Confessions : Walking Home
The streets were empty, save for the dogs that were enjoying the freedom to play on the streets after the jeepneys, tricycles, and pedicabs went to their respective homes to sleep. The streets were clear, though dusty, bathed in the yellow glow from lonely separate lamp posts.
There I was, with my shadow and the sound of my footsteps, walking.
Even with my eyes closed, I knew how far I had to walk, the slight curves of the road, each and every uphill that would lead me to home. With two dirty stones clutched in each palm, I set off, one step after the other.
It has been years since I last walked this road.
Walking along, I pass by establishments, thrift stores and houses that old memory could not remember for they were not there. I cross the streets while nearing an ice plant whose gate is guarded by dogs who lie still and stiff, and perhaps as cold as the ice that comes from its buildings.
Somewhere along the way, I am greeted with the aroma of dried fish. I have smelled this before during the day when I usually take my ride, but the scent of dried fish smells different, heavy, as if they were sleeping like everyone else.
I walk, and I remember.
I remember that this road is where I found the path that led me to poetry. Mamang and I used to walk this same road when I was a child. She would recite a few lines for me to remember, a few lines each night until I would finally have them all, and we would spend our time not walking, but reciting verses from people who were actually dead. The road was dark then, this was way before these lonely lamp post find themselves rooted here. I remember that while I recited the lines that I strove to remember, I would see the dark sky filled with so many stars.
Bright lights from sleeping houses all around the horizon have blanked out the light of these old stars. Many of them I am sure are like the writers of those poems I first discovered: bright but dead.
Suddenly I hear the barking of dogs coming towards me and getting closer with each step. I grip the stones in my palms, feeling the crusted earth on its surface break into dust before I let them drop from my hands.
I am Home.
24 june 2007
Confession: Of Fathers & BabyMakers
Sorting out through my collection of files for Project Life, I stumbled across snapshots of my little kid. Jian, as I am led to believe by his mother, is everything a son could ever be. But he is not that little anymore. He just turned seven last February, and yet he has made his presence felt: among his family and I am sure, among the girls as well.
Better than the father, I should say. =)
Which leads me to the events, separate and distinct from each other and yet like puzzle pieces they fit with each other’s varied form to produce a picture. That picture is him. Life indeed has this certain characteristic of being too good for words, it crosses and breathes with time, it calls forth memories, it stirs and rouses dreams that are sleeping in the dark.
Life clings. It is the vine on the pole. It is the pole for the vine.
Seven years is indeed a long time. So many things have happened. And when it comes to Jian, I confess I was not there.
Still, thinking about how he is doing somehow lights a bulb my sad face. He looks like I was when I was a kid, which I know is something that is in the realm of genetics. But kids grow up to be like or unlike their fathers with more than genetics. In our case, perhaps my presence, in the form of my absence, surely had something to do with it.
Whether it was for good or not, I could not really say.
If only…If only… but then, as I have taught myself if anything I know about life, it is that time and chance, like somebody ages ago said, happens to everyone. I believe in this. I have to confess that I lost it. I lost the chance. Perhaps being melodramatic I could say something like “it was stolen from me by the clutches of fate and powers too much for a mere mortal such as I” or some other bull. Yeah, that would be bull.
There are no words enough to describe life and living, so it must be for love and loving. Lately, I have been asking myself how and why and where and what and when, all the relevant and irrelevant questions pertaining to this dark and mysterious being, Love, that is. Really, after 3 decades and the first year of the fourth one, here I am, like how it all began, empty handed, save for the memories in my head in the shape of monsters but are actually with the face of my true and honest desires.
I am led to believe that in more aspects than I know, Jian and I share a lot of things. Traits, mannerism, dreams, hopes, childhood memories. Well, and good, and somehow fitting, considering that we are indeed bound to each other, in our own presence as each of us individually is, and in our absence from each other.
Being home, setting myself through this path that I somehow knew long beforehand was what I was going to get (and incidentally, one of the mysteries that somehow someone I dearly loved was able to see out of my cloaks and shadows) has made me realize a lot of things about myself. Ok, I take that back: they are things I made myself face amidst the changing weather of the world, the same changes that affect the seasons of my life.
With all that I know about my son, because the things I don’t know honestly doesn’t matter really until I get to know them, I have could say this.
Indeed, I am a Great BabyMaker. =(
It still remains to be seen, or perhaps never, if I I could claim the same about being a Father. =)
6 july 2007
2:14 p.m.
Farm.
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