Day 19 - Sepia Portrait

Day nineteen of the quarantine.

The sun is bright but not too much to be annoying. I can still feel the presence of clouds somewhere in the background. I can feel them looming not too far behind the morning sun, waiting for their turn to take over the sky and rule the mood of the day.

Funny how I feel their presence more even when they are hiding, even when the sun is glaring.

Funny how you can feel the tale tell of impending gloom, in the middle of a bright morning.

Ever since the beginning of this whole chaos, I’ve been training myself, or rather, forcing myself, to do normal. To make normal the new necessity to survive. Wake up at dawn, make the bed, open the window, exercise, greet the sun, greet the plants on my front yard, clean the house, breakfast with toast and jam while talking to my Mom. I feel like we need to hold on to what little normalcy we have in our lives.

It’s the same ritual this morning. As the sun rose higher, I figured it would be nice to capture the brightness in which this day is started. So I took my camera and walked to the front yard. I crouched in front of one of the greens and shifting my position to find the best angle where the sunlight is filtered by the thin transparent leaves while getting the sun itself in the frame.



I see skies of blue

and clouds of white

The bright blessed day

the dark sacred night

And I think to myself

what a wonderful world



I just noticed Louis Armstrong's What A Wonderful World playing in the background. I figured my Mom must have turned on her playlist while sewing the cloth masks.

I kept on taking pictures, as the songs come flowing through the speaker.

Suddenly, like a reel of film, images after images invaded my mind. I was transported to a time where old songs played from the radio and we were little kids playing with our board game, watching TV from a TV set in a saloon, sitting on the couch staring at the tree branches swayed by the wind of dry season, nodding our heads sleepily on a Sunday afternoon, ready for a nap because there wasn't much to do back then. Everything was fine, back then. And we were convinced that everything will always be fine, back then. The world was so much slower.

I let my guard off and let myself basked in the wave of childhood memories in a soft brown and yellow hue. For a moment I felt peaceful and nostalgic.

But I couldn't help but feel that this serene moment is tinged with something. Everything is perfect. The day is bright, the flowers are fresh, the leaves are green, the world is fine, but something, somewhere, is off.

The nostalgic images reeling in my head blurred and slowly came to a halt. And then I saw myself in the frame, the me from decades ago, staring back at me with a solemn and detached expression.

I know. We're just picture, frozen in time in sepia-colored portrait.

And then it dawned on me.

I’m feeling like I'm starring in the opening scene of a horror apocalyptic movie.