Ang Hiling By Brian Justimbaste

Brian Justimbaste lives a very solitary and mundane life accounted for by the way he opened his story, stating: “My knees ached from the long walk. All I saw was an uprooted tree. No sight of anybody walking. No traffic lights.” He seemed to have gone to a convenience store and bought cans of beer to drink by himself which further develops the account I posted earlier. He then proceeded to quell his boredom by watching a show on wish fulfillment which I assume is to be the show called, “Ang Munting Hiling” which he never really got to focus on as it ended because it did not hold his interest long enough.

Way into the night, he lay quietly in his sofa and had let his thoughts linger on “cats scavenging my garbage bin outside” which then led

The unexpectedness surprised him and he accounted for everything the crew members did, up to the way they smelled. He noticed that they reek of alcohol, they gave him an obligatory package wrapped in blue cellophane, and he also labeled the two crewmen as the “tall one” and the “short one”. He seemed to be experiencing an information overload maybe from having not seen anyone other than those two crewmen in the three days he stayed in his apartment alone. He even interrupted a conversation the two were having for the sake of a conversation, like he stated in the story, probably hungry to talk to someone. In this same paragraph, the taller one noticed a frame with a picture of a lone Brian during his elementary recognition, and an upturned television, used by the shorter one as a table, given to him by his mother. This provides proof, in relation to my narrative, that from the very beginning Brian has always been, in a sense, alone. The upturned television set from his mother is the only representation he provided for readers to remember her by and it might be a metaphor for his relationship with

He was to be someone who committed suicide but failed and a friend of his (I gather this “friend” would be his boss because Justimbaste stated that most of his friends were from work) was the one who had written the letter sent to “Ang Munting Hiling” about his unfulfilled desires, and an estranged lover (which is false as the person they provided to be his lover was a stranger to him and one that he hadn’t even met in real life). Serapio went on and said that his confidante was to be Aling Luz who interacts with Justimbaste only every three months when there’s an absolute necessity for the interaction. This shows how lonely he really is. He has no close friends, no lover, and no valid interactions with his neighbors. Even his very identity had to be tailor-made because he was much too boring for