Losing my yellow coin purse is really very difficult because it brings
back the devastating feeling of all my previous losses: those bagful of
clothes long, long ago, I left in a hotel after I heard the devastating
news about you; or that stupid brown wallet I lost inside the busy
Marawi public market in June while taking shots with Mick and
our Maranao friends; or how it felt to lose my beloved eyeglasses one
Tuesday in April while shuttling from a magazine office
to a TV network and finally, to a big newspaper compound at the heart of
Jakarta. Or, how it was to leave the newly-found Rachel Cusk's book on a
seat of a jeepney. They were not really worth millions, especially my
yellow coin purse,
which only had six one peso and two 25-centavo coins in it; but there’s
something about losing that makes you feel empty and dry. There’s
something
about the absence of the thing you lost that makes you look around to
notice the color you once took for granted but now makes you think of
the missing object with ache. Now I look at them and take notice: the
yellow tupperware
glass standing tall amid all the clutter on my table, the yellow
container thrown in a grass-covered lot next to
our house, the yellow cover of Ken Auletta’s book “Googled,” my yellow
underwear. I remember the day that Ja left and we ran out of cooking
oil. Is that the way relationships are measured? Through the sheer
number of yellow cooking oil containers bought from a convenience store,
used up and emptied? [This post has nothing to do with Pnoy's yellow,
which I vehemently detest!]
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