That's X, Like X-Ray

November 8th is the 115th anniversary of my best friend today - the X-ray Machine.

It all started with a simple cold and cough which worsened after a couple of days. My doctor had to ask me to drop by on a usually non-work day for her. Of course I was scared, with all the pneumonia scare I am paranoid of.

Doc gave me a white slip, a referral for chest x-ray: in big bold letters I read "r/o pneumonia."

I froze. I told myself this is not happening.

Fine, it was just ruling out something. My cough and colds are beyond the No-Drowse Neozeps I was trying to self-medicate myself with. It's beyond Vicks. Beyond Vicks inhaler even. Beyond the early morning sea breeze, which is obviously non-existent in Manila.

So, Saturday was X-ray Day. And then, after the one-minute session with the radiology tech (which I had to wait for for over an hour waiting in line), life returned to normal. My partner N and I had our usual Saturday date - movie, popcorn, dinner, coffee. We hung out with our friends to celebrate one's new job. We went home and had a lazy Sunday doing chores (talk about ironing, I mean, irony). But even if I was coughing all day while counting how many spins the washer does per minute, I totally forgot about the X-ray.

Then it occurred to me, that during the past couple of months, N and I have been kind of categorizing our friends - sorta like examining each one more closely, sort of like subjecting them to an involuntary X-ray test.

An X-ray can tell you a lot of things - whether it's broken or not, whether it's swollen or not, whether it's hopeless or what. It's not the same thing about your friends, really.

With your friends, you dunno who hangs out with you because they get to pay a smaller part of the tab.

You dunno who hangs out with you because all their friends flaked out on them on the last minute.

You dunno who hangs out with you just because no one else bothered to text them the entire Saturday.

You dunno, most of the time, who's real and you dunno who they really are behind that x-ray machine.

I have close to 500 friends in Facebook. And I can absolutely say that only less than ten people are those who I would call friends. These people didn't have to go through that X-ray test. These people have proven through time that there is no need to doubt them. I hardly see them. They're absolutely not my gimik friends. But you know. You just know that they're the real ones.

Today is X-Ray Release Day. I handed the slip over to the bored clerk who yawns every time a patient comes in. She rummaged through a pile of brown manila envelopes. She mispronounced my name, I smirked and I nodded.

N held my hand as I pulled out the findings. I winked at him. I was skipping and hopping and almost dancing towards the doctor's clinic. With my count up, I convinced myself that nothing was gonna bring me down this early. I opened the clinic's door and handed the results to the ever-cheerful nurse. She was smiling and all I could say was "Told you, dear."