I hadn’t had a vacation until, let’s see it was the end of the UAAP season then, so was it Aug 2007? Anyway it was at Boracay, but for some odd reason it wasn’t as fulfilling a holiday as I’d thought it’d be. I remember going there in 1995 and back then Boracay was TRULY beautiful. I was with my friends Geo and Maite and her very large family and it was fun like crazy happy fun. I remember Geo didn’t even know how to eat with his hands or flush the toilet with a bucket of water, rich kid that he was, and was the constant butt of jokes because of. But I especially remember my best friend Yna and the laughs we used to have. She was the very first person to tell me that I should write, and in high school I would type these long notes for her after school and she’d read them and tell me what she thought. She was a strict critic and one of the first people I knew whom I’d trade thoughts of on books and movies, and we talked for hours over these things.
It’s actually surprising, now that I’m actually writing about her all these years. The truth is not a day passes without my thinking of her. She passed away after a freak accident at their house in Laguna involving an airgun of all things, and I think I count that time as the first that I actually ever felt an absence so truly palpable in my life. We were in our mid or early twenties I think.
At the time, see, I lived in a world where I felt I was not well understood, and there she was taking the time to know me. The way I write about her now I’m afraid she’d come off as an angel, but she was far from it, and I know she’d want me to write that (because she insisted I not write ‘crap’, and preferred I always write the truth, claiming to be able to tell the difference, which was true). She was feisty, chain smoking, cursing and constantly opinionated about something or someone. And she treated me with a respect that said ‘I understand you, I know you are an ok person, I know you are not easily understood by people and that’s tough, and I will not feed you polite bullshit, because you deserve better.‘
We had our arguments and for a while she had a dark phase that took her away from me, but I knew I could trust her and she never let me down, even when things were pretty rough in our respective lives family wise and financially. She was moving from one parent’s house to another before she got married so we got out of touch a bit, then lived in Laguna, then before I knew it she was gone.
Of course I wonder still, what she would say if she read my writing. I’m not afraid to be judged, I just want to have those long conversations again, when she would detect that hint of unsurety, of hesitation or self doubt that would mean what I wrote was not entirely what I felt. It’s as if she knew what I was thinking even more than I did myself, consequently forcing me to learn to trust her because it made me face the truth in what I was trying to say, which more often than not was a hurtful truth, given the situation I was in at the time.
I also knew she was tormented from her own situation, and her seeming aloofness which kept her from being a favorite of a lot of people was her way of dealing with things. She was far too honest to have around ‘polite’ company, and I loved her for it. I knew how it felt to be different, to be a square cog in a world of round holes and not know where one’s place was, and her company or at least the knowledge someone else was dealing with it made me feel less alone.
I started out writing this to say I was tired and I needed a vacation, but I ended up talking about Yna, a close friend and someone I would probably miss forever. I guess I really am tired, because it’s in times like this when I am less than strong, I want to know she is somewhere, being less than strong with me. People like us would talk about books and characters in books and movies and stories and such things so we’d form an ally against whatever it is we were trying to beat, and things would be alright for a bit, giving us enough to go on till the next trial.
Then if life were a script we’d start respective families and we’d grow old and our kids would grow up with each other and we’d laugh at how rich kids like Geo back in ’95 in Boracay didn’t know how to eat with his hands or flush the toilet with a pail of water, and we’d have barbecues every Sunday at our house this week and their house the next and Geo’s and Maite’s the week after that because they have a baby now, finally after so many years, and isn’t that a sign that God exists and we’ll think of ways to go to their house so we can look at it often.
But of course we can’t now, and I ponder that everyday. And I don’t have an ending for this so I’ll just stop here.