Always had this fantasy of walking the stretch of White Beach in short shorts and a bikini top.
Well, yesterday, I did! Along with Naya, home from Toronto.
We’re living on the quiet end of Boracay’s beach, in a resort with a wide expanse of empty white sand in front of it. We’ve been walking aimlessly, eating amazing meals, taking silly pics of each other.
I would love to have my life … if I didn’t already have it! 
Last night, for the first time in a long time, I felt like a real adult.
That must sound crazy, coming from a 35-year old. But really, I always lived like an overgrown teenager, knowing there was some older guy to take care of me.
Now I know what it’s like to have to take care of myself.
At 2 am last night, I still couldn’t sleep. Which is normal most days. But this time, something was very wrong. I couldn’t sleep because I was scratching my legs, my ankles, my ears, my neck so hard I almost scratched the skin off. My eyes had shrunk into little slits. My face was red and swollen.
I felt like one giant, burning itch.
I took the most powerful anti-histamine I know of, but it didn’t work. There were red patches all over my body, growing bigger every minute. And I knew that very soon I would have a hard time breathing.
So I calmly packed my bag with all my IDs and a book and ipod and change of clothes and took myself to the Emergency Room.
The ER guards wanted to send me in on a wheelchair but I found that too funny. Faced with the nurse on duty, I filled up a form and answered tedious questions without any hysteria, questions the person who accompanied a patient would normally answer.
The ER doctor took one look at me and immediately had me injected with an anti-histamine full of steroids. Extreme allergic reaction, he said. I thought I could go home after that but he said I wouldn’t be able to walk straight. True enough, the injection packed a punch. I felt like a wall of bricks had fallen on me. I landed on one of the rolling ER cots.
Woke up hours later in the same spot, with the sun shining on my face. I felt lost and gritty and uncomfortable with my jeans and shirt on … like the feeling you get when you wake up in a ratty little motel bed with cheap sheets and a guy you barely know … at the end of a night you sort of regret happening. Haha. ( At sa mga kunwaring hindi maka-relate, magpakatotoo kayo! )
But the giant itch had subsided for the most part … enough for me to get to work by 10 am to face another long day … without bothering anyone … and as if nothing had happened.
The Delhi airport doesn’t have a smoking lounge. My mother was shocked to discover this after we’d finally completed their tedious check-in process. She could have suffered in silence. But being her, she charmed the military men standing guard at the airport into letting her back out again … through all the security checks … just so she could have a couple of cigs.
“Why do you allow your mother to smoke?”, their commanding officer asked me, shaking his head in horror. I threw my hands helplessly in the air.
For all that she’s lived her life in my father’s shadow, Mama is her own person.
A very efficient, lovable, wide-reading, smoke-addicted own person.
I am writing this for me and for the children I may someday have. I want them to know what their grandma was like in India at the age of 63.
I want my future kids to know that while I was walking cluelessly through the crowds – as always, pondering the point of my existence – she was literally trying to point out the cute guys. She spotted all the good-looking Indian men around us. It was hilarious!
I want them to know that while I was quietly taking pictures at various sites, Mama could be found chatting up all manner of interesting characters.
While I tried to sleep on our long car trips to Agra and Jaipur, she wanted to discuss how the smoke belching factories we passed were contributing to global warming.
She had studied the maps, was familiar with the various Indian states and knew the names of all the Indian desserts we had to try. She was also intensely curious about the market produce, from the long thin cucumbers to the orange pomegranates that look like nothing grown back home.
She read the Indian newspapers that showed up in our room every day. And made the fascinating discovery that their “matrimonial page” did not contain wedding announcements … it was full of families advertising for potential brides for their sons! (e.g. “Wanted: Fair, beautiful girl from good family for 27-year-old MBA earning 37,000 rupees a month. Career girls need not apply.”) Traditional Indians, even the ones with MBAs, still believe in arranged marriages you see.
On this trip, I discovered I like to brood and she is generally perky.
I was almost in tears at the Gandhi memorial with the realization I have only half of my life left to do something truly great. Ma couldn’t relate to the angst. She said she’s always been content with her simple dreams.
Seeing India was the realization of one of those long held dreams. And I was blessed to share it with her … not just as her daughter but as her friend and fellow life traveler.
I went back to the Gandhi museum on a Monday … when I knew it would be closed.
I was the only visitor on the grounds that afternoon.
And so the gardener let me walk this path normally cordoned off from guests — the path tracing Gandhi’s footsteps to the exact spot where he was shot in 1948.
I stood there, in awe, a long time.
There is an inner quiet that has finally returned to me. The part that always found it easy to be still and pray … or whatever it is you call the act of reconnecting with the universe and thanking it over and over again for what you’ve been given.
In this inner quiet, things are simple and I know exactly who I am.
I like to walk. I like being alone. And I do not, in fact, like being drunk.
I have everything I need.
I don’t want a big house. Or a car. I don’t want to increase my carbon footprint or contribute to the commission of more crimes against humanity.
I also don’t want to watch my people kill themselves for ratings in order to entertain the lowest common denominator of viewer.
What I really want to tell them is to please, please use the phenomenal power in their hands to open minds and touch hearts and make a difference among those who can care, even if they may be few.
In this inner quiet, I know this chapter of my work life is ending.
The goals of big business, important as they are, are at odds with what’s inside me.
I am looking for something greater to devote my life to.
Ma holds the Taj in her hand …
Mother and daughter finally together in India …
And the legendary love story …
Mumtaz Mahal was a beautiful, sharp-witted girl, who sold silk in the local market. Shah Jahan was the young, soon to be Emperor, who fell madly in love with her. And married her though she was only a shopgirl.
Mumtaz became his trusted confidante — sharing her insights with him, even joining him on his military campaigns during pregnancy.
Mumtaz died bearing their 14th child. She was 38 when she passed away, and he was just 41. Shah Jahan never remarried.
He built the Taj Mahal in honor of her. It took 22 years of construction, which he himself supervised. He was said to have wept every day throughout the process because he missed Mumtaz so. But he never entered her tomb for he believed she was still alive … she was … at least, in his heart.
For the hopeless romantics out there, it’s the ultimate soulmate tale.
For the darker among us, there is a lesser known twist …
Shah Jahan was also a cruel man who allegedly murdered all his brothers to ensure his rise to power. And so as karma would have it, Shah Jahan’s own son threw him in prison so he could take early hold of the throne.
Shah Jahan was placed in the Agra Fort, right across the Taj Mahal. His only comfort was that he could still see Mumtaz’s monument every day from his window. He died in jail.
Indian women look like tropical flowers … typically seen worn on the same day: a saffron colored sari with tomato red prints combined with an aqua scarf, beaded gold shoes and pink bindi.
The pop music the Indians listen to, that many use as their cellphone ringtones, is as equally loud and happy.
All sorts of animals show up on their national highways: huge blackbirds that fly along with the traffic, camels and elephants, squirrels on the sidewalk, herds of water buffalo and often enough, unchaperoned sacred cows who take their slooooow time crossing the road while vehicles stop to let them let pass.
The food is a dream of curry butter sauces on beds of fluffy basmati.
And believe it or not, the air actually smells like jasmine and rose water.
(OK fine, when crowds pass the air also smells like unwashed armpits … and there are as many weird insects flying around as there are exotic bigger animals … and the regular folk like to cut lines and argue at the top of their voices and some truly harrass the tourists …)
It’s chaotic but so, so alive here. It’s also 42 degrees out but I’m loving the heat.
India is gorgeous!
It’s hell waking up in the morning.
For a couple of minutes, before I even open my eyes, there’s the intense pain of feeling empty and totally, absolutely alone. What’s the point in living? Is there any reason to get up? Am I really me without him? Who am I?
I think all my friends who have husbands or wives can imagine how this might feel.
In a way I lived for him, because of him, for 12 years. Every day, I’d go off all heroic, pretend to build empires and slay dragons … then I’d come home and just be me … the silly, girly, ultra domesticated me that no one but he knew. And if anyone had asked, which was real life to me I wouldn’t have had to think twice. What was real was coming home and telling Roli stories about my fantasy world called the office. Laughing about it. Letting it all go.
We always had a home with love in it. A home with love plus his spectacular DVD collection, my experimental cooking, his useful gadgets and gizmos, my perfectly organized zen decor.
Now we walk around like wounded halves of a whole.
And I have stupid regrets, like I never finished Red, White and Blue because I always assumed they’d just be sitting around for me to watch whenever I wanted to. And he realizes he never had to worry about where the clean towels and socks and pillowcases would come from and now, has he ever got logistical problems …
He’s moved all his stuff out. Finally. All of his stuff … except for himself.
He still sleeps on the couch.
It’s absurd but I let it be.
I’m afraid.
He’s afraid.
His being around has stopped me from ever coming home early to write in peace. But it’s also stopped me from asking strangers home in my weak and drunken moments, spared me from a rebound.
And most days I’m thankful to be alive, to be redefining who I am without a relationship in my life.
It’s just the getting up in the morning that’s so damn hard.
There’s this gay guy in the office who always gets fabulous boyfriends. Not the teenybopper one night stand types but serious, thinking ones, the kinds you could imagine dating if you yourself were gay.
I asked him last week how he finds them.
Then I suddenly thought to ask him what was wrong with me. What was stopping me from finding equally fabulous (but straight!) guys.
“Nes,” and he took a long, long pause before clearing his throat, “You scare me. You scare people.” He then described how I walk into rooms oozing the equivalent of nuclear energy, snapping at everyone, expecting immediate answers, fidgeting when I’m impatient, interrupting when I’m bored …
It’s funny how the social skills that can get you ahead at work do not translate to other venues in life.
His tip, “Sometimes, you just have to be really sweet … and not be a know-it-all … “
Then and there, I decided to practice my version of sweet, mindless charm on said scared-of-me gay office guy.
One week later and he’s probably forgotten about our conversation but I see the sweetness is working on him. He used to stay way outside my personal space. Now he regularly walks into my cube just to rant.
The sweetness works on girls too. Sometimes I can’t help myself and stop totally strange women in malls to ask what the color of their eyeshadow is because it makes them look pretty. You won’t believe the smiles they give me, plus the make-up tips I get.
So the universe upped the ante last night and gave me a real guy to practice on. It was around midnight at Esquinita. I was hanging out with Dyimeno who was pushing me to fill out the international grant application form she’d brought. “Sige na!” “E tamad ako mag-aral!” ”Sige na!” ”E tamad nga ako e!”
In the midst of this exchange, a waiter with a goatee mysteriously handed me a napkin, which turned out to have a neatly written message on it …
In the past I would have freaked out and totally ignored it. But last night, I took a little time to assess the situation, asked the waiter who sent it, saw that napkin note boy — who was smiling shyly at me while drinking with two of his friends – had a pleasant, open face, and decided to write him back.
Left my name on a bar napkin without a number. Drew a smiley on it. Sent it back through aforementioned waiter.
About ten minutes later, I had to walk to the bathroom. Napkin note boy turned out to be waiting for me outside. He stood a meter away, had his hands in his pockets, looked super nervous. ”I’m F_____”, he said. I smiled and shook his hand. A funny little conversation ensued about our workplaces.
There wasn’t any spark. So I wasn’t giving out my number. But I liked the boy. He was nice. Respectful. And more than anything else … courageous.
So my wish for today is that his earnest search finds him the perfect girl. And I don’t have a wish for myself because I’m already receiving unexpected packages from the universe every day … new friends … new insights … new experiences …
I’m having a blast of a summer, in every way possible!
P.S. = note to self: must thank office gay guy for being so honest … 
I love the start of summer!
Makes me feel so alive.
Warm weather brings simple, basic pleasures … the sun in your eyes, skin that starts to burn, droplets of sweat trickling all over.
Then there are the pleasures that come with the struggle to beat the heat … walking into a cool shower at full blast or rubbing your eyelids with ice cubes or feeling the sheer ecstasy of smooth vanilla ice cream topped with caramel sauce against your tongue.
It’s a sensual season.
An inspiring one.
When summer starts I want to disappear from work to go on some fantastic adventure. I get the irrational urge to wear open-toed heels and cotton sundresses and sing while playing ”Low” at full blast, which I just discovered is the same hip-hop song 8-year old girls all over the city are dancing to this season (gosh, I have the musical taste of a child!).
Summer makes me want to: go sailing and not hit dry land for days, sit on the sidewalk at 3 am to count the stars, and sign up for membership at a gym filled with a bunch of equally hot, sweaty, muscled guys …
Wait, come to think of it, I WILL sign up for that gym …!
And why I’m outing myself on this blog right now, I don’t know. Except that this is something I have to say at least once in my life.
I really, really loved her.
This happened all of 20 years ago, yet I still remember some of the time I spent with her as if it took place yesterday.
Thea was 21 when we met, a fresh UP grad, brilliant and beautiful … and she was my creative writing teacher. The first day she walked into class, I already knew her. Not from my present life though, but from some other existence. It was so clear to me then. And I know it to be true now even if I have no proof to show you.
I was 15 and in fourth year high school, the literary editor of our student magazine. I had already decided I was going to be a writer someday. So it made absolute sense to me that my closest friend would be my writing teacher.
Of course, my batchmates and her co-teachers didn’t quite see it that way. The resistance from the entire school was palpable and sometimes vicious. But being the way I’ve always been, I didn’t give a damn. Neither did Thea.
That year, Thea and I spent as much time as we could talking. When we weren’t talking we would write each other kilometric letters … on parchment paper and in long hand. We walked for miles and miles every Thursday night in our perennially blue shirts and sneakers, just walking and talking, experiencing life together in the way one can only do when one is very, very young.
Once, close to dawn, as I was finishing a paper, I saw her astral project in front of me. She told me I would often visit her as well, calling to her from outside her window in the middle of the night, though I swear I do not remember such travels.
It was, as you can imagine, a very odd friendship.
To say it couldn’t pass for a love story because nothing actually happened, I mean physically, is to not know what it means to really love. Our was a meeting of minds and spirits in such an intense, life-changing way, the experience still amazes me.
Years passed. I grew up ever more the agnostic and she grew into such a deep level of spirituality it was something I could no longer comprehend.
Thea became a missionary, then a Cenacle sister. After years, she eventually left the order. But she still works in the campus ministry office of a very big university. She spends her time planning for and heading retreats … still shocking everyone with questions that penetrate the very heart of one’s being.
I haven’t been to mass since 2nd year college, the year Thea went to Bukidnon to become a Jesuit volunteer. I left the Church then for many, mostly feminist reasons … but I also remember feeling angry at the time, because God had somehow taken her away from me …
When we saw each other last weekend, without our other friends for the first time in years, she asked me why I had suddenly called.
I said I didn’t know but I wanted to talk with her.
She then said she had important news to break. She just found out several days before that she might be very, very sick. Though she wouldn’t be sure till she got the results of her biopsy this week.
I was in shock.
But she had already reached a surprising level of acceptance. She was praying for joy and courage, whatever happened. She was sincerely curious about chemo and what it might be like. She was at peace, she said, to be sharing in the suffering of Christ.
I couldn’t eat as I listened to her talk about the possible struggles to come.
The timing of our meeting was so strange, I was reminded of our alleged nocturnal visits from decades past, and how it was possible we might still be meeting up now and then, sharing problems in a dimension our conscious minds would never remember.
I pray for her though I don’t really know what it means to pray to her God.
I am afraid for her though she is stronger in faith than anyone I know.
I want to be there for her if the pain comes. And I want her to know that in this lifetime as in many before and after this, I love her and will always love her.
A note from Zivan (in Heyward) to me and Naya:
“I remember … having a world war against 6-year-old Nessa in Hong Kong and laying out all our toys in the hallway so that these toys could annihilate each other one by one. Turn by turn, one of my toys would topple one of hers, and then vice versa. By the time we were done, we were friends again.”
“I remember … bringing a buck-toothed 5-year-old Naya to ballet school on the bicycle with the basket up front. We would wedge the cushioned piece of wood on the middle bar section so she could sit there. And I would peddle furiously, trying to get back up the slope towards Lazcano. Sometimes we would laugh because of the effort.”
Response from Naya (in Toronto) to Zivan:
“I remember … you encouraging Mama to buy me a volleyball and volleyball pin when I was 11, because I was failing PE, then teaching me to bounce it off against the garage wall, patiently, even if I kept on hitting the lightbulb, pathetically.”
Response from Nessa (in Manila) to Zivan:
“And I remember … waking up in the middle of the night, hearing you fall with a thud to the floor from the top bunk of our double decker. You cried out loud and I felt so much pain for you I cried a little too. And before we would sleep when we were little we would recite lines to each other that went, ‘Good night, sleep tight, wake up bright, in the morning light, to do what’s right, with all your might’ …”
We write each other, my brother and sister and I, a little at a time. Sometimes a lot at a time. I have long letters from my sister that make me laugh out loud with her cool advice and crazy anecdotes. And long, long letters from my brother filled with so much faith and love, I cry whenever I read them.
My sister is coming into her own in a foreign land, growing in her craft and in experience. My brother is bursting with hope and optimism and happiness for the first time in years because he is finally home with Agnes.
He sends graphic novels for us to read, she sends me funny songs that describe episodes of my life, and I send them pictures of the folks … along with all my angst …
Zivan recently made me realize blogging is no substitute for building and nurturing relationships in person. Naya helped me understand what dating in the new millennium was like and why I shouldn’t downgrade my expectations of men because there are still good ones to be had out there. They are far away but it’s as if they’re right here with me, knowing more about my life now than my life back when we were all still home.
I no longer feel like an only child in Manila, awkward around parents I hadn’t really talked to in years. We are all talking now, in one way or another.
My family is the ultimate blessing in a life that is already so blessed.
Yesterday, I taught Mama how to email and surf the net. Hoping she might eventually become part of the circle of correspondences. She opened my brother’s blog, shocked to immediately discover he had almost been killed along a California highway in January. She then proceeded to post her very first comment.
And for the weekend at least, after leading our impromptu computer training session instead of mindlessly malling … I couldn’t help but feel happy.
************
P.S. =
Does one’s name affect one’s destiny? I’ve always wondered …
Our folks picked unique names for us because they wanted us to be “special” (aka weirdos). And we so are!
Zivan’s whole name is Lionel Zivan. Lionel means little lion, Zivan means lively. Our surname means valley of the lions. So he’s the lively little lion in the valley of the lions. And so he is … lively, that is. Full of life and gifts … he is a composer, guitarist, keyboard player, drummer, singer, visual artist, comic book writer, public speaker, teacher, all round techie guy, unofficial family pastor. My kuya’s the epitome of a Renaissance Man.
Naya’s whole name is Yavanna. She was named after the goddess of the harvest in Tolkien’s Silmarillion, a history of Middle Earth. And so she has already harvested two Palanca awards and is considered by many to be one of the great young Filipino poets of our generation. Also a thinker, a drinker, a dancer, a lover and now - allegedly - an up and coming cook.
My whole name is Ianessa, it’s Greek for gentle ruler. Walang kokontra! Mabait ako! Hahaha!
I have no reason to feel tired. I just am. Drained.
This blue energy gets depleted really, really quickly.
I feel like I’m driving a car at dusk on a very long expressway. I just found out I lost my headlights. Plus I don’t remember where I’m going. But I have to keep up the pace or I’ll cause traffic.
So I just keep traveling on this endless highway in the almost darkness, trapped in a straight line heading pretty much nowhere.
