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)