We keep your memories alive, Dodong Solis

We heard about your passing yesterday.  I opened my picture files and remember that you told me once, when I was scrounging for stories about the early people in this city, that your folks used to own that piece of land where the new hotel was now standing.  

"That used to be the land where my Lolo's house once stood," you said.

"How rich you must have been by now, if your Lolo had not sold the land," I said.

You said something after this but I could no longer remember your reply. I wanted so badly to remember it now that it has fallen upon our shoulders to remember everything.  

Maybe, some other time, when my mind would be in a more relaxed state, maybe, it would work again and I would remember. 

Just like what the Crystal Woman told me once.  The memory will just come to you in the most unexpected time. It will not announce itself to you when it does, unlike what happens in the movies.  There would be no spectacle, no drama. But you will know when it happens.  The information from the crystals, stored for millennia under the earth, will just come to you and you will know it when it does.

I will remember what the Crystal Woman said to remember the stories in this city. 

I will remember everything. 

There are some things that I missed

I am surprised to discover that I only posted five blogs for the entire year last year.  I failed to mark the coming of the new year and the going away of the old because I'd been working nonstop since July 2018, and the workload never allowed me to breathe all through the year. At Christmas and the New Year, I was simply too tired to celebrate. I even remember battling with sickness while I was doing the usual work overload.  My memory comes in fragments now because of fatigue. 
Since I arrived here in July last year, my days have been bleeding into each other,  the nights becoming days and nights into days, I could no longer tell one from the other.  At times--and it's because I edit the stories fast before they go out to the world as news, I oftentimes get the feeling that the headlines are stale when I see them in the morning. I get the feeling that they happen the other day or the day before that, instead of just yesterday. 
Sometimes an excruciating pain shoots up from my back somewhere and I begin to be afraid of things that I don't understand about spines and lumbar column or whatever they are called. I want to read and learn more about them but the breaking stories keep me occupied. The breaking news, they get in the way of everything I do. They even awaken me from sleep in the middle of the night. I long for simple things--like reading a good book at a leisurely pace in the middle of the garden or eating pizza with my boys at a table near a big window. 
The other day, I got a message from Prateeh but I was too busy when it arrived, I can't even put a finger on the goddamn phone. When I replied, Prateeh must have already gone too far away to even see it. I want to sit down and read a book without anyone disrupting me. The thing that I loved most working in Makati was reading The NewYorker everyday and listening to the Fiction podcast until I drowse off to sleep.  Now all I hear in the morning is the sound of gunfire.