with soap, had placed their mothers deep in the crevices of their mind in their bid for the top-floor office – he still slept a wall away from his, her breath audible through the layers of flowcharts, pie-graphs and equations he had plastered upon his wall during his streak of first-place finishes in science-fairs.

It was then, when the trophies and medals robbed him of space for the apparels his mother’s magazines shoved in his face, that she had surprised him with her command to attend parties laced with plastic cups and music nowhere near comfortable. He was told to walk up to the girl melting herself into the wallpaper and introduce himself because that was what men in top-hats and roses would do; and to – not under any condition – suspend his head over the toilet bowl, puking his dinner of sisig and pancit all over the toilet-seat, while some guy, in boxer shorts that reeked of forgotten cheese sandwiches and gym-socks, lay drooling by the door.

He told her, yes, because that was what good boys did; but he only went as far as to park the car at the end of the street where the parties – that were visible only from the people spilling out into the streets, clutching each other in their attempt to re-learn locomotion – were held. When he got home, he was thrown out of the house when she caught him walking up to his room in a straight line.

She was not a bad mother. She was just unprepared to handle a boy that mumbled lists of numbers in his sleep that kept her from dreaming. And now that her hair had been thinning and turning into ash with every exhale, she hoped he had someone else.

She stepped out onto the patio and called out to him, telling him to grab an umbrella – her voice audible through the rain only if one were to place one's ear directly by her lips; and her presence acknowledged only by the groans and moans of their patio floor. She did not know if he could hear her, but he did; because while she stood there with her back folding upon itself, arms across her chest, wrapping a blanket – littered with a patch-work of random fabric and edges bitten and scratched by their stray cat – tighter around her frame of bones, he felt himself understand her before sound could even reach him.

That was what brought him here, far enough from his place – his mother's place – to never have to encounter anyone broadcasting his presence with a: “Hey you! How's your mother? What's that you're reading?” He had parked his car across the street from a conglomerate bookstore before positioning himself by the section where divorcées and widows with swollen tear-ducts could be found.

He hated such moments – those moments where silence pressed around him, suffocating him as it entered every crevice of his body, as if forcing him to admit where he had gone wrong. He would have preferred to be by the curb, inhaling concrete and mud while staring at puddles; or in his bedroom organizing his collection of test tubes and comic books; or on his Facebook and Twitter account, which he updated with inventions whenever his world stood still. But his mother had other plans for him; and she had many more that he was yet to be aware of.

Standing there, in the same position he had once seen another man do – legs apart, a hand in the pocket, shoulder against a shelf, finger thumbing through a book – he assumed the expression of someone in contemplation, while begging a picture of Dr. Phil to let him curl in a corner and sleep. No one ever came, anyway, and he really had no use for these books, except perhaps as a foot-rest for his mother who watched The Bachelor with a box of tissue clutched to her chest while he sat beside her fishing out plastic from her meal fresh out of a cardboard box. Or as a prop for when he was obliged to hog a table at Starbucks, an order of Chai Latte cooling in between his hands, while a book – listed as the favorite of the woman his mother had been stalking on a website peppered with pictures of couples and their matching sweatshirts – lay unopened in front of him.

He did not see the point of all this; but his mother had told him this was the place to be when the clouds tore themselves thin and umbrellas turned the street into a kaleidoscope of opportunity. She was right, in some ways, but nothing ever happened to him; and as much as he would miss the blur of leaves and twigs wafting the scent of concrete and mud up his nostrils, he hoped tomorrow would be warm.