In Continuum.

To be honest, I am not exactly surprised at this is my sister we are talking about. My sister does have anger management issues, always the one throwing a tantrum or the one making a big fuss out of the littlest things. She was also the child that used to scream and cry everyday at five in the meaning when she was young for no apparent reasons, and my parents used to drag her into the bathroom just to lecture her into shutting up. Those were the kind of disciplines that my sister and I received as we grew up, it was all about talking and lecturing, never about canning or spanking. For some reason, my sister and I seem to have gone in different directions in terms of our perspectives on life, and she hasn't shed her temperamental nature. My uncle says that she refuses to grow up, and I think that is true to some degree. She is a big child locked in a woman's body, one that is halfway through her twenties. To her, the world still pretty much revolves around her, and she is the center of the universe somehow. Everybody, for some reason, has to work around her tempers and her moods, at least for those who knows not of her little episodes. 

And as for the immediate family members like myself, we have devised paths of our at home just to make sure that ours do not cross with hers. We have learned the subtle non-verbal cues to stay away from her, what to say and what not to say when is in a certain mood. It's probably the part of my father that she inherited, the part that has been amplified and enlarged into an exaggerated proportion. No one is an island, people would say. I say, no one is an island, and no one is at the center of an universe either. She thinks of herself as the sun, whose existence depends on no one else, whose gravitational pull affects everyone but itself. That is probably how she sees herself, with all the people in her life revolving around her in an endless orbit, warming up when we get closer to her and then cooling down when we are further away. She rages non-stop for the most part of the year, occasionally releasing dangerous flares into the space and towards neighboring planets. But we have learned to deflect these dangerous flares from the sun, we have learned it the hard way. 

I suppose humans do no operate like planets, we do not exist in a standalone manner. I suppose in any social group that involves any forms of relationship, we exist to influence one another reciprocally. It is about how you influence others and how others influence you, and nobody can claim to be completely immune to the ideas and the words of somebody else. We are not isolated creatures, we cannot live in solitude for extended periods of time. We need that human touch in everything, somebody there to share our worlds with. We are more like countries I feel, where neighboring countries share the same weather systems. You get sunny days when I get sunny days, and you get colder days when I experience a blizzard. We are all relative to one another, like gears in a machine that turns and revolves with one another. Some people, like my sister, don't see that at all. I sometimes wonder how my sister turned out to be the way that she is, how she has isolated herself away from everybody and still feel that the world is obliged to her in a way. It's kind of like a teenager running away from home, only to call back because he ran out of money for somewhere to stay. That's the way that she is. 

There is only so long until a person realizes that he doesn't need to please you any longer, that he doesn't need to revolve around you anymore. There are some people I know, not just my sister alone, who sees themselves also at the center of their own universe. There is a set of planets that revolve around the center as well, but some of them realized that they do not need to remain in this orbit forever. As we learn to exchange certain thoughts and ideas, we begin to understand what benefits us and what opposes our own ideas and what is true. So some of us wake up from our wakeful slumber, some of us peel away from the center of it all. It is going to happen someday to you, it is going to happen to my sister too. One day, people are going to realize that they do not owe you anything, that their lives are not dependent on you at all. You may seem to be influential, especially after being in the middle for so long. But people are going to know, and they are going to leave you one by one. In the end, you are just going to be a dying star in the middle of vacuum, with nobody orbiting around you but a galaxy of trash left behind by the other planets. 

I don't suppose I speak directly of my sister, but to those that see themselves so highly at times. You know, the kind that puts themselves on a pedestal when they are really not deserving of that status at all. They have given too much credit to themselves, and it's repulsive to think so at times. A small conversation with a friend recently made me realize that people are not blind sheep, people know when to break away because they are not gullible, they are not stupid. Similarly, my aunt may be old and clumsy at times, but she certainly  is not going to be there forever to take my sister's tantrums. She has been way too tolerating, just taking my sister's punches one by one every single time, and the same for everybody else other than my mother, whose presence shuts my sister up almost completely every single time. This is not the way to treat other human beings, especially the ones who are close to you. If you cannot even treat your friends and families as friends and families, if you can dispose of them when you don't need them any longer like garbage, then how are you going to go out to face the reality?

I suppose, in this point in time, my parents have decided that it is either we learn it the hard way, or we don't learn it at all and fail in life. That is probably when I was enlisted into the army, they saw it more as an opportunity for me to grow up rather than an abrupt break in my life that is going to disrupt everything else. That was my time to grow up and to become more mature, that was the period of time when I learned that people do not revolve around someone else, and others do not revolve around me. We are in each others' orbits, we are in the same universe, and we are just like one another. My sister, and some others, never had such opportunities to grow, to learn, to realize that the real world out there doesn't stomach people with these narrow-minded attitudes. I don't think my parents are going to drag my sister into the bathroom to give her a lecture when she returns from Taiwan this time around. All my mother said was that she'd learn it the hard way when she joins the workforce, when she is forced to be under the command of a superior, to learn that people do not work for her, and that you have to work for others too. 

Amidst all the complexities of human interaction, the basis of it all lies in a little word called "respect". It is all about respecting who the other person is and what he stands for. It is a tough word to comprehend at times, but it is certainly something that is vital to learn of if you are going to have to come in contact with people who are not going to be so nice to you in the future, people who are not going to take your shit just because you grew up thinking that people would. It's about respecting the presence of others and not take them for granted, and I just feel that the effects of such ignorance is more than a consequence to yourself, but to others as well. Your ignorance is not only going to cause you to be left behind in your own empty solar system, but it is going to hurt people along the way as well. As I have learned it myself, I am also a student in the complexities of life. I don't suppose I know how to thread my way through things either. At least I know, to play the ball close to my chest and to always remember the little thing called respect. I know people are not going to be there forever, and what I do know is that I should do everything that I can to make the best out of things. Not to be in the center, never in the center. Always in orbits and revolutions, around one another.