Running Away + Hauntings + How to MAke a Bone

I came to this house after I ran away from the last one. I ran away because the last house was haunted.

It was not much, that last house that I had learned to call home. Made from wood, its walls where to thin too halt the raucous laughter of children making up games as they play, nor the sound of game cocks that the neighbors would spend time with more than they would with their children. On rainy nights, the winds would seep between the boards, an occasional drop or two coming in and finding me downstairs, on a bamboo sofa that I called my bed.

It was on this bamboo sofa that I half gave birth to something that died, and became a ghost.

I started running away at an early age. I was 10 when Mamang and I had one of the first of what would be a series of arguments. I cannot really remember what the argument was about, only that I felt alone, uncared for that when Mamang went to work, I began stuffing my school bag with clothes and some food stuff, locked the door, left the key on the bottom of the nearest flower pot and started walking away.

That day was one of the longest I ever spent. I found myself at the park in the center of the city, and there, after buying some bread from a nearby bakery, I opened my bag and brought out the books that I brought with me. Bread and books, those were what I devoured that day until a family friend found me and somehow tricked a young gullible child as I was to come home.

The next time I ran away home, I stayed away from home. It was not easy standing up on one’s own feet, but those days were also the days that I was most free. Together with two other friends who shared the same need for me to be away from the comforts of home, I discovered love, and tragedy, learned the art of betrayal, wild intoxicating sex on early mornings, survived 3 pairs of fist and legs. I was wounded. And yet I never let my head down.

The women of Cebu made me forget the one who abandoned me as they gave themselves to me in abandonment. And yet on the first morning of the new year with the sun waking up from her sleep of the old year, Cebu made me realize that no matter where you go, if what haunts you is inside your head, there will be no safe place to hide or find solace.

They say running makes for good exercise. I don’t run that much, but I could say that it helped in the making of bones.

I came to this house after I ran away from the last one. I ran away because the last house was haunted. There was a bamboo sofa. Before it became the haunting ground for a ghost, it was once alive. It breathed. It had a voice. It held kisses and embraces for me.

It did. It did. Until it somehow died. It would only be redeeming for me to say that since it was born from half of me, then half of the hands that murdered it was also mine.

The deaths of memories are unlike human bodies. They do not rot; they do not stain the air. They do not being flies buzzing around. There are no bodies. But there is a presence, as if somehow, invisible as it may be, something clings between the folds of space, thin like powdered ashes and fallen stardust, falling and settling themselves between the flesh and one’s skin.

I came to this house after I ran away from the last one. I ran away because the last house was haunted.

But all of that running has helped me make my bones.

I came to this house after I ran away from the last one. I am still haunted.

And yet should you try to seek for me, I will be where I am now.