Survivor's Manual

In the old days, fear figured in our survival as a species, the psychologist told us. That's why, in extreme circumstances, fear flashes before us like a warning. We could never rest until we locate the source of that fear, the warning, because it's key to our survival, she said. 

Today, we no longer face those kind of dangers that our ancestors used to face; yet, the amount of stress we had to deal with everyday has grown to unprecedented proportions. Key to surviving the stress of our everyday life is our capacity to savor moments of joy, to locate in our body no longer the source of fear, but the source of pleasure. 

I kept thinking about this as I went back to my room.

Story that I failed to write

Why can't I write it? Is it really that difficult? What's preventing me from writing it? What's the problem with me? Is it the tree? The Mindanao Eucalyptus, also called the Rainbow Tree, which is a beautiful tree? Is it the Balete somewhere outside the camera frame, the tree that started as a branch but grew into a tree? Is there anything wrong with me? Why can't I just roll up my sleeves and write? Oh, God. It will be such an injustice if I continue to fail to write this story. Praying for extra strength.

Baggage

                                                                                                                                          

So who fetched you from the airport? Michelle asked, as soon as we were seated around the table on the 23rd floor, where we were to have our dinner.

Uh. No one, I said. I was already here since the 12^th.
Ah! So, you’ve gone around?
I guess so.
So, you've you been to the New Star?
New Star?
That new hotel. With the new casino, new bars.
Ah, no. No, no, I said, shaking my head, waving my hand. 
I did not go there. I went to the old places, where I used to frequent before. I went there to reconcile myself to the past (paused), to reconcile with myself.  

So that maybe, I could move on. 
The astonishment in her eyes. Move on?! I said to myself. It has been 33 years, c'mon! You mean, you hadn’t moved on yet?  

Perhaps, I had. Perhaps, I hadn't.  But how could I know?!

I never even had the time to think about it.  I came here to look for that girl I lost so many years ago. She was concealed in almost everything I saw. I walked the streets littered with beggars, passed by the stores selling cheap textiles and other odds and ends from China, walked the ugly street of Colon, where once, I used to spend time reading Time magazines at P5 per copy, newspapers at P1 per copy. They used to have newsstands like that, where you could rent a newspaper, even magazines, to read. A testament to the Cebuano's grit? Ingenuity? Entrepreneurial spirit, they used to tell me.
Where else could you rent a Time magazine at P25 per copy? Or the much more expensive National Geographic? It would take a longer time to read.
I used to read until I could already feel the oil on my face, seated on a plastic chair, the electric fan rattling in front of me. The place was so hot and uncomfortable. Why was I so oily when I sweat? Why was I always bothered by the heat and the dust?  Why was my reading interrupted? Who disrupted it? Who stopped it?

Boats in Dumaguete

 

October 2019

Feeling like Rip Van Winkle

As soon as the air cooled, I went out of the hotel and walked towards Osmeña Boulevard, where I took the jeepney that had Santo Niño on its signboard. I asked the driver what route would take me to San Jose and he said, this one, pointing to his manibela. So, after winding down through--was it Sanciangko or P. del Rosario Streets?--the jeepney finally went to my old street and dropped me near the gate. I immediately followed the walk that led to the chapel because that's what had always been on my mind--to find that chapel and see what it looks like now.

They call the walkway leading to it the Paseo Recoletos now, although I could not remember if we ever used that name before. To us, this was simply the way towards the chapel, you would meet so many people here, usually carrying things, baggages, sometimes sacks from the nearby Carbon market. Today, I met this woman hurrying towards somewhere, carrying at least three bags and dragging a child. Another man followed, this time, carrying a--what was that--a sewing machine?! Why do they have to manually carry a sewing machine? A beggar,  covered with soot, lie sleeping on the paseo's floor.  An obnoxious smell of dried urine assailed ones nose.

I was surprised to find the chapel's entry on the ground floor sealed but I could hear church music upstairs. Two opposite stairways led to the second floor. I chose one and heard someone--a priest?!--leading the novena. It's a novena, we're starting the novena, a woman told me. I did not know why she had to explain that to me.  I went down and asked the security guard how long had he been working there because I wanted to know when did they move the chapel to the second floor. But he said he was only working there for four years and it had been that way since he arrived.

I fell silent. I was gone thirty-three years!

Diary of Pain

Inquirer newsroom on the 3rd floor. Chino Roces. 2017.

I have decided to embark on a project--or a journey--whatever you may want to call it, to expunge this very bad thing that is bothering me. The first thing that I will do is to download some of the photographs that have been clogging my icloud for a very long time and talk about them to expunge their power. Stop them from bothering me. Leave them behind in a place where they should be: that is, in a limbo where they could not exert power over me.

But a voice within me warns: Not in limbo! That place could be tricky, shadowy, those demons could assume many dimensions and could come back to you in another form!

So, I will bring all of them into the light!  So that I could look and examine them and see them for what they are! 

For example, that particular shot where a dark chair outside framed an illuminated newsroom. That's where I waited for the call that never came many years ago. It was maybe, past 8 p.m. or was it almost 9, I was already done with the work at the newsroom and was preparing to go home. But I sat there waiting for the call. It never came. I looked at the shining metal frames of the glass windows surrounding me and felt their efficient coldness; rendering work in the newsroom was sheer efficiency. I long for the warmth of that call that never came. The warmth of home.

Then, I realised that no one was helping me. No one was taking my side, no one was backing me up.  That photograph was taken five years ago. 

Last night, I talked to my sister. I rarely visited them now because doing so would distress me so bad it would take me days and months to recover. But I went there prepared. I thought I could shield myself from whatever distressing things that they might have to say.

Then slowly it came, innocently, and right in the middle of the conversation. I was telling her how before, in my twenties and in the midst of the circumstances I was facing, I had given up pursuing a particular path. Then, she cut in and said, "Had you become a lawyer, you would already have had so many enemies by now." She laughed a long, hard laugh that scrunched her face, made her look very ugly. 

I could not understand why she said it, where such unfair and wrong notion came. I did not know how to answer. Stunned, I merely stared at her. 

Now it dawns on me. They always view me as a troublemaker.  This is a badge of honor as a journalist, but if you hear your sisters telling you that in a totally misconstrued and negative way, I wonder what would you feel? I should lessen my contact with them as much as possible. 

Things we discover at 55

 

That we are utterly alone in this world. 

Secret Garden

 

Malagos

I traveled all the way to the forest just to try my camera before it finally conks out and say goodbye to me. But I brought the wrong lens so when nature revealed its astounding beauty to me, I was stupefied. 

I was only able to capture it in parts and not the breadth and depth of its grandeur. Also, I was too busy worrying about the exposure that I simply, simply failed--

So, here I was, trying very hard to be a photographer, when nature was just saying, "Hi, how are you, why are you so worked up, my dear?"

 

 

Bust of Brutus

Shshsh! I know it's not perfect but - maybe almost! Besides, the young artist who is my Art Teacher already moved me to the next (and the more difficult) level; enlarging by mere approximation. Which means, you only have to look at the subject and draw it without any aid of a ruler or any tool for measurement. You are completely on your own!

But let me talk about Brutus. "Is that the guy who killed Caesar?!" Ja asked as soon as I got home and opened the new plate. "Yes," I said, "The person of interest." 

The way the young artist who is my teacher had said to me who the guy was made me think that maybe, just maybe, he wasn't Brutus; he wasn't Brutus at all. When I looked at the guy in the picture, I began to wish he were a Roman General instead of a Senator. He seems to match the image of a military man. There was something about his patrician forehead or is that a patrician nose. Or the way he pursed his lips that hinted of a smile or cunning; his shrewd, calculating gaze, his thick neck, which suggested of a  physique that could be achieved only through long years of training and discipline. 

I stared at him for hours. Ja could not understand why I sat there for hours, staring. "What are you doing? Why can't you start your drawing yet? Why are you staring there for so long?" I began to understand why artists stare. Van Gogh spent days staring at the potato fields when he did the potato eaters.  Or was it the potato peelers? (Yes, I came from the kitchen. I use peelers a lot!) Basta! Potatoes! Look it up in that book of his letters.  

But I stared and stared almost to the core of the soul of Brutus (if this were really Brutus. I searched the images on the web and I only found a younger face, so, I'm still in doubt). I like the guy to be a Roman General but I also tried to think of him as a convicted criminal, a leader of an underground syndicate, a beggar, a pedophile. Just to see if the characters and the picture could match. 

My drawing failed to capture the ruthlessness of the man. Nor his brute strength. In my drawing, he is not a Roman General at all. He does not even look like a Roman. I'm not making any judgment. I'm just blabbering.

A view from the Tower

There's not much to see from here. This is a lonely place to be but I like the isolation and the total privacy.  You can type anything on your laptop without anyone peeping over your shoulders. You can write letters, diaries, journals without anyone asking, "What are you writing? A journal again? Why do you write a diary? What for?" As if diaries were filthy little secrets; and sounds like diaper. The voices in your head. You can turn off the TV set here, shut all the voices and sounds.  You can finally face yourself, ask what's bothering you. Explain why you did the things you did and those you did not do. 

No one would bother you here, except yourself. You'd be completely on your own. That's a scary thought, though; to be completely on your own.

 

Illumination

 

Clouds

 

Rediscovering pleasure

At the Galvez Atelier, we copy figures from the classics; and we do that using only a 2B pencil, a gum eraser, a pencil eraser, a stick that might be similar to what Michelangelo must have used during the Renaissance (we’d like to believe, though, it might not necessarily be true because this stick is made of bamboo, which might not be found in Florence); and a ruler. I haven't picked up a pencil in maybe, the last 40 years, and it felt so good to rediscover the purely sensual pleasure of the lines. Sometimes, the plates get too difficult or complicated and I feel I'm not up to it. But still, I return and return and return. Not until I saw the photos, I would never have known where I was when I started and where I am now, several plates later. 

Take a Time Out

 

Thank you, Lola Openg

I was trying to figure out where to get my baptismal certificate at the time when no one among the living could remember, or even had any knowledge, where I was baptised.  I cracked my mind trying to analyse the possibilities--by tracking down in my mind the movements of people I used to know. My Pa already passed away five years before, though, how I wish I could still ask him.  As soon as I asked Ma, she said, "Of course, you were baptised in Argao, where else would it be?"
Was it probable that I was baptised in the town where I grew up? Where to begin my search? Then, I remember this particular photo showing Lola Openg carrying an infant with those scandalously thick black hair.  I was quite sure that that infant was me because I had a memory of it being pointed to me by grownups. I used to be so embarrassed by the shocking black hair; though, right now that my hair is thinning, I've been wondering about that hair; how I failed to appreciate it while it was still around. I was always trying to hide it, tying it or having it straightened.  Lola Openg looked younger in the picture now, though, when I looked at it before, when I was much, much younger, Lola Openg was always old; way, way too old. 
I've always looked up to her as an extraordinary woman, not like any other woman I knew. She had strength and toughness of character. Her place in Balusong used to serve as a drop-off point of settlers arriving in Mindanao for the first time or those who had already settled here but were leaving back to their old Visayan hometowns. They always make it a point to sleep in Lola's house before they take their flights the following day; or before they go on a long bus trip to Nasipit or Cagayan de Oro where they would take the boat to Cebu. If Lola Openg had carried me that day I was baptised, then isn't that very likely that I was baptised in the city where she used to live? I still could not believe it. In my mind, I tried to scour the locations of churches closest to Lola's house and those closest to her heart. Everything pointed me to a particular cathedral. True enough, less than 15 minutes after I inquired, the venerable priest assistant handed me my records. Thank you so much, Lola Openg! 

I want you to stare

 

On the Road to Sister's heart

I travelled all the way from comfort zone to the strange land of Circe. No one could turn me into a pig, though. It was still January and the sun refused to appear in the horizon, so everything that I planned got canceled and set to an indefinite date in the future.

Trying very hard to heal

 I believe that a dip in seawater will heal me. You are not allowed to disagree.

Just a word of welcome

K asked, "So, what did you have for the New Year?" 

I knotted my brows because suddenly I can't  remember.  Take note that he said, "what did you have," not "what did you do" for the NY; which made me ask, "Is he being more materialistic?"

To focus on "having" and not on the "doing?" or perhaps, on the "feeling?" Is that what he got from communing more with his father's part of the family? Or, maybe, even with my other part of the family? Sometimes, I get the feeling that he is discarding me. 

"I can't remember because you were not there," I said as a way of explaining. He nodded. He belted another song. Belted. Finally, I found the word. He had learned how to belt a song without my knowing it. The first time that I heard him scaling the notes so well, I said, "Wow. Now I finally knew why it took you so long to finish Architecture." I paused, looking at his face for effect, before saying, "I think you went to another class, the videoke class." He laughed. "You're doing so well now that we can finally say we are a real Filipino family: we sing the videoke.  Ja and Sean - and perhaps JL, too - laughed. Ja took the microphone, which we brought all the way from home. The videoke staff had to agree when I said we had to bring our own microphone as part of our anti-COVID-19 measure. I simply needed to make sure because no one was certain yet whether or not we were already out of the pandemic. Ja filed at least five songs. He was having a concert. I was worried the rest of the company--all young people--might get bored.  Sean said it was okay.  Happy New Year!