Something exciting is about to happen. I think I have mentioned it here a few weeks back, but I'm not about to spill everything by telling you on which entry. I hope it all falls into place. Best of luck to the three of us!
20B Maunawain St., Pinyahan, QC.
A two-floored house converted to apartments. Barred window looking into a dirty eskinita. Curtain pulled aside. Desk and chair facing the wall. Dead dry plants on the sill.
New walls. Tiled floor. Galley kitchen. Bed, bookcase, stereo, study table, refrigerator, washing machine. Teddy bears on the floor, death note posters on the wall.
Mop, bucket, rags, solvents under sink.
Closet. Box of cosmetics, jewelry. Sweaters, pop art shirts, skinny jeans, white long-sleeved polo shirts, black pencil skirts, black leggings, summer tube-top dresses and flat sandals in brown and black.
Kitchen. Salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, soy sauce, coffee, instant noodles, tomatoes, onions and garlic. I don't cook much. I make plates of scrambled eggs and rice. Bathroom. One bar of soap. Hairfall control shampoo and conditioner, a pack of napkin and Dove facial wash.
Linen, towels, handkerchiefs. A heart full of hope.
It is evening, and the shade is slipping closer all the time. If I thought about it, I quite liked this part of the house, or rather, the backyard. It seemed to have an enterprising flourish to it. The plants corkscrewed their way to the light as if they were doing what they wanted instead of what someone else had ordered them to do. My little nipa hut is secure. Or secure-ish.
I had come out here to find a bit of silence and to get my head in some sort of order. I had phoned the companies—or rather, I sat in McGregor during the week’s afternoons, eating Tiramisu and giving instructions while my Finance Committee had done the ringing bit—and it was all sorted for the coming semester. Next two weeks. Only fourteen days. How was I supposed to deal with that? I still need at least another week to get the newsletter printed for the registration.
And there were other things. Relations with busy friends, past and current colleagues, were still strained. When I went to bed last night, my mind still half blinded with all the silent speeches I had made, I texted a common message to them all.
“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. -Anais Nin”
I had checked my cellphone to see if one of them replied. Some of them did. Some had explained—quite noncommittally—about our org’s activities this coming sem, about our feasib’s groupings, about enlistment et cetera—but when it came to telling them my uncertain plans for the future, something happened. Or didn’t happen. They didn’t reply and I realized that I wasn’t ready to decide yet. Maybe the stars will have a say regarding my alternatives; maybe the CRS will decide for me; maybe it is out of my hands. I certainly would like to believe that it is, because I do not want to hurt anybody’s feelings.
The passing cars glittered in the late afternoon light. People returning from work or shopping, Kuya Ralph and I typing away at McGregor. My parents fetched me a little early and it was turning into a perfect May evening, one of those days that turned everything to gold.
In our backyard, the leaves had become temporarily translucent, and the flowers along the verge seem bright enough to hurt the eye. From somewhere nearby came the faint scent of my mother's medalia. It smelled like a cross between sampaguita and Johnson's baby powder. After a week, all these will be replaced by the smoky avenue of V. Luna., but for the moment I feel like in a perfect Philippine postcard.
When I get back to Manila, work will begin to pile in earnest. I can foresee it now-the Guilder meetings, the publication of our broadsheet, the UP Sox semstarter, the OSA reports, the enlistment-everything that I had chose to offer myself to this coming year will begin. And I haven't even started mentioning my academics.
But it will be a whole new year altogether. Kuya and I will be having our own apartment and I am super excited. I have even drafted a short list of what I have to do when I get there:
Four easy steps, right? Wrong! Most of the work will be physical, and given that I almost broke down last April from the sheer thought of having to move out of Yakal and into my Area 2 boarding house, moving in to our new apartment will be hard, terrible work. Which is why my mother is coming with me to Manila this Sunday, though I doubt she can handle the physical labor it would take its toll on her body.
I do hope everything will be alright. I may not be able to write a poem again, as I do now when I'm in our garden, so I will post this recent one here, still raw and untitled, but good enough for posting, I think. This is, after all, my blog.
I heard you
when you did not speak
and just stared at me with knowing, hurtful eyes.
I wanted to dissolve
into molecules,
atoms even,
if it could give me an escape
from the whipping lashes of your mind.
You just stood there.
I remained still.
Silence still speaks volumes.
"Kat, lunch tayo sa Sunday."
"Ate nasa bahay ako."
"Oo nga, lunch tayo sa Sunday."
"Ate, nasa bahay ako... sa Mindanao."
"Oo nga, lunch tayo sa Sunday. Nasa GenSan ako."
Mom was talking about hypertension and stroke and our family history on the disease yesterday. My nursing friends talk about that kind of stuff all the time, but it weirds me out to hear it from my parents and having them associate disease with their own bodies. You know, my mother used to scare me when I was little. Death, she said, would one day take her and Dad away and I will be left alone with my brother, both of us incapable of living life without adult supervision.
So yesterday, having my parents truthfully say to me their illnesses made me feel sort of powerless. I do not know how to analyze blood pressure and what the complications of hypertension are. Sure enough, my mother's doctor could explain those to me, but the thought of having to rely your parents' health on the hands of another person, a stranger, made me feel uneasy.
Mom's headaches and dizziness had been more frequent lately and Dad's allergies and rheumatism have become a normal aspect of his everyday health. Add to that the fact that he still smokes more than a pack of cigarettes a day. Thea and RJ, my nursing friends, had been elaborating the medical technicalities-complications, symptoms, effects, et cetera-of these things to me, yet somehow, I still feel unsure. Do I feel guilty that I did not take up Intarmed when I had the opportunity, that the course could actually help my parents out in their old age, that it was the more popular choice of my aunts for me as compared to the BAA program I will be graduating from this year? Or am I just being paranoid about my parents' health?
Yeah, that's it. I'm just being paranoid.
For the most part, this is where I am spending my summer in Marbel. My own nipa hut, surrounded by my mother's petunias, where I can be slow and sheepish, where I can think and just be oblivious to the everyday struggles of the busy outside world. The difference in greenery reflects my two-week stay here. This is mine. All mine.
I remember the private conversations I had with my writing adviser in high school. Love, boys, boyfriends (hers), dreams (mine), broken ones (hers) and I couldn't help but wonder what has happened to her since I left. One day, I received a letter from her, or rather, a one-line message, written in her neat, cramped hand on the back of a filing card.
'"The trick is to love somebody. If you love one person, you see everyone differently."James Baldwin'
I added the quote to my database, made a note that I should attempt to find the source, and threw the card away. The fact is, and was, that I am not James Baldwin, nor E.M. Forster, nor Sylvia Plath, nor Virginia Woolf, nor Anne Sexton. I am Katrina Magallanes, an amateur business student who has given up the life of the writerly for a more practical, more down-to-earth profession which had-I could not say-stifled my internal longings for fiction, and more appropriately, romantic dramas.
If Miss Elle* had discovered what Baldwin had described as 'the trick of love', then she might as well tell me, so that I need not go through any heart-crushing emotional torment that had been described by the countless of girls I had, for myself, counseled on love and relationships.
Miss Elle, I am not used to this but you are not here. I have concluded that the best way to convey this reality is not to engage in stuttered explanation but to re-establish our teacher-pupil relationship by a dint of a sensible text message to tell you, Maam I'm in Marbel.
It feels weird when you come home and your past catches up with you. I seldom come out of the house since I arrived here, but when I went to McGregor the other day to meet Trisha, I saw Jay* with someone I presumed to be his girlfriend. The mere sight of him revived a miasma of amateurish sentimentality. But the sight of him with another woman brings a different feeling altogether.
I don't know how long it has been—years perhaps, but he has grown taller than I expected. He has grown out of his baggy jeans and oversized shirts which used to hide his athletic physique. His hair, which hanged low and unkempt during high school, is now short and held back. He had an air of happy confidence about him which substituted for what used to be his angst. He looked new, fresh and polished. Were it not for his familiar smile, I might not have recognized him.
We greeted each other with a brief hello and I proceeded immediately to wait for Trisha inside. I tried to work out a decent plan for our org's finances but my head would occasionally turn around and find itself at the direction of where Jay was seated. Oh, there is nothing between us. But he so represented many of the boys who, in one way or another, played brief, casual yet often monumental roles in my past.
We were a tragic pair, Jay and I, but we had closure. All my little flirtations in high school were foolish attempts to know what it would feel like to have a boyfriend. I grew out of it come senior year and since then, the thought of having a boyfriend became distant. Although I have had crushes, suitors and summer flings, nothing serious ever happened. Either my crush already has an incomparably gorgeous girlfriend, or is gay; my suitors, either appallingly chauvinistic or are too soft and melodramatic; and my flings, which as time passed, eventually faded because the guy would want to change me and I would refuse or either one or both of us would realize that what we had is what it really is—just a fling. So yes, ladies and gentlemen, technically speaking, I never had a boyfriend.
But it's not such a big deal to me as it is to most women my age. In fact, I take my cue from Randy David, whose Valentine lecture (yes, the political critic Randy David had a Valentine lecture) I attended. He said that in order to find love, one must love one's self first and must establish one's self as a stable, decent and respectable person. You should not seek love, he said, but you should let love find you.
This is a rather conventional notion, especially for Filipino women like me who were taught by nuns and quasi-nuns to wait for boys to court them rather than take the first bold move themselves. I do not entirely agree with Professor David, but I take his advice on self-improvement. What I had been doing for the past four years in college, where I have had fewer attempts on boys, was improving myself through my academics, my work for JPIA, Guilder and the recent UP Sox, my occasional volunteer work for the parish and my daily conversations with friends and colleagues.
I am happy being single and I do not mind staying so until Mr. Right comes along. The women of the Opus Dei in Tanglaw, which had been inviting me for so long in their youth group, are predominantly single. Even my friends and group mates in UP with the exception for Karolyn are single like myself.
At twenty, coming home to Marbel is not without rumors as to who got pregnant in the batch. And I would just like to point out, that as my childhood friend Babes is waiting for the birth of her baby boy this month, I am still waiting for my first official boyfriend to kiss me under the vast night sky with stars in our eyes and butterflies in my stomach.
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