To Be Loved

Last night I slept knowing that God loves me.

Prior, I sobbed by the greatness of the idea. How can I be loved so much?

Things are going smoothly in my life, recently at least.

I am beginning to find my way back into love. I guess I am. (When I have totally gone back in, I’d tell you more.)

I had a great time with my sister and my sister’s girlfriends in Café Breton. It was a jovial get-together with people I just met, therefore, another cosmic experience and that means meeting someone again for the first time. If that’s confusing, ok, it’s just like déjà vu but only 50 percent or barely.

One of the stranger-friends asked how younger I was than my sister or how older she was than me. We said 10 (I’m 23, she’s 33.) They were surprised and exclaimed that we looked like barkadas. By and by, all of them were one-by-one asking how big our age gap was, as if it hasn’t been asked and answered yet. So we’d say again, “ten.” And they’d be like, oh my god really? And we’d be like, yeah. And then they’d say again, para lang kayong magkabarkada. And then I said, hmm… are we supposed to look like mag-ina in real life? The long and short of it, it felt good hearing someone comment on our barkada-like sisterly relationship. I never thought we’d look like that in front of people, considering how I grew up in a not-so-close-knit-but-eventually-found-its-way-to-be-close-knit-ironically-when-we-started-moving-one-by-one-out-of-the-house family. I wonder if my mom and I would eventually look like that….

My sister and I, or better yet, my four sisters and I…. We dream together. We plan together. We make our dreams come true together.

My sister and I have been planning to build a house, nay, a family mansion, as I corrected Ate Dale, my sister’s best friend, last night when she asked what my sister and I were talking about when she butted in the midst of our deep conversation; before us was a block of high-ceilinged townhouses which reminded us of our dream house. Yes, our dream house. Not my dream house nor her dream house, but ours, for the seven of us, my father, mother, and their five daughters—us.

How ironic that, growing up in a family with perennial financial problems, moral issues, and everyday nagging at each other to deal with everyday, we still plan to have a place where to stay together for the rest of our lives. Don’t the cat-and-dog fights suffice for us to say that we eventually want total independence of each other and just see each other once in a while or not at all? Isn’t our Nanay’s nagging enough reason for us to totally, altogether move out?

Looking around society today, with most families broken by different factors, it’s still safe to say that ours is the most normal, if not ideal.

I have a father. He works for a government hospital (that’s for 45 years now a.k.a. all his life). His salary is no doubt meager to send all five kids—us—to college. But he did. Miracles happen. He made them.

I have a mother. She is a housewife. She’s been that for as long as my memory serves me well. It was my father’s staunch principle to have one of them stay at home with the kids—us—to focus on us and raise us. And that principle worked. Otherwise, one of the daughters—us again—could have had herself pregnant and got married early. One of us could have “drugged” away. One of us could have not finished her schooling. One of us could have… the bad possibilities are endless!

We are all five. Girls. No boys to look after us (except for my kinda skinny father). We went to school. We went through school and beyond. We went through a lot! (God knows what they are) But none of them included either of my parents' unfaithfulness to each other nor their children's messing up in school because we learned the value of money early on and knew better than to waste away our tuition fees. We've been a thread too close to breaking up as a family but we were never a broken family. Comparing or not comparing with other families of today, I am proud of ours.

Now you ask why I so think there really is a God who loves me (and of course, you, too) beyond this world, beyond anything, beyond our scars, beyond our ignorance, beyond our mistakes, beyond our imagination, beyond description, and beyond you and me?

I was never a religious person. (I don’t remember the last time I went to church, but it was definitely this year, and my pious mom should not know this.) But I am spiritual. I believe that there’s one big Man or Woman or Spirit out there who knows everything we do, everything we’ve done, and everything we’ll ever do, and we can’t escape from Him/Her. But the good thing is (as if the last statement were really bad), Someone is always going to catch us any way we fall. But we will never fall. We will always defy gravity. In every end, things always work themselves out because God is working them out.

Last night, I slept with my soul opulent.

(written 2 nov 08)

the night before obama won

For the first time, I was grateful I live far from work (or simply far, alright). The long way home would buy time for my body to digest the chao fan, lemon chicken, siomai, and nai cha milk tea I consumed with Jeff and Pyugs, friends from work, that is if it still has power to digest given that it’s way past midnight now.

We (or they) talked about their sad stories.

Pyugs’s was when his mom died while he was in the States (specifically, San Jo-say [in Pyugs’s articulated voice]), how his grandma broke the news, and how he and his siblings reunited after several years for a supposedly happy get-together but really to circle around their mother’s coffin. Being the natural speaker in the family, he delivered the eulogy, saying his mom had always been there with him in his frequent trips to the hospital sickly child as he’d been, but the rare, if not the only, time his mom was hospitalized, he wasn’t there for her. That broke my heart! (By the way, sometimes I imagine giving eulogies more of like the ones in Ally McBeal episodes, talking about the dead, not realizing the gravity of the situation if it actually happens.)

Jeff’s was... well, I don’t remember it being sad. He just went on recounting his years as a student/barista in Maryland. I think the only sad part throughout his turn to speak was when he mentioned about his favorite sad song, Blower’s Daughter, of the movie, Closer, which also made me sad remembering scenes from the movie.

And so the three of us paid the bill; Jeff dropped Pyugs at ABS, then me at Philcoa. Jeff was, the entire time, on a long-distance phone call with his mom, sharing his first live report on TV Patrol on a weekday, having been moved from police shift to Bandila shift. His mom, thinking that it was Jeff’s off today, said she did hear her son’s voice on TV but didn’t care to look at the screen, hence didn’t see him doing the live report. It was funny! (His mom always watches his reports on TV via TFC. I wonder how many times his mom has been late or missed work altogether just to catch his son on TV both doing well and messing up!) Anyway, the entire thing didn’t look like a mom-son talk but more of just a jeff-any friend talk.

These men both looked like mama’s boys to me, how they talked endearingly of and with their moms respectively. But these men are real men (Pyugs may not be physically with his never-fading-always-rosy cheeks always ready to go on-cam for any breaking news, and Jeff with his bakla-disguised-as-conyo language). They are beloved in their respective families, admired in their crafts, and loved in the newsroom. And I’m glad to know them, in a different, deeper level this time.