I don't have a title for this

So this is from the first exercise, I was going to write the scene that came up for the exercise but this came out instead, but I reckon this will lead to the scene that came up in the exercise. Or not. We'll see.

The cousins, Ferdi and Nando were born 3 days apart, both of them named for their Tito Ferdinand, who was simple, however out of his fifteen siblings— each of whom regarded the others on an emotional scale that ranged from antipathy to mildly tolerated— Ferdinand was the only one they could all agree to be generally likeable. Which probably had more to do with the fact that his lack of intelligence barred him from becoming a factor in family decisions. He never asked for anything, never desired to eat more than the family could afford to feed him. He lived at his parent’s farm his entire life. He was a good worker, a hard worker and had an almost post human connection to the carabao that worked and tilled the family rice fields.

He judged none, and spoke only in platitudes. His face was the only part of him where the truth of his age would allow itself to take residence. Ferdinand would always be, the Ferdinand he always was and this made him impregnable to the insufferableness the Barcado family would grow to have for one another. To them, Ferdinand would always be a child and in some ways each member of the family, in their own way, took to shielding him from the trifling quarrels that had infected them to a point where it would be as prominent as its family name.

However Ferdi and Nando’s parents did not name them after Ferdinand because they wished to shield them from everything that was in ugly in their world or because they foresaw raising young boys who would never learn to wipe their own ass properly or would sleep in their parent’s bedrooms until the age of 15. They dreamed of young boys who had a question for everything. Who would always see the world as something new. They dreamt of sons with something of a passionate familiarity towards the world. Or was it desire? Something that pulled them towards movement, towards looking at anything with even the slightest bit of care. It was everything they imagined they were once, believe that they still can be, and yet, have fallen frustratingly short of time and again.

And all hopes, they would pin on Ferdi and Nando. Who by all accounts, were decent boys growing up. But those hopes would become implausible benchmarks. They would become more or less the reason why Ferdi and Nando’s names would be spoken by their parents in resigned tones. “This is my son,” followed by deeply inhaled sigh, “he collects comic books and has worked at the same office for 4 years and has never once received a promotion” or “This is my son, he’s 27 and has had 2 girlfriends and none have lasted more than 4 months” or “This is my son, he has no real goals, he graduated college with a degree in history, however he has no real opinion on anything.”

And it wasn’t that Ferdi and Nando grew up to be stupid. They weren’t. They were just kind of there. Nando still lived at home with his parent, while Ferdi rented out a one bedroom in-law that belonged to a family friend. They knew things that were completely inconsequential for anyone to know and would often rattle off inane pop culture related questions in an attempt to stump the other. As it stands the current count is Ferdi: 235 and Nando: 247. The cousins never bothered to learn their native tongue, as it was, Ferdi’s father during family parties would often proclaim loudly and drunkenly in tagalong— that no, they weren’t stupid at all, they just were really stupid about things.