However, in the Manileno nightlife where wit isn’t sorely missed in most conversations anyway, the spirit of the staircase is more than just about feeling sorry about some forgotten riposte. It stays with you longer than for just a moment, it is actually a state of mind.
For La Vida Manila at night is a peculiar thing.
Into the Bay the sun sets before Luneta lovers, seaside vagrants, pickpockets, aliens. And the moon reigns over our sanity and sanitation.
From the top of Our Lady of EDSA’s crowned head one can view the rush hour traffic drifting up the River EDSA.
The urban smog beclouds the sky, veiling the constellations within it. The skyline is beheld instead, flickering with all that is florescent from the billboards and emptied office buildings.
And in and out nightclubs, bars, restaurants, discos, the nighthawks come and go. The sleepwalkers and the vampires and the batgirls and the buttmen.
They suck the life out of every cocktail, filling their guts with vigor and vitality until their eyes water with venom. Enough to melt the beautiful with a liquid stare, or defeat the undesirables with a dagger look.
They have seen enough, to know enough, of the vacuous, vicious cycles of the night. They haunt place to place, season after season, for each Club’s death is another’s birth, or some other’s resurrection. But the Faces remain the same in the Cult of Fun.
They hate the light, save for the neon and the strobe, and perhaps the occasional camera flashbulb. Only the toilets and sinks know what truly transpires in the dark recesses of the ladies and men’s rooms.
On occasion I am one of them. I would join them in their nocturnal flights, most often and most religiously not too long ago when I was but an aging adolescent.
But, alas, aray, woe is me! That has all changed.
For now, when most nights fall, so do my melancholy, my ennui, my evening sorrow. The nightly winter (or rainy season) of my discontent.
The Elders once warned me that this time would come, but I had paid no heed; I thought that caviar wishes and champagne dreams would see no end. And I would prowl around the night forever.
But the time did come, and these days I am but a shadow of my former self. I have ceased to thank God each Friday. My head no longer bobs up and down to DJ-spun music, or swings side-to-side to exchange air kisses. At the ripe old age of 26 my hipbones now creak with every step on the dance floor.
In one way, it is the going in after the going out that I have tired of. Too many nights of piercing the silence of my bedroom with my wobbly stilettos, followed by the muffled sobs of a foot in mouth upon remembering an earlier faux pas. Or my face in the john from the unbearable lightness of alcohol in my head.
Alas! Aray! Woe is me! I have been possessed by the Spirit of the Staircase in another, more mordant incarnation.
The Spirit of My Staircase is a monster. It makes me regret not having had that witty repartee, which I could’ve had in some great conversation, which I may have missed with some people whom I haven’t even met at some place that I haven’t even been to. It is a disenchantment with social life in general.
And yet, the Spirit of My Staircase is about more than a failure to connect and engage with other people genuinely. It is about the dread of coming backâ€â€to my daylight reality, to my work, to my vicissitudes and my troubles, even after a night of euphoria. It is asking myself, "Why on earth am I here on this darkened staircase again?"
At the end of an all-nighter, when all is said and done, I never feel lonelier.
I, along with any Manileno or human being for that matter, know that a healthy social life is a vital element in the pursuit of happiness. But if my social life is only giving me a hangover of the soul, then perhaps an anti-social life would be more in order.
In other words, some time alone.
So during those moments now and then when the Spirit of My Staircase beckons to me I know that it’s time for a French exit. Away from Manila, away from friends, away from the nightâ€â€and into a little more inner light.