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Jhoanna scrunches her nose, flipping through her notebook. “Bakit ba kasi may trigonometry pa rin sa physics? ‘Di na ako tinantanan nito!” She huffs in annoyance, scribbling the formulas of Law of Sines and Cosines on her formula pad before answering the assignment given to them by their professor. For a while, during the summer, she thought that she would be free from the shackles of Sine, Cosine, and Tangent functions that she frequently encountered during the first semester of their junior year, but she thought wrong. From the very first week of classes, she found herself swimming in the waters filled with the said mathematical concepts once again.
She doesn’t even know why she’s in STEM. For all she knows, she should’ve been in HUMSS, but considering the blatant favoritism for STEM students in the country, she thought that it was the only practical choice. Besides, college entrance exams usually revolve around science and mathematics competencies, so she has the upperhand.
As she scribbles away in her notebook, nakabusangot , Stacey groans in her seat. She covers her eyes in agony, feeling beat. “Peroxisomes… Golgi Apparatus… Vacuole… Lysosomes… Mitochondria?” She repeats in her head like a mantra, “Teka… Mitochondria?” She groans once again, noticing the odd-one-out. She’s being pushed to her limits, and she wishes to turn into a virus at that very moment… maging pabigat nalang at mawalan ng pake. “Jhoanna,” she calls. The younger woman only hums, loudly pressing on her scientific calculator which has been with her through hell-and-back.
“Jho.” Stacey calls once again. Jhoanna looks up on that call, looking through her eyelashes. Her fingers stop midair, the calculations left unfinished on her notebook. “Ano?” She asks when Stacey only stares at her. “Bakit, Staks?”
“Imagine kung sumabog Lysosome mo.”
“Huh?”
“Edi patay ka n’yan.” Lysosome, the suicide bag of the cell. Thank its lysozyme.
“Anong pinagsasabi mo, Stacey? Nabaliw ka na ba?”
“I guess so.” Stacey only shakes her head as she drops her head on her book, feeling burnt out. “Imagine if life just didn’t exist. Imagine if… walang evolution na nangyari. Imagine if all organisms are still the same—“ She mutters while lifelessly looking out of the window, feeling the cells in her brain going haywire. She had an ample amount of sleep (surprisingly) and had enough food to eat, but it seems like the mitochondria that is in her brain cells are too tired to continue pushing out energy for her to function.
Sana wala nalang akong cholesterol para natunaw nalang ako sa init dito.
“Then the world would be an intense form of competition, Staks. We would all be needing the same resources to live—magkauubusan. We’d die.”
“…Then hindi sana ako lugmok dito ngayon sa bio! Patapusin mo naman kasi ako, Jhoanna. Masyado kang seryoso.”
Jhoanna just looks at Stacey with a sigh then goes back to doing her physics assignment. “If… the world was the same as it was millions of years ago, then we wouldn’t be here, Stacey.” She says while looking down, focused on the task at hand. “Remember when we looked at plant cells, mala-Matthias Schleiden?”
“Using your mom’s confocal scanning microscope, kaya ka napagalitan kasi mali pag-handle mo? Yes.” Jhoanna rolls her eyes in feign annoyance dahil pinaalala pa ni Stacey ang pangyayaring ‘yon. Hinding-hindi n’ya makalilimutan ang mukha ng mama n’ya when she saw Jhoanna carrying the microscope by only holding its arm. Good thing her mom didn’t notice that her plant had a missing leaf that they used to watch the movement of the cells under the relatively expensive scientific device. “Ano naman?”
“We realized back then that the foundation of life really is so minuscule, yet they had a purpose. We’re made up of cells who work so hard just to make us function so we’d have a purpose in this world, Staks.”
“You and your words, Robles. Sa’n mo naman natutuhan ‘yan?”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters now—“
“Solid, liquid, gas! Pwede rin ang plasma.”
“Haha, very funny.” Jhoanna rolls her eyes for the nth time that hour, but continues her sentiment before Stacey cut her off. “What matters now, Stacey, is that we have a purpose. Kaya nga tayo nag STEM dahil we want to make this world a better place through the natural sciences, right? Na baka one day, the item you’d discover or innovate could change the world for the better.”
“And anong connect nito sa biology?”
“Kasi, you want to be a doctor?”
“At this point, parang ang hirap pala! Ayaw ko na, Jho!”
“You cannot grow if you only stay within the limits of your comfort zone, Sevilleja.”
“Whatever. Gusto ko nalang maglasing.” Stacey huffs before reading her textbook once again, setting her arm up on the table to use her hand to rest her head as she scans and tries to comprehend the abundance of unfamiliar jargons presented in her book. The words seem to mix into an undesirable concoction in her mind, that if her mind was a chemistry experiment, it would’ve exploded a long time ago.
Talk about scientific error.
“And overwork your peroxisomes? Maawa ka naman sa liver mo.”
“Hoy, ang taray, ha! Ngayon na nga lang nagka-urge!”