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a piece of advice: if you are eating something while reading this, it's best to finish whatever you're eating before you continue reading.

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what hurts me a lot is when i see someone (i'm emotionally attached to) suffer, and i can't do anything but watch him in vain.

here's the setting. after our eee13 lab, melai, isel, aj and i decided to eat pancit canton by the main lib. it's one of our usual habits (and this was the reason why we bought 20 packs of chili-mansi pancit canton for the overnight at rhoda's. but we never managed to eat them. haha.)

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well, there was this cat, which, in many respects, is like tangee, that kitten who used to roam around the tambayan.

anyway, this kitten was on the ground, asleep.

while we were waiting for our pancit canton, we noticed that there were so many ants near the cat. from what it looked like, the cat was distracted by these ants, so it moved to the nearby road and resumed its nap.

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then, while we were eating, somebody tried to park his car right on the spot where the cat was sleeping. he didn't notice the cat, so he actually...

so he actually ran over the cat.

well, the cat was still alive. i could still remember the look on its face as it tried to get out from under the wheel.

we were frantically shouting, because that's all we could do. we couldn't do anything. of course, we can't lift the car. and we can't pull the cat out or else it would die.

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but the driver apparently noticed something was wrong, based from our reactions. (hello. what would you do if you were about to park a car, then people eating calmly in a corner would all of the sudden scream, cover their eyes and look away? you would obviously sense that something's not right.)

so he pulled out his car.

and while he was doing so, the cat's insides exploded. like a balloon that's been sat on. or ran over for that matter.

we were so horrified that from the moment we saw the cat being run over, we tried to move to another place so we won't see the cat writhe in pain.

but we were too late. too slow. or rather, the events were too quick.

as we were moving to another bench, i saw the cat's final, fatal horrifying moments. even that moment when the cat exploded.

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and that asshole just parked his car on another spot. he didn't care at all about the cat. and just moments after, he left. we didn't know where the hell we went.

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i couldn't take that incident off my mind. probably i was emotionally attached to that cat. like i said, the cat was in many respects similar to tangee, and i liked tangee. i even used to play with it back then when it used to roam around the tambayan.

so from the moment i first saw the cat i became attached to it.

or probably because i've witnessed the whole event. from the moment the cat was squished under the wheel to the time its insides burst.

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this isn't a scene vividly crafted from one's imagination. it's real.

and now i can't sleep because of this. i can't concentrate on what i'm studying because i keep on recalling that incident.

so i had to write this because this is the only way i'd ever move on.

i still feel guilty that i didn't do anything to alleviate the cat's suffering during that last few seconds of its life. i still feel guilty because we all felt the instinct to look away, to move away, while the cat was in pain.

i want to light up a candle for that poor cat.

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i'm not silly. it's just that i'm too (emotionally) involved to simply let this go and move on as if nothing happened.