Fairies and Lions, Too

My sister is taking her first plane ride, and she is taking it all on her own, to a metropolis that does not know her. It is her first seminar, her first hotel stay and her first travel all alone. In my mind, she is still a child, not the Chemical engineer she had made herself become, and in my mind, she, like my brother, will always need protecting against the world. 

This would seem trite, to those used to travelling, and especially to those who have traveled since they were small, but for us, who have to strive in order to make it happen for ourselves, it is a testament, once again, of dreams becoming true.

This must be how parents feel, as their children make their dreams real, because of them, or, in some unfortunate cases, despite them. It feels strange, like I had been left out of an experience, which, in reality, could have never been mine anyway.

Perhaps, I have always thought that I would be there during my brother and my sister’s first plane ride. I have not imagined a scenario of them doing it alone or with other people. I had always thought that I had to make it happen for them: this thing imaginable only as a luxury when we were children, as we sprawled, belly-down, on our parents’ bed and on our daydreams.

Too soon, we have stopped dreaming of becoming princesses and warriors, just when kids our age started believing they can be fairies or lions. In the stead of wild childish imaginings, we dreamed of grown versions of ourselves, in important luncheon meetings, or in pilot cockpits. We talked too long about plane rides and hotel rooms, instead of wands and swords, of huge beds and hot and cold showers instead of superpowers and wings.

There were times when I wished we had it like other children did, but this—this unknowable triumph we share only with those who are like Us—this is irreplaceable. It escapes language and is articulated only by the glitter of tiaras, pixie dust and shining armors.

We do not mind if our first plane ride happened fifteen years too late into our lifetimes. This does not change a thing. Plane rides and hotel rooms are made of similar stuff as princesses or warriors, of fairies and lions, too. 

The Consequence of Memory

I pulled an all-nighter for Elie Wiesel’s Night.

I have always thought that there are books that change us, and there are books that are able to reveal who we are. Night was both, and I had been fearful of it.

Two years ago, I attempted to read it, and I put it down nine pages later, terrified of what it could break in me. Last night, I picked it up again, and I was right to not underestimate its power.

 It was as harrowing as I expected it to be.

Night is not for the struggling faithful or for the non-believer. One should approach the book with care, because he emerges from it a changed person. Only the self-assured pseudo-religious would emerge from it unscathed, because they will have dismissed it as an example of condemnable writing.

Night is a slim volume of the firsthand account of a Holocaust survivor, written in very potent prose. It is a record of the worst that human beings could be, and I feared that when I read it, I might see things I cannot un-see.

Yet, I emerged from Night without having been as provoked as I had expected to be. I did not get out of it angry, or confused, or accusing. If anything, I accepted that I was not asking the wrong questions. I do not know how this was possible. Perhaps because I had grown up, had grown wiser in the span of time that I waited, and the part of my soul that was vulnerable, in all its fragility, had created for itself a semblance of defense.

Or perhaps because I had lost what I had been struggling to protect in me, two years back, when I decided I couldn’t get past the book's first nine pages. I had lost this part of my soul in the two years that I waited, and because it is no longer there, there is nothing to protect nor to destroy.

Had I insisted on reading it then, I would have fallen into a pit from which there is no saving. Like Night's Eliezar, I would have found it futile to guard my faith when all there was to see were abandonment and disillusionment. Like him, I, too, would have found it easy to condemn and impossible to forgive. My fear had been my very salvation. Because I waited, I am saved.

Elie (for I shall call him that) ended his memoir in three pages. The conclusion of an unspeakable journey, in three pages.

It was an epilogue devoid of drama, devoid of questions or answers. It did not glorify the redemption that came in the end.

If anything, the conclusion was written only like it was a duty he owed to the story he told—like it was the consequence of living, the consequence of memory.

In the Tiger's Eyes

I remember how the eponymous lad in Life of Pi wailed inconsolably when he was finally found along the Mexican shore by people—members of his own species, he said—after a long ordeal and a struggle to survive with a Bengal tiger, which like him, had survived a shipwreck. He was wailing, much to the confusion of the people who were saving him, because his heart broke when the tiger left him--so unceremoniously.

This tiger, for whom he has learned to feel responsible and by whom he felt valued and needed, jumped out of the boat, all thin and famished, and walked on towards the forest without looking back. It just walked, literally, out of his life. So unceremoniously.

Time and time again, we are Pi, calling out and wailing for the tiger that left so unceremoniously, it broke our heart. I’ve been realizing how it is truly a miracle to find people who value us, when, as it happens sometimes, a moment so clear comes when we realize our insignificance in certain relationships we value. The moment would be so clear that the epiphany would almost seem like a betrayal. How could we have been missing it until now? How could we not have seen how little we mattered?

Pi’s father is right: we see in the tiger’s eyes only our own emotions reflected back to us.

But those emotions were ours. And despite them inadvertently hurting us in the end, looking straight on couldn't be a mistake.

So, we allow ourselves to be saved by the epiphany, we grieve for the tiger who left so unceremoniously and perhaps, when we are healed, we will try again.

This Business of Untangling

I used to look forward to epiphanies that begin with “at the end of the day…” but lately, they have been escaping even before I could acknowledge them, perhaps because they are too many or perhaps because there is no “end” of the day anymore. Lately, it seems as though the conclusions of each day are reduced into a quiet dwindling— a dot, dot, dot—no longer the definitive closure brought about by a deep sigh and then, sleep.

 There is no lull inside my head, even in that thin strip between wakefulness and sleep. There is a singular forceful thought that squirms and complains, “There is too much untangling to do”. I often yield, and lie awake, for hours and hours, buried deep in this business of untangling.

There is too much untangling to do. There are too many thoughts about people, thoughts about people’s reactions, and thoughts about people’s reactions to reactions, thoughts about wrong reactions, quick reactions, fake reactions, right people, mean people, friendly people, thoughts running around, thoughts staying put, thoughts covering other thoughts, fantastic thoughts, practical thoughts, blasphemous thoughts, thoughts about lists, thoughts about lies, big lies, small lies, big brains, tiny brains, loud people, proud people, dancing people, sick people, fat people, people with shiny heads, poor people, old people, dead people, crazy people, people with diabetes, people with tangled hair, people with tangled, tangled hair, thoughts about people with too many judgments to assign, many, many, many judgments waiting for their turn, judgments raising their hands, judgments jumping up and down, me, me, pick me, ruthless judgments, people with judgments, always with judgments in spite of their tangled thoughts tangled with feelings tangled with fears tangled with insecuritiestangledwithfrustrationstangledwithsickpeoplewithtangledhair. 

 Eventually, though, I manage to tire myself out only to slip into dreaming. Once, days after we buried her, I dreamed of my dead grandma, wanting to come inside the house. She was knocking on the front door very persistently (which was very un-ghostly when you think of it). She was in her favorite white shirt and her loose black pants, and some of her hair strayed to her face as she knocked and knocked. I woke up in a fit of mirthless laughter. I found it really preposterous that I conjured her in my dream with untangled hair. When my grandma had become too sick to get out of bed, her hair became so tangled it became a stubborn solid mass of white and gray. We couldn’t undo it no matter what we did. When she died, we buried her in the lacy white dress I bought her, and her tangled hair.

 The truth is I have developed a fear of tangled things. Several weeks ago, when my mom fell ill, her hair became so tangled too. I tried for days to untangle it. It was a chore devoid of method or order, but I would do it anyway. I would pull a chair by her bed and I would patiently loosen the tangled mess. As my fingers worked in the foreign roughness, my mind would sift through the thoughts in my head.

And the business of untangling would begin again.

In Defense of Incoherence

Prayers, as I know them, are usually composed of moments of non-speaking. The things we express in prayers: repentance, gratitude, aspirations—these are the least expressed by human language. I have learned that the most heartfelt of aspirations, those we make known only to God, are expressed without any appreciable coherence. Our most honest expressions of remorse, of gratitude and of desire are revealed not in any orderly construction of phrases, but rather in Incoherence, consistent only in the underlying faith that they will be Understood.

Perhaps, the language of prayers is silence. Perhaps, its syllables are flashes of images and warmth. Perhaps, they take wing from the depths of the soul and fly through the limits of our minds, through the clouds and the stars, to a place where they are welcomed and understood. Perhaps, their disorganization is their very organization, and they defy human comprehensibility precisely because they were never ours to make sense of in the first place.

Perhaps this Incoherence is the expression of a language we have forgotten, but which refuses to be lost. It lingers in defiance like a devoted soldier, and presents itself only in prayers, as a lifeline, a conduit, to everything Divine.

Five Pieces

Today, in the midst of packing in the IIT evacuation center, an old man slowly walked up to the stage where volunteer groups were getting ready to distribute bread. I saw the tentative steps he took towards the organizer who had just given reminders about the system of distribution to the hundreds of people who would have been in their own houses, had it not been for the flashflood. The old man took out his Family Card, a creased index card which had been wet and soiled in places. He straightened it out with both hands and presented it to the organizer.

“Sir,” he said. “Mangayo unta ko ug pagkaon. Mulakaw naman gud ko.”

The organizer explained that there is a system in place, that if he were given ahead of everyone else, questions will arise. Another volunteer head said that if he waited, he would receive his share in a while. I wanted so badly to give him his share but I know I will be breaching a system that has been in operation long before I started volunteering, so I piped in and said we were almost ready to distribute, but the organizer cut me off and said we weren’t. We had been waiting for another queue to finish before we could start the distribution.

The old man folded his card and placed it back in his shirt pocket, nodding away his disappointment.

“Aw, mulakaw nalang ko,” he said slowly as he turned to go. He wasn’t angry. The humility in his eyes is one that would shame any of us on the gymnasium stage.

I watched the old man leave and then I looked at the bread packs we were going to distribute. Five thin slices per pack. Per family of five. We have just denied a hungry old man five pieces of bread, for which he had stripped off all of his pride and for which he had worn all of his humility.

I followed him with my eyes, as he wove through the crowd, to a corner of the gym, where he bent down to get two red plastic bags of clothes and other things, to the main gate where he slowly made his way out. He was alone.

We had been afraid that he was lying, that like so many before him who used his reason, he just wanted to get ahead. We had insisted on a system that would ensure fairness. We had wanted to protect the five pieces of bread.



I did not run after him. I realize that when God accounts for each tear in our hearts on Judgment Day, I will have to answer, too, for that old man's.

There

“I had wanted to tell you a story today,” my professor said at the very end of the class period. I was in my Philippine Linguistics class for a very special reason that semester. I was classmates with my students, as I sit in each class to learn how the subject is taught. Come next semester, I was to handle the major course.

My students/classmates, caught up in the business of putting away their notes and gathering up their things, eagerly settled back down and urged her to continue. My professor set her books down on the table again, and then told us about a day, twenty-five years ago, when--in her words--it was a particularly good time to be a Filipino. It was the day the Philippines made a difference in the world. In EDSA. She was one of those thousands of people who stood up in the bloodless revolution that became our legacy to the world.

One student, caught up in the narrative, asked what the people did in EDSA.

My teacher considered the question momentarily, in that half-expression people usually make when they are half-incredulous, half-impressed, half-sympathetic. She nodded once before she answered, as if to confirm a truth that presented itself only at that precise moment.

I was at the back row, contemplating an answer that floated up from the literature schema I had been academically brought up to create. This answer tasted like Pretense in my own tongue: it was a powerful irony I had been trained to anticipate, but one which was also the very exemplification of something “full of sound and fury, [but] signifying nothing”. It was something I’d expect to enjoy from literature and I had never really believed that I would hear it so sincerely said in real life.

That morning, I did.

“What did you do there, ma’am?” was the question.

A pause. A half-expression. A nod. And then a smile.

“We were there,” came the reply.