My Thelma

I don't know when or how exactly we first met, or, even more importantly, what pivotal moment knitted us together. When I try to think back to those times we hung out in college, what I manage to recollect are scraps of memory in which we were already buddies -- the two of us riding a jeepney to SM North, the two of us driving around the campus in his owner, the two of us waiting for our class to start.

There were a couple of crucial events, I suppose, like that month-long Citizen's Military Training in Fort Bonifacio, which we had to attend at the same time. And later on, those anxiety-ridden days when we were just starting out in UP and had to be observed and evaluated by members of the senior faculty. But I suspect that it's all the other things that we shared implicitly that really brought us together and made us bond. It's the unspoken understanding that we were both square pegs/drama queens/lost souls (even now, in our early thrities), but together we were, well, not so bad after all.

And now, more than ten years since we graduated, our friendship is still going strong, despite his being in Singapore and my being here in dear old 'Pinas. Our cache of memories, both sad and happy, continues to fill up. The time I took him to some dingy basement pool hall in Quiapo less to pocket balls than to observe the skin trade. The afternoon I set him up for some nice little nookie in the kubo with a volleyball buddy of mine. The days spent strolling around in Burnham Park in Baguio and eating pigar-pigar in Pangasinan. The wine and the cheese and the rambling conversations about poetry and boys.

Thelma, there's still so much we have to learn and experience, so many more crimes we have to commit. The road stretches miles before us. I just hope you won't forget where Louise, the baddest chick of all, lives.

Happy birthday. And believe me when I say you are missed.

A Home in the Rain

There's a typhoon today, and so no volleyball, just hour after hour of lying in bed, with the sheets tangled round my feet, and channel-surfing. It's not so bad, actually. I like curling up in bed with a nice book, reading in the weak aquatic light coming from the window. It brings to mind those slow, lazy college days at the boarding house, when I would just press my nose against a newly acquired copy of a Milan Kundera book while listening to Tracy Chapman and the rain. Or walking under the acacia trees along the UP oval, trying with the help of a puny umbrella to reach AS with my clothes dry. It reminds me of a boy I adored, when I was still just a boy, and how one time we made love in my kubo while a storm turned the world upside down outside. Later, when the rain subsided and he'd fallen asleep, I sat by the door just watching the broken twigs and bougainvilla blooms strewn in the yard. That was a strange time, a time of uncertainties and hurts, but also of poetry and song and foolish hope.

Now, so many years later, I'm here in the orange room of my apartment, listening to "Fix You" by Coldplay, which is a perfect bad weather song, if ever there was one. And suspended in the hammock of memory, I feel neither happy nor sad, but at home, which is not a bad place to be.

The Beyonce Box

It's just a plain ice box, something to keep fish in. We bought it at a fish shop in Davao when we decided to bring home some tuna.

I don't know what got to me -- maybe it was because we watched Beyonce's concert on DVD the night before -- but after the box had been sealed and I was given a pen to scribble my name on it, I wrote down "Beyonce." Then I turned to B and told him I'd carry all the bags if he would pick the "Beyonce box" up at the airport.

We had a good laugh waiting for the box to turn up at the airport in Manila. When it did, B plucked it off the baggage carousel immediately, not wanting anyone to see who Beyonce was.

That glittering and glamorous ice box has travelled with us many times since, and of course, each time it's with us, bearing fish, meat, soda or ice, we can't help but hum "To the Left, to the left..."