Keona, (he)art-in-progress

In 2024, my niece Keona took the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts Talent Determination Test (TDT) for admission into the Associate in Arts Visual Communication program. The AA is a two-year certificate program that can be bridged to a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree.

Keona hadn't passed the UPCAT, but she had already fallen in love with UP. The College of Fine Arts, specifically. 

Below is a picture of her on her way to take her "last" shot to enter UP CFA via the TDT.

I remember feeling sad for her when she shared with us the UPCAT news. I also felt a bit guilty, because as soon as she was born, we'd been telling her to go to UP--part joke, part dream, largely an assumption that of course she would go to her parents' and uncles' and aunties' alma mater.

Having entered UP as a transferee, however, I also knew that the UPCAT isn't the only way to get in.

I remember telling her to take the TDT because even if she did pass the UPCAT, she would need to take it anyway, stressing, perhaps a little too much, hoping it offered some consolation, that passing the UPCAT doesn't determine your acceptance into CFA.

I remember remembering a UP Quill orgmate who once shared his AA to BFA journey in the 1990s and telling Keona his story.

I also remember telling her that UP was also my dream school, but I was forced to go to DLSU (and not UP Baguio, where I had secured a slot) and that I transferred to Diliman in my second year.

My sister Kai and I looked up the AA programs, took note of the deadlines, and considered what the possibilities were. 

Then Kai handed the reins over to her daughter to pursue her dream school--after paying UST a not-so-small amount as a reservation fee.

And take the reins, Keona did. She did everything. She made Plans B and C (taking the TDT for Fine Arts in UP Baguio, which was still an option then, because it was scheduled on a later date) and D (transferring from another school). She curated her projects in senior high school, ensuring that her works showed diversity in technique. She also painted a self-portrait with a ton of cats to beef up her portfolio. 

She tracked deadlines and requirements and showed up for all that was required of her to enter the college of her dreams.

I was in complete awe, thinking that, if I had been her, I would have most likely gone to the school that wanted me.

But Keona focused on what she wanted. And she did the work to get it. And she got accepted into the AA VisComm program with no difficulty at all.

Some time last year, the family was out for dinner somewhere in Molito, Alabang. Keona followed from Diliman. She was still wearing her UP ID with a UP lanyard. Someone teased her about it, and she replied, beaming, "I will wear this everywhere because I worked so hard for this!" 

Yes, she did!

Keona got accepted into the BFA degree program today. 

Auntie Anna

Like many Filipinos, we have family who have immigrated to the States. By the late 1980s, my mother and her three siblings were split between the East Coast (the eldest boy Justino and the eldest girl Constita) and Southern Manila (second eldest Jesus and youngest Ramonesa).

Justino, whom we knew as Uncle Boy, was a doctor who specialized in internal medicine. He moved to New York for his residency at a teaching hospital in 1969. He lived in Queens and eventually married a nurse of German-Irish descent named Anna Brennan, and they made a home in New Jersey.

The story I was told is that Uncle Boy was smart but shy, and Auntie Anna had to make the first move. I can't know this for sure because I was a toddler when I met Uncle Boy for the first and last time, but I can imagine it, because it was Auntie Anna who kept in touch with us for the both of them throughout the years.

She sent us pictures of their children almost every year, so I felt like I saw Justin, Jonathan, Steven, and Jessica growing up. She wrote us Christmas cards and letters in that distinctive handwriting I've come to associate with American mail.

One year, Auntie Anna gifted us melamine plates with our names on them. This was before Kai was born, so we had three that spelled out "Hilary Ivan," "Nolan Myles," and "Althea Lauren."

We used those plates for all our meals, three times a day, over so many years. As I finished eating, the rice and viand cleared off my plate would reveal my printed name, and I would invariably think of the state-side Riveras.

Uncle Boy passed away before I could visit them in America. He never came home again after 1978, which was also the last time my mother saw him. When she flew over for his funeral in 2013, Auntie Anna embraced her like a sister.

In 2015, we were invited to my cousin Jessica's wedding. I did my best to go, because I wanted to finally meet this side of my family. I had a memorable visit, and I was able to hang out with most of the New Jersey Riveras, including Justin and his wife Michelle.

Auntie Anna was as chatty as I imagined her to be. She recalled Uncle Boy taking her to Baguio. She mentioned the Filipino food she liked, such as the staple pansit and lumpia, even before they were popular.

She told me how much she loved our grilled pork. I assumed she was talking about lechon or liempo, but then she said the meat was threaded in bamboo skewers. She didn't know what was in the marinade, she said, that made it so good, so sweet and tangy.

I realized it was Filipino-style barbecue she was talking about, and I made a mental note to give her a recipe or even Mama Sita's Barbecue Marinade Mix and bottled calamansi seasoning one day.

Unfortunately, while we kept in touch on Facebook, I haven't been able to go back to visit.

Auntie Anna passed away peacefully yesterday, July 2. I am hopeful she was met by Uncle Boy and their first-born Justin. I imagine them having a beautiful feast together, with as much Pinoy BBQ as they can eat and the best of everything else they would ever want and need.

Time makes you bolder

Here I am, having lunch by myself at a restaurant as a way to encourage myself to have a weekend. I see another woman eating by herself, and, for some reason, I feel a little sad that she is eating alone, even if I am doing the same thing and enjoying it as I always have. 

My mind drifts to thoughts of how her choices--and, I suppose, mine--led to this moment: eating lunch alone at a restaurant, surrounded by everyone else with their loved ones. 

Did she lose a great love, did she never stand a chance, is she momentarily escaping a bad love, is she still pining for the last one?

I catch myself and stop myself from thoughts that would eventually make me feel bad for imagined reasons. Then I start to tuck into my food.

But the restaurant knows and it has been watching me since I entered with a reservation for one, so it starts playing Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," which I last played with a semi-broken heart. 

And I saw my reflection.

The kindness of strangers

A couple of days ago, I went out to buy vegetables and found a tiny cabbage among many large cabbages in a bin. It looked full grown, its light green leaves confidently curled around each other in easy to peel layers, and yet I could hold it with tip of my fingers. If it weren't so tiny, it would be so in place with the rest of the other cabbages, ready to chop, to dice, to cook.

I took a picture, making sure to show its scale. I took several pictures, making sure to show the scale more accurately.

I heard a girl beside me laugh. "I was wondering what you were taking a picture of," she said, "And then I saw it was a cabbage." She made her voice tiny with the last word. 

"Cute, no?" I replied. And we laughed.

I went home that day grateful for the human interaction. It had been over a month since I last stepped out of the house to, well, do anything, after hearing about the new virus strain. 

I'm a people person who likes staying away from people--I can love them better that way, I believe--but our quarantine has crawled ever so painfully, almost nefariously, to close to a year now, and I am people hungry. 

I find myself talking to strangers lately.

A few days ago, it was that girl with whom I had a good laugh over a tiny cabbage. Then, on Sunday it was the water delivery guy, who, upon learning I consider Cebu my hometown, told me of his trip to visit an aunt on Bantayan Island, where they ate shellfish all day, including oysters that they themselves picked during low tide. 

"When the tide is high," he said, raising his arms to full length, "the water is this high." But it receded to show the seabed, he said, and that's when they picked the oysters.

"I've been meaning to go there," I told him. Later, before I slept, I remembered the time I walked on the beach in Panglao during low tide and found not oysters but a tiny sparkling pink gem in the shape of a heart.      

Today, I had lunch with my best friend. We had a lot of catching up to do, so lunch stretched out into dinnertime (even if all we had after lunch was coffee and cake) and soon the mall was closing up. As we were waiting for her driver, my friend said she needed to use the comfort room.

I was amused, because we have been basically doing the same things each time we meet: At least once in every two months, she picks me up, we eat one type of food in one type of restaurant, run some small errands, talk about things we've sort of talked about already online, then she brings me home. It's the pandemic version of our pre-pandemic meet-ups, and because she's one of the few people I meet, it is a very welcome routine.  

The last time we were together, while we were waiting for her driver, it was me who needed to go. Tonight, following the same routine, it was she who needed to use the comfort room. 

When it was me, I asked the guard where it was and the only one they kept open was far from where we were. I led the way, and I remembered that the last time, they had already barred the comfort room entrance, but the cleaner, who was already leaving, was kind and unlocked the PWD comfort room for me. As we walked, I said, "I hope that same cleaner is there." 

He was, and he was finishing up cleaning the men's comfort room. He again led us to the PWD comfort room, because the ladies' room was already locked. As I was waiting for my friend, he waited with me and asked, "On your way home?" I nodded, and asked him the same. 

He just had to clean the PWD comfort room, he said, then he was going to walk home. He lived nearby, which I said was fortunate, because mass public transportation these days is a risk. He agreed, and he said tricycles are safer but expensive, and he likes the walk. He told me where he lived, and I remembered that after my last job, I'd promised myself never to work too far from home again, as the commute made me miserable even when I tried to make the best out of it. "You're lucky," I told him, "to live so close to work."

We thanked him when we left, and I almost caught myself saying "Until the next time!" as if to an old friend. 

Still walking this way

Looks like Christmas is still on

My favorite exercise is walking, which, at least for me, is both exercise for the body and the mind. I don't do it often because I don't feel comfortable walking in our village—I could make a long list of things that make walking unenjoyable where I live—but I've decided to give it another shot, because this pandemic has had me getting used to being locked in my small house and I hardly get any exercise. 

The beautiful thing about walking, at least for me, is that as soon as I do it, I am reminded that I do enjoy it, no matter where I am. In college, I walked often from La Salle to CCP and from La Salle to Lawton. When I transferred to UP Diliman, my friends and I would walk from our tambayan beside the now gone FC building to wherever, often Philcoa. When I worked for The Philippine STAR, I'd often walk from Port Area through Intramuros to Liwasang Bonifacio, where I'd catch the bus home.

For a couple of years, I lived in Sampaloc, and I walked on a flooded España Boulevard from Welcome Rotonda to my apartment on Forbes Street (which was actually renamed Arsenio H. Lacson Street in the early 70s, but nobody called it that; they called it Por-bes which I kept pronouncing as Forbes should be pronounced on jeepney rides and nobody jeepney driver ever got me. But I digress.)

So, walking. The longest I've walked in Manila is still during the EDSA 2 revolution, and even then, as we were demanding Pres. Joseph Estrada to resign, I enjoyed seeing the sights along the way from the EDSA Shrine to Shakey's Quirino, I think, where my friend and I decided to hole up in because we'd heard that the rally was going to Malacañan Palace but Erap had already said he was leaving. We were tired and hungry (and hangry) from having been at the Shrine since the day before, so we ditched the rally for an airconditioned and empty Shakey's and was treated to news on TV of Erap exiting the Palace.

When I lived in Project 4, I walked to establishments along Katipunan Extension, like Countryside Restaurant and Kopi Roti and Route 196, and once to White Plains Avenue for a Marcos is Not a Hero rally in 2016. I wished I could walk to Eastwood—distance wasn't the issue; safety was. 

I wish walking around Manila were similar to, say, walking in Paris or Manhattan. But as Carlos Celdran kept saying, if you look close enough, you can still see the city's beauty. I guess that's what walking has done for me: It has taught me the art of looking close enough.

I've been looking closely in my neighborhood again, and taking bad pictures of things I found beautiful. As soon as I stepped out of the house, I saw that our bougainvillea tree was in full bloom after its extreme Typhoon Ulysses trim. Then there was that small brown dog the was on a roof—not a balcony, mind you, but an actual roof--watching me walk by. One of the houses I passed had a collection of hibiscus planted along the fence and they all had flowers. Things like that make my walks interesting.

And then there are the people. Sometimes, at our village commercial center—the point of my walk where I turn back—I buy things, like food or lottery tickets. The other day, I lingered around the lotto stall, and when I finally decided to get a ticket, the man manning the booth saw the shapeless bag I had slung across my chest and told me to roll the piece of paper so it wouldn't get crumpled. It's important to not get it crumpled, he said, his voice both gentle and wise.

That same day, I decided to buy some barbecue at the stall along the village church's creek, seeing that there weren't any people. My bill was P52, but she smiled and charged me only P50. Tonight, my bill was P61, and when I struggled with finding the right coin in my purse, she laughed and said to give her P60.

What I miss is smiling, albeit shyly, at people and making painfully awkward stabs at small talk. Things are more difficult now that I have to wear a face mask and a face shield, and, of course, with this virus basically a talking disease. 

But at least there's still a world to go out to, and I'm hoping so profoundly that it will open up again soon. In the meantime, I'll continue taking walks and looking closely—enough to keep on hoping.        

A letter

I once found a letter in our mailbox that was addressed to nobody I knew. The address on the envelope was ours, but the name was a stranger, so short of going house to house in our neighborhood and asking for somebody by that name, I didn't know how else to help the letter find its way.

It sat on a bookshelf for weeks before I decided to open it. Maybe it contains a clue on the person's identity, I reasoned to myself, as I opened the envelope carefully so I could still seal it again.

It didn't. It was an apologetic love letter, from someone who hadn't communicated in a long time, a ghost before ghosting had become a phenomenon people would write and tell stories about.

I haven't forgotten you, the letter said in Filipino, and I am sorry if you think I have. Do you still live in this address? Please let me know. It was signed with love, sent from foreign waters with no specific return address.

For a few seconds, I felt like I had been handed an important mission by the Universe: to bridge a couple's eternal love.

Then a few seconds after that, I put the letter down. If he really loves her, he will have to find his way.

A throwback Thursday

Last Thursday, I got a message from a former workmate. We used to teach English in an office in Alabang, where I spent a little over two years before transferring to the content development team in Eastwood. I would spend six more years developing blended learning content for the company before leaving in 2015.

The work entailed creating lessons, quizzes, tests, and courses for the company's learning management system (LMS). I mention this because my former workmate was asking me about phonetics, somehow thinking me to be some sort of "expert."

I'm hardly an expert. Phonetics is a subject I had encountered only briefly in Linguistics 101, the only linguistics class I took. And I was only forced to learn a little more about it because I used an old paperback dictionary when I was a newspaper writer. Online dictionaries weren't a big thing yet back then. Besides, I had to share one dial-up internet capable desktop computer with everyone else in our department.

My former workmate told me that she was taking an online test and she couldn't move past the phonetics-related questions because the system wasn't accepting her answers. She'd been at it for hours, she said, and she couldn't figure out why her answers were being marked wrong.

I was on the road when we first messaged in the afternoon. When I was able to reply to her again close to midnight, she was still stuck on the same three questions. Feeling her frustration, I offered to take a look.

Basically, there were sentences written in phonetic alphabet, and you just needed to enter the English words in the provided box. Because I am a nerd, I was instantly curious, despite being exhausted from having just been in an eight-hour car ride.

I spent some fifteen minutes figuring out what the sentences were, switching back and forth from Messenger to browser on my phone, only to discover she and I had arrived at practically the same answers. I started feeling frustrated myself, because I was so sure our answers were correct. I had checked and double-checked.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that the problem was most likely an LMS issue, not a human comprehension one. I asked her if she had tried writing the sentences without any punctuation marks or in all lowercase letters. She had tried the former. She then tried the latter. Et voilà! Problem solved.

She thanked me profusely, and I told her it was no big deal. It was, to her, of course. Finally, she could move on to the rest of the test, she said, after hours of being stumped and not knowing what she was doing wrong.

In a way, it was a big deal to me, too. I had handled a lot of frustrations in that job, the least of which was working with limited technical resources on a quirky platform. I had loved the work with a passion, but the job had started to feel like an albatross around my neck in my final few months.

How many hours had I spent testing quizzes to check if they accepted all possible incarnations of a correct answer in the six years I was handling content development? That was tedious labor, but years later, what little I had learned helped me help someone else. It was hilariously simple, but it also felt so... glorious.

Writing this now, a few days later, it seems like such a small thing, so trivial, even inconsequential. But I can still remember how much my old self craved for even a little bit of this lightness, and I can only be thankful that, finally, it is here.

"Maybe she just wasn't meant for us"

Last week, our stay-out helper's story, told over a span of days, was about a five-month-old baby in her neighborhood who had died because of "tigdas itim." I didn't know it then, but she was referring to German measles.

The parents already had eight (father side) and four (mother side) children before they had this one, she said, and for hours each day, they had needed to leave their new baby at a relative's house so they could do whatever they did to make a living.

Unfortunately for the baby, our helper said, the house stood beside a tree that was home to an elemental. It may have been annoyed by the baby's non-stop crying. The parents were warned by a hilot not to bring the baby back there, but they refused to listen. Besides, they needed to work.

One day, the baby got sick, black spots appearing all over her body. Our helper explained that it was different from the usual measles because the spots were blackish instead of red. The baby also had high fever. They brought her to a clinic, but she never got better and, towards the end, vomited and pooped thick blackish liquid.

There was more drama over the next few days after the baby passed away: about the doctor giving the wrong medicine, about the family not having anyone stay up with the baby at night during the wake, about a cousin having to file for death benefits instead because the baby's parents just moved here and had no IDs, about an insensitive relative roasting eggplant (apparently a huge no-no) while the wake was ongoing, about the baby not having been baptized so she might end up as tiyanak, and about the parents being missing when the priest came for final blessing.

For a few days, our helper said, you couldn't talk to the mother. She wasn't hysterical with grief; it was as if she was stunned by everything that was happening. The father, on the other hand, was resigned to his loss. "Hindi talaga siguro para sa amin," he said. Maybe she just wasn't meant for us.

I wanted to say that while not all deaths are preventable, this one was, but I didn't want to start a conversation with her that would surely lead to what--or who--is killing our children.

Instead, I asked whether her children and her children's children had been vaccinated. She said yes, and I left it at that.

If I could be sweet

As I entered the elevator to go down to the lobby from the 5th floor, a man rushed out. We almost bumped into each other, then we did the dance for a few seconds before we found our way.

A quick glance told me he was handsome; he looked to be in his 40s, going by his hair. But the most striking thing about him--at least for me--was that he was eating a chocolate bar. He held a half-wrapped Meiji milk chocolate bar in his hand, biting into it like a delighted child instead of breaking it into oh-so-proper adult bite-sized pieces.

The doors were closing when he suddenly ran back in the elevator. "I'm sorry," he said, in what I think was a Japanese accent.

I suprised myself by laughing like a girl, then saying, "Oh, you were going down?"

"Yes, yes," he said, with a half-laugh, "I'm sorry."

We stayed silent as the elevator slowly descended to the ground floor. I stared at my feet. It was a small elevator.

When we got to the ground floor, I quickly stepped outside to wait for my Grab car, which was two minutes away. He followed, stood near the steps, glanced around, then saw the vacant seat beside me. He took it. Then he happily continued eating his chocolate bar.

There was a time when I'd wish he had talked to me or I had gathered enough nerve to strike up a conversation with him. Right now, however, I really can't stop thinking about that chocolate bar.

We were both stuck in the rain

We were both stuck in the rain. Me, because I had decided, on a whim, to buy a drink. Her, because she had gone out on her scooter and hadn't thought to bring any cover. There had been no warning of rain, save for a sudden gust of wind immediately followed by a steady spray of water.

We sat on plastic chairs at a table pushed against the frontage of a closed store, thrown together by our need for shelter. I was on my phone; she was on another stick of cigarette.

I had my back to her, not wanting to intrude or be intruded on, but she spoke, her voice thick and raspy from, I could tell, years of nicotine and tar and smoke.

"You have a nice belt," she said.

"Sorry?" I replied.

"You have a nice belt," she repeated.

I turned around. She was a beautiful mestiza: creamy skin, dark brown eyes, a tiny sharp nose. Makeup-free, as far as I could tell. She was wearing a pink spaghetti top and short denim cutoffs. Her brown hair was put up in a messy high ponytail. She was ten years older than me, she would point out later, past 50.

"Thank you," I replied, and before I could stop myself, I added, "I like it too, because it's made of recycled materials and it's good for the planet ... Earth." I tapped on my phone, an effort to rein in my rambling. Beautiful people, in general, make me nervous.

"It's nice," she said, "you don't need holes on it." She quickly ran a finger on the weave of my belt, an intrusion so swift I didn't have time to flinch.

Is she trying to trick me or something? I found myself thinking. But instead I mumbled, "I hope my underwear isn't showing," and I tugged at my jeans. She assured me it wasn't.

I took note of my belongings, almost immediately feeling bad for thinking with malice. There were other people around us; the people manning the store next door knew her by name. But I turned my back anyway, making a show of being busy on my phone.

It was still raining; I had nowhere to go.

"Have you seen the movie Glorious?" she asked, her voice straining through the silence I was putting between us. "That was some kiss he gave her, with his tongue all out."

Is she trying to pick me up? I found myself wondering. I'm not good at reading sexual cues, and I didn't mean to be assuming, but I'd seen Glorious and how did the subject shift from my belt to a movie about a 51-year-old woman who, after years of fearing she had turned frigid, reignites her sexuality with a young lover?

But I had made a resolution to be generous with my attention, so I decided to give her an audience, at least for as long as the rain would last.

She told me the story of her best friend, a woman in her fifties who had a 21-year-old boyfriend. The boy was crazy about her friend, she said, and he wanted to marry her, but the friend wanted to keep their relationship secret because he was younger than her youngest child.

Besides, they couldn't marry because she had been married before, years ago, to a mason, the construction worker who looked like Panchito whom she had chosen over her rich American journalist boyfriend and another American suitor who was based in Hong Kong and took her to five-star hotels and gave her a package with 24 bottles of different expensive perfumes.

Her best friend and the boyfriend are going to Leyte together soon, to meet her family and make the relationship official.

She also told me the story of her uncle, an engineer who worked in Dubai as an airline mechanic. He was pirated by a competitor once--asked to name his price, he quoted four times the amount he was making, and they gave it to him. The woman said they tried to set him up with her best friend, but she loved her Panchito then, so they ended up setting him up with her best friend's maid.

The uncle fell in love with the maid. He married her and built her a mansion in Pangasinan. He was infertile--everyone knew this--so when he found out that his wife was pregnant, he knew the baby wasn't his, but he accepted it because it was the one thing he couldn't give her.

The second time she got pregnant, she tried to get rid of the baby. She ended up bleeding heavily, non-stop. She almost died. He flew from Dubai to nurse her back to life. The baby didn't make it.

She eventually left him for a policeman from Urdaneta. The uncle came home unannounced and caught the lovers in flagrante delicto. On their bed, in the master bedroom in the mansion he had built for her.

Her uncle had been tempted to kill his wife right then and there, the woman said, but he calmed down and told himself that it was pointless to kill such a terrible person. Let her suffer the consequences of her actions, he said, life will get her back.

She kept the house and everything in it. He left for Dubai. He died a few years later. "Sa kaiisip," the woman said, pointing to her head and twirling her finger. Death by overthinking? I wondered, but I was thinking of myself.

"Do you have children?" she asked. She had two. One was 37, a daughter. She was single.

"No," I replied. "I don't have a husband either." But I have other things I think too much about, I wanted to say, like presbyopia and falling hair, whether I keep misinterpreting sexual cues from men, and even women, and whether I talk too much and say the wrong things. Basically, a slow kind of death by overthinking.

"You want a smoke?" she asked. I shook my head.

In another life, I would have said yes and continued the conversation. I would have made a new friend--a beautiful, chain-smoking, scooter-riding momma with a raspy voice and colorful though sometimes tragic tales.

Also in another life, this would have been a meet cute. She would have been a handsome, single man instead--or our genders would have matched, at least.

In this life, it had stopped raining. "Well," I said, "I have to go home now." I said goodbye, and that was that.

Justin

I have cousins whom I met for the first time in 2015, when one of them, the only girl among four siblings, got married and I flew to the US to attend the wedding.

Jessica and I had written each other when we were young, but all I knew of her brothers were their names, how they looked as children based on some pictures from the 70s and 80s, and the occasional news my mother shared with us. But I thought of them a lot when I was growing up, because for many years my brothers and I ate all our meals at home on personalized plates Auntie Anna had sent from the States. Many times, after I'd see my name underneath the rice, I'd think of theirs: Justin, Steven, Jonathan, Jessica.

The first time I met Justin, the eldest, was at the wedding rehearsal, I think. He was seated on a pew at the back of the church, and someone mentioned food to me. I can't remember what exactly, but it must have elicited delight from me, and when he saw my reaction, he smiled, brown eyes sparkling, and said something like, "We're related, alright!"

We met a few more times after that, and it struck me how kind and warm he was, and how witty too. I found myself wishing we'd grown up close to each other, the way my other cousins and I had.

The longest chat I must have had with him was when he drove me, Sherwil, and Ruth back to my Aunt's home in Bergenfield, after a fun day spent on Jersey shore with his wife Michelle and her sister Cindy. Traffic was bad, but he kept us entertained and told us it was okay to sleep.

I'm grateful that we had that moment, and with my dearest friends too. It was like a catch-up barkada trip, and a big brother was bringing us home.

Once, on Facebook, I posted a picture of my ballpoint pens and said that I hoard them and some other office supplies. He left a comment, something like, "You're family, alright!" Then he posted pics of drawers and drawers of his own stash.

I'd been looking forward to more similar discoveries, to more visits. We lost Justin today. He was lovingly surrounded by our family in the US, and held in the hearts of our family in the Philippines. 

We will miss him always. We will love him forever.

I imagine he is being welcomed in heaven by our grandparents, especially Lolo Lino, and his father, Uncle Justino. And his beloved dog, sweet, sweet Buzz.

The summer I learned sign language

When I was 16, I learned American Sign Language from a deaf guy named Larry, who was then a student at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. We were in Ozamiz, holding summer workshops at ICC-La Salle.

It's still one of my best summers, for many reasons, one of which involves a ghost encounter!

Larry wasn't supposed to teach ASL, but he volunteered to teach us. We finished all 12 modules, and I was amazed at how, as Larry taught us his language, he became more and more colorful in my eyes. He was a wonderful teacher, strict and funny and a little naughty when we were more fluent.

I found learning the signs easy, but I struggled with interpreting them in conversation, so after that summer, I forgot pretty much everything, except the name he gave me: the letter D, for my nickname Dat, dotting both my chubby cheeks.

Actually, he gave me two names: the letter D moving down in waves for my curly hair or the letter D on my cheeks. He smiled when we settled on cheeks, and I was just relieved he wasn't referring to my pimples!

I saw Larry in CSB last year, but he didn't see me. I wanted to say hi or hello (I still know how to sign that!), but I hesitated and the hesitation won.

Might as well, I told myself as I walked away. How on earth could I ask him if he remembered me, and if he didn't, how on earth could I tell him how he once spent several days in Ozamiz, silently changing how I saw the world?

"For remember"

It was my second year in UP. While I was walking to the jeepney stop after a late afternoon class, two Korean men stopped me and talked to me, with a hint of urgency and desperation, in Korean. They'd been trying to catch the attention of other UP students, and none had given them the time of day until I came along, looking, at least in their eyes, all Korean-like.

Seriously, for some reason, they thought I was Korean. I know this because they kept saying, "You Korean? You Korean?"

They were disappointed to find out I wasn't. I felt bad for them, and my messianic complex kicked in, so I stayed to talk, even if it was getting dark. They barely spoke English, but I somehow understood they had gone straight to UP Diliman from the airport, left their bags at the kiosk across CAL, and started looking for somebody to help them find a place to stay. They were in UP to take English classes.

I couldn't get any more information beyond that, so I brought them to the College of Education, where they said the classes would be held. I had also seen posters in both Korean and English looking for Korean boarders. There was a name of a contact person at Educ and the phone number of the boarding house.

When we got to Educ, the person wasn't there or was busy, so I asked to use the phone instead. I called the boarding house, asked for any Korean available to come to phone, then handed the phone to the two men. They were so relieved to be able to explain their predicament to someone who could understand, and they were given directions to the boarding house. Good thing, too, because by the time we were done, it was dark.

I quickly walked them back to the kiosk, where, to my relief, I discovered that several students (either members of the UP Mountaineers or a frat) had watched over their things without having been asked. The Koreans and I exchanged names, and they asked for my contact details. We didn't have cellphones back then, but I gave them my home number.

They wrote down their names and home addresses in my notebook, all in Korean. Then, they gave me Korean coins. I didn't want to accept their money, but they were insistent. "For remember," one of them said, as the other tried to explain to me the conversion rates.

I thought that was the end of that.

A few months later, I heard from them--specifically from the guy who said "for remember." It probably wasn't the first time he called, but it was the first time he managed to leave me a message asking me to call their boarding house.

At first I didn't want to--I was shy--but then Filipino hospitality kicked in, and so I did. His English was better. He said they wanted to meet me and treat me to dinner.

It was quite a stretch for me, but I agreed to meet them outside the UP Film Center. I was expecting to have a quick catch-up at The Chocolate Kiss, but they wanted to go to SM North, eat at McDonald's, and watch a movie. Before I could explain that I actually wasn't very familiar with SM North, they flagged a taxi, and off we went.

They reintroduced themselves to me with their English names, names they'd chosen for their English class. The one who had invited me out said his new name was Rocky. When I asked him why, he acted out shooting a machine gun like Sylvester Stallone. The other guy was simply Michael.

We had a fun dinner, during which they told me their ages (if I remember correctly, Rocky was 24 and Michael was 27). They were studying again. Michael was taking up mechanical engineering; Rocky, business. They'd just completed mandatory military service. They didn't have wives or girlfriends.

Watching the movie, on the other hand, was kind of awkward. They didn't understand most of it. We watched Disney's "Peter Pan," if I'm not mistaken, and I can't remember why it was showing; it wasn't even new. We entered the cinema halfway through the movie, and they didn't know that we could stay to watch the first half. As soon as credits rolled, they stood up to leave, and I was too late to tell them we could stay.

As we walked outside SM North, Rocky asked if I could give him English lessons. I said I couldn't, because I had no idea how to teach English and I felt that I would be a terrible English teacher. You'll find a much better teacher in UP, I told him. Then I said goodbye.

I think I heard from him at least one more time, before I was swallowed into an organization called UP Quill. After that, I never saw or talked to them again. I didn't think about them much either, but for years I kept their coins, wrapped in a piece of paper with their real names in Korean and their addresses in Seoul.

Funny, because I didn't think anything of him then, but thinking about Rocky now, I feel like I missed something worth exploring, something that may or may not have been love.

A love story

This would've been okay as a tweet, but I prefer to put it here, on this day that perhaps someone else's beautiful love story has officially begun.

In Starbucks, a chatty little girl, maybe four, nags her mother. "Mommy, tell me a story. Tell me the happiest story. What's your happiest story?"

The mother says, "Look at daddy."

Goodbye; it was nice to know you

Looking through my old blog posts (the ones I've decided to keep) and scrolling down my Facebook timeline (as I debate whether to delete my account or not), I saw interactions with people I no longer interact with, either by choice or by chance.

I didn't even know then that that would be the last time I'd be interacting with them or posting about being with them.

It makes me feel sad, actually, how people come into your life and make you happy, and then you somehow hurt each other, and then all you have left is evidence that at one point in life, it was good between the two of you.

Still, it is what it is. I have these happy memories that don't make a monster out of me and a monster out of you.

She and her cup of coffee

When I think of you, I often end up thinking of how gracefully you hold your coffee cup with your finger, as if your touch were a kiss.

And I envy your romance with objects, how you seem to draw out the secret beauty of everyday things.

Leftovers

"A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?" - Albert Einstein

At the mall yesterday, I noticed a man slip into a recently abandoned table at Jollibee and pretend that he was the original occupant so he could eat the leftover spaghetti.

I was on my way to pick something up at the nearby Mr. Quickie, but my instinct was to stop and check if he was okay and maybe offer him something.

Now, when it comes to strangers, even in what I feel to be safe public spaces, I almost never follow my instincts anymore. As quickly as my feet paused mid-stride, I picked up the pace again and completed my errand.

I hate it when I hold back on helping. I end up tortured by thoughts of my indifference or selfishness. But denying this instinct is something I need to survive or else I would end up trying to save the whole world, failing spectacularly, and destroying myself in the process.

I've learned to counter my messianic complex by considering a different version of the case story. This time, I questioned what I had seen. You're not even sure that it wasn't his table, I told myself as I went on with my day as planned, maybe you just imagined he was eating scraps. He didn't even look like a beggar.

But I saw the man again later at the food court, wandering around the tables. There would be plenty of scraps, certainly, if that was what he was looking for. The mall doesn't have trashcans, preferring to have janitors clean up after customers (this is a safety precaution, I was told years back, when bomb threats in malls were common). Basically, people just stand up and leave their plates, empty or not empty.

This time I was seated, eating some dim sum, so I was able to watch him more closely. He looked to be in his mid-50s. He had no bag. His clothes were worn, but they were clean and even color-coordinated in shades of blue. He wore imitation Crocs.

I considered his survival strategy. It was sad, but it also brilliant, if you think about it. Why rummage through trash for food when you can get leftovers from tables at fast food restaurants and food courts? If it would come to that choice for me, I'd probably hit the malls as well to retain some semblance of dignity and hygiene.

I was thinking this over when I saw the man heading quickly in my direction, a guilty look on his face, mumbling to himself and waving his hands like he was swatting at flies. He passed in front of me, scurried to the other end of the food court, and kept on walking until I lost sight of him.

He was long gone before I noticed the security guard that had been on his trail discreetly.

I wondered if someone had complained about him; I also wondered if the man wasn't just a resourceful mall scavenger after all but had mental issues as well.

And this is the end of this story.

I didn't help him. I can't say I'm sorry I didn't, but I also think I am.

Sweet, corny

I'm so sorry, I couldn't resist the title!

Whenever I go to Manila, I find myself craving street food, usually bananacue, turon and sweet corn. I think it's because when we were kids, we would go with my mother to UP Manila when she was still a graduate student there, and she would often buy us these snacks. I didn't care much for the city--it was too busy and dark and dirty for me--but I looked forward to merienda and I eventually associated any trip to Manila with street food.

When I was a student at DLS-CSB SPACE recently, I'd often buy sweet corn from this old lady who parks her cart in front of a 7-11. I'd buy more than one cob, one for me to eat on the bus and the rest to bring home. This old lady was unfailingly pleasant and accommodating, and she always remembered not to put any margarine on the corn and to salt only one of them, the one I would eat on the bus.

Tonight, since I was already in the Starbucks at the corner of Taft and Vito Cruz, I decided to walk in the opposite direction, to the Rizal Coliseum, to find someone selling corn.

I came upon this old man manning a cart. He smiled when I ordered four cobs, and smiled again, apologetically this time, when he said he could only give me three because the rest of the corn wasn't ready yet.

I said three was okay, and watched as he shucked three corn cobs and slid them into transparent plastic bags. I couldn't help but notice his hands. Like those of many of the street vendors I'd bought corn from, his hands were red and thick, toughened, I suppose, by constantly handling hot wares. He could dip his hands into the bucket of steaming water and take out bushels of corn.

As I paid, I asked if anyone else nearby was selling corn.

He smiled, this time a little shyly, and said his wife was selling corn at the 7-11 near the school.

"That nice lady is your wife?" I replied, "I usually buy from her, but this time I was on this side of Taft so I came here. But I almost always buy from her!"

This time he smiled with pride, with love in his eyes. "Yes, that's my wife."

As I walked to my bus, I imagined them holding each other's hands, hands that were red and tough and very much loved.

The writer who left me his novel

Many years ago, when I was a creative writing major, I became friends with another writer from another school over the telephone. I can no longer remember how it happened, but people passed along phone numbers back then.

We spoke a couple of times, then he asked if we could meet. He wanted me to read his life's work: a fantasy novel. I never could write fantasy, though I read some, and I didn't think I would be able to give valuable feedback, but he was insistent, so I said yes.

I can't remember how and where we met, but it would have been at McDonald's Philcoa. I imagine we told ourselves what we color shirt we would be wearing -- no cellphones back then -- and we sat in one of the booths. We must have not talked much, but long enough for him to hand me a brown envelope filled with his work.

I never got around to reading the entire manuscript (it is handwritten, in different notebooks and pads, in poor penmanship) but I still keep it in a special box on my bookshelf.

I wish I could return it, but he didn't write his full name and contact number on the draft and I've forgotten those as well.

I wonder where he is now, and what he does for a living. I wonder, does he still write?

I don't remember anything else about him. It is such a huge blank that we may as well not have met. Except for one thing: I still have the only copy of his first novel.

She's so far away

One of the things my best friend and I used to laugh about was how she thought the lyrics to that 1994 Roxette song said, "She's so far away, like China in my eyes." I teased her for years over it, even wrote about it in an article on mondegreens. If you're our common friend, at least from our school days, I've surely told you that story.

Today, Sherwil walked me to the main road from her house in Cabiao, Nueva Ecija, just in time to catch the 4.05pm bus back to Manila. I'd just spent two days with her, doing nothing and everything we used to do whenever we would have sleepovers at her parents' house in Muntinlupa.

We resumed a few rituals. We talked non-stop. We messaged friends. We took pictures. She made sure I had enough to eat. I made meaty spaghetti for her. We watched a movie. We slept beside each other (there's no extra room ready in their temporary house, and her husband was sweet enough to let me stay in their room while he spent two nights in his old bedroom in the house next door). We joked about taking baths. (I wanted to; she didn't. True story.)

But there were a few firsts. It was my first visit to her new home. We went to the few touristy spots she'd always been curious to see. I took a picture of her in front of the big sign that spelled out Cabiao, something she'd always wanted to do but couldn't because there was no one to go with who could take a nice picture of her without cringing.

Of course, we argued first about what the sign said: She insisted it said Cabiao, I insisted that it started with a letter N, and it turned out we were both right and talking about two different signs fronting Nabao Lake.

It was also our first sleepover that included a silent third party: her baby in her tummy. My future godchild. Sometimes, we'd talk to the little one.

As I settled in the First North Luzon Transit bus that would take me four to five hours away from my best friend's new home, the song "Vulnerable" started to play. I laughed a little, but also thought about how things have changed since 1994, and how there's a post-Sherwil's Wedding version of us, and how there will be a post-Baby Duque version of us as well.

Right now, she's a long bus or car ride away. When the baby comes, she may be a world away from Emily and me. I'll welcome the change, of course. I already love the little girl. Or boy. (Girl!)

But in a few months, Sherwil will be completely navigating the different world of motherhood, while Emily and I are still single and trying to find our footing in this one.

Girl friends change -- and in many good ways, but few that benefit their single friends -- when they start their own families. I can't help but think she'll be so far away.

You know, like China in my eyes.