DEadpOetSsOcIeTy

There were some thoughts better
not being told. There are some feelings
better kept to ones’ self. But good memories have there own way of expressing
themselves despite the silence.
I can still remember the feeling
of dancing in the rain (and crying in the rain), playing outdoor games, climbing
up trees, smelling grandma’s chocolate rice, sleeping at the backyard, building
houses made of grandma’s hand-woven blankets(which I often get scolded about), receiving
new dresses with pink laces and sashes, hugging my favorite ragged doll,
laughing over something grown-ups never find funny and even the tears I shed when
the boys in our neighborhood rejected me in their “soldier” games. These are
some pieces of puzzles that make up the entirety of my treasured childhood
days.

 
My heart told me that it was not
that long ago when I first learned the concept of love or rather experienced
it. But logic reminded me that it was more than ten years ago and the more time
filled in the gap between those memories up to this present time, the more they
lingered to my thoughts. The feeling took hold of my senses of the most
mysterious thing I had encountered with. Love. It was a broad subject. In fact,
someone told me that love’s meaning was still indefinable but it gave meaning
to life. I found the irony agreeable. Perhaps, when I looked back my days ago,
I could count the different ways from different people of how love sprinkled me
with pure and innocent happiness. And how it connected the puzzles of my life.

 
I could still capture the
toothless grin of Manang Stela every time she saw me outside the house waiting
for her to pass by. Manang Stela was the owner of this small sari-sari store
near the municipality’s church. And I was her avid buyer. I was always eager to
buy one of my favorite foods in her store; the 25 centavo red marble-shaped
bubblegums that turned as hard as marble itself after five minutes of chewing. At
six in the morning, I became excited especially when I could already drew out
her outline from the distance. Holding her wooden box filled with few coins,
she would tap my head and together we would go to her store. I was proud to be
the first person to buy from her store and even prouder when she gave me a
discount for my bubblegums. The moment I cupped my hands together, she
understood that she had to get her spoon and dip it from the jar of cherry gums
to my hands of full eagerness. That made me happy. I used to wear the same big
smile from the time I waited for Manang Stela to the time I returned home. The
only difference then was the red color smeared in my lips. That smile was
certainly influential. One morning, I had my older sister with me.

That was just one of my morning
habitual activities when I was at my grandparents’ house during weekends or
vacations. By the end of the day, I definitely would smell like a piece of
crap. We had many places where we could hang-out and play. There was our tree
house made of cheap woods from my uncle’s place. It was built in a Calachuchi
tree (I used to pick one of its flowers and place it in my left ear). We had
our “top ten”; a serene open field at the back of the church where we played
tag or just for the sake of running. My sister came up with its name after I
graduated from kindergarten and made it to the third place at Immaculate Heart
of Mary Academy (I hated the nuns there). Not to mention, we had the plaza,
market and even the cemetery. Yup, we could get as far as that. When my
grandfather died, the cemetery became the soil of one of our playgrounds. He
died due to high blood pressure. I remembered when my grandma asked us while
she cried if we were happy now that nobody would scold us for being
disobedient. I was utterly confused. My grandfather was not a good man. He was
great. One time, I wanted so much to make grandpa proud of me that I offered
him a fresh, big eggplant only to find out I stole it from our neighbor’s
backyard. He scolded me real bad. And it made me cried real hard. But he calmed
me soon enough by making me understood something; that I had to work to get
what I wanted. He was a man of virtue. Grandma never made a mistake in choosing
Toribio dela Calzada as her partner in life. My sister, cousins and I used to
pick flowers at grandma’s garden and placed them in grandpa’s grave. We would
just sit there and had our chats as if we were in our rooms. We missed him a
lot but it was nothing compared to what my grandmother felt on that
disheartening day of loss. I realized then that the more you lingered to
someone else’s presence, the harder it was to fill the emptiness of his
absence. The pain stayed there for quite a long time like a bubblegum tangled
in your hair. But pain to me back then, was not as evident as the toothaches I
had from eating those cherry gums. Perhaps, what my grandmother felt was much
similar to what I felt when I lost my favorite doll but my mother said it was
more than that. It scared me.

                                                                                                 - to be                                                                                                         continued

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