manila summer was just weeks away and i remember the equatorial sun brooding at its closest it had ever been over the city.
this when i was yet a student nurse in a 75-bed hospital beside the fetid monumento market.
and i do remember his text message entreating me to skip my afternoon duty. he talked about being in the real classroom and not being cooped up in some dank, windowless ward.
i told my clinical instructor i had a family emergency. somehow, i knew then i would never become the ideal nurse.
he illegally parked his souped up fx tamaraw at a no-standing zone in front of the hospital. upon emerging from the hospital entrance, i remember seeing his smile, crooked, almost that of a hump, as refracted by the bouncing heat wave.
i asked him if something was wrong. nothing, he said. i just want to spend the perfect day with you. from then on, everything he did and said was immaculate.
i do not remember us being stuck in gridlock along northern luzon expressway. i remember eating the most scrumptious sisig topped with the most complex pig's brain sauce in dau market. i remember the softest pillows, the most responsive mattress in this peanut brittle smelling day inn along session road in baguio.
yesterday, when the temperature dipped again to below what's seasonably tolerable, i took the number two train home. home after spending a good part of the day just rummaging at strand bookstore for a densely written book by annie dillard i first read when i was in sophomore college.
i just thought it would be healthy for me to read it again now that i have grown older. i did not find any copy there and riding on the train home made me realize what folly it was. i mean, re-reading a book that i had a hard time finishing anyway.
on the train, i sat across a poorly groomed woman who kept on muttering unintelligible phrases throughout the ride. at the same time, she kept combing her greasy hair with her fingers.
aside from her purse, she brought two plastic bags with her: a black one filled with scraps of newspaper clippings and the white one had a packed chinese lunch.
when she got off at tremont avenue, she intentionally left the white one. the asian looking boy beside her called her attention. she told him she didn't need it. then she ambled towards the exit clutching her purse and the black plastic bag filled with paper scraps.
my wonderful boyfriend, the one i've been telling you about, well, if my best friend in manila would read this entry, he would go apoplectic. what wonderful? i can hear him now.
this boyfriend who yanked me out of my nursing rounds to drive me all the way to baguio one almost summer day, well, he was the first, and i think, the last boyfriend i will ever have, who hit me. he would just lose it then and bam.
but crazy co-dependent me, i hardly dwell on that part of our tortured relationship. as always, just as i do now, i remember that immaculate afternoon, conveniently forgetting the lurid, painful other days.
my memory is indeed a crazy woman hoarding scraps of useless paper and throwing away food.