30 years. 30 days.

The tide turns. Waves race toward your toes. Tonight, you wonder if somebody at the edge of this sea, on a similar breakwater or probably on a parallel universe, sits and skips stones just like you do. But you can only make out a blink arranged neatly in the island before you.

It’s been 30 days and 30 years. And you want to find yourself elsewhere. Some place better than this. Perhaps on a cliff. No. A bamboo platform on a cliff. A room with doors that open to the sea. The gauze curtains gathered to one side. With the surf, hazy white lines that falls and rises. Falls. Rises.

c[]ngratulatiOns! Sam Gael Gulfan Macabit and Mr. & Mrs Primo Arbon

Start:	Jun 13, '08 10:00p
Location:	Tacloban City and Cagayan de Oro City

It's a red letter day TODAY for:

1. Mr. & Mrs. Ganymede Macabit--Christening of Baby Sam Gael in Tacloban City. I am supposed to be one of the godfathers. Dang! I miss it.

2. Mr. & Mrs. Primo Arbon III church wedding and reception near Cagayan de Oro City. Primo was a colleague at PAREF Springdale Private School for Boys who eventually relocated to Kansas for a teaching post.

My tight schedule prevents me from going to 2 different cities at one time. And I'm here in front of the PC fixing Monday's cultural exchange programme. hahays :-)

time out; method to this madness

In a fit of anger, you say you form a fist and count ten pussy cats to maintain peace and balance. And you added that when everything burns like hell’s kitchen, you lock your room, roll the shutters and holler at the top of your lungs.

But you never said anything about the days when you leave the doors and windows open to just stay in bed, lay on your back and count the number of grains or squares or cobwebs on the white ceiling. They often wonder if you turn green with madness or red with fury because you’ve never shown your emotion in public.

You only burst once when a salesclerk--in her own mistake thinks she can mask her negligence--raises her voice at you.  You just lose it. You comfort yourself that you are not angry; just stressing a point. In truth, the rage consumed your pride and ego that very moment. Since then, you stop wondering what you are capable of doing in public.

But lately you take a second look at being non-confrontational and the rooftop. The seldom used rooftop. In your head, in between ordinary days, in a fit of madness, you grab the yoga mat and roll it on a space that can hold a party of ten. On that night, as you lay on your back with the ocean of stars before you, the few secrets of the universe hums, rolls and unrolls with your mat.

Then you left that zone and retrieve Van Gogh from memory to distract the moment.

On a night like this, on a St-Remy’s asylum, Van Gogh translated these stars, eleven of them, into a circular form, magnified than what you see. There is no swirling clouds tonight, only the stars, dot-to-dot.

It always brings back memories of childhood when the family switches off the house lights and gathers at the yard, telling stories which you have long forgotten now. But the night lingers, with you sitting on the grass, with your five-year-old head on your mother’s lap, listening intently to a story about elves and a fiefdom that now belongs to a distant memory.

Or on a night the house was renovated--when the second floor windows are left with no covers. And the moon’s honeyed light peers from those windows to the ground floor where you are seated.

Then you come full circle even for just a moment--like that game in childhood on moonlit nights when you only need water to paint the moon; the earth as your canvas.

 

 

 

--RV Escatron | 8 June 2008