i ha’ve always been a sucker for stories like hers. so much so, that i thought she was telling me my story.
last night, i attended another one of those garden variety gatherings. the usual for a pinoy party around here. the mahjong table peopled mostly with windbags. the spread of greasy victuals. the endless prattle. the grapple to wangle the karaoke mic.
only thing striking was talking to this woman who spoke mellifluously the same bisayan patois that i do. like myself, she grew up in the periphery of the bisayan speaking basin back home. but surprisingly, she and i, we took to each other'’s linguistic idiosyncrasies swimmingly.
and when she was into her fourth imported san mig can, she was loose with her story about the great love of her life.
no, she wasn'’t drunk-bawling. she was just sad and heavy with this longing. i could almost feel the cushion in the settee we were sitting settling down deeper for a good half a foot more.
i wish I could tell you her story. but she asked me, after all the details she spared me not, not to tell any other soul about it. she had this immense pride of ownership of this extremely wistful thing.
waking up this morning, i wasted a good deal of time in bed mulling on how prodigal for me not to tell you her story. if there was one thing, sophocles once said, that frees us of all of the weight and pain of life, that is love. her love for this man is potentially liberating to perhaps some of us. it is to me.
but then i remember the beauty of her story. and that makes me keep my promise to her that most of the time i loosely give around and break. beauty somehow is sacred to me.
then where does that leave me and this post?
i'’m not sure, either. maybe, somewhere around a year after losing this great love of mine.
the edsa elevated rail was just a month into its operation. and there i was getting off at crossing station. and from afar, i thought i saw him with his new boyfriend.
and for a moment there, the house sparrows nestled atop the street lamps across araneta coliseum broke out into a winged bouquet of feathers in the smoggy cubao air.
silently, the doddering lion, the one with the moth eaten elbows in malabon zoo, shook hard its mane. the terrified mother of a brat quickly hauled away her son towards the more pacific exhibit of rare birds.
meanwhile, on a fishing rig near tubathaha reefs in palawan, a lonely crewmember atop the viewing deck just spotted a mating couple of dugong, leaving him stunned and breathless with no one around to tell.