Dusk

What does it matter where we are tonight? You are with me still.

 

What does it matter that you have never walked these paths? Beside me your footsteps refuse to be silent.

 

I do not feel the distance at all. Time and space - what do they matter? The trees over me are trees that have watched over generations of friends, and they tell me you are here.  And those three stars that we have named - they tell me that seven thousand, one hundred islands away, I am walking with you in the night.

 

This is more than magic, more than memory. It is something that has never been named but has always been known by those who understand the soul.

 

So walk beneath trees in the starlight. Walk with me. I am here.

The View from Inside a Giant Tomato

Day Seven in Dumaguete (For  those of you who didn’t know I moved here, well now you do. =p )

 

I’m listening to music in my room, otherwise known as the Giant Tomato because of its bright orange paint. Why the owner of the boarding house picked such a, well, stimulating color (to put it mildly) is beyond me. I tried to tone down the brightness by practically wallpapering everything with pictures and posters, effectively turning it into a three-dimensional version of Friendster. Despite all my efforts, it stayed as orange as ever, so now I’m  living in a Giant Tomato-themed Friendster profile. But I digress. I meant to write about Dumaguete.

 

So, the Motorcycle Capital of the Philippines. There are, obviously, plenty of motorcycles of every shape, size and color. The parking lot outside my college have more scooters than the EMCOR showroom back home. But since I don’t drive one, I do a lot of walking. Everything seems to be only a couple or so blocks from each other, and I don’t get lost as often as when I commute. Walking’s a good way to get to know a place, and an incident I witnessed the other day helped me understand why Mabuhay magazine called Dumaguete the City of Gentle People.

 

It was late in the afternoon and I was on my way home when I saw an old lady stumble and fall on the other side of the street. I rushed to cross the road, but two guys got there before me and were already helping her up. They were dressed in shorts and dirty camisa-de-chinos, obviously laborers going home after a hard day’s work. They were very gentle and concerned with the elderly woman, but she was mercifully unharmed. After a round of smiles and thank-you’s to her rescuers, she continued on her way — and so did I, with my heart a little warmer and more at home in this new place.

 

But if those two guys, tired and grimy as they appeared, turned out to be gentlemen in disguise, a well-dressed man who seemed to be in his late forties whom I encountered two days later turned out to be just the opposite.

 

I was having breakfast by myself in a small cafeteria when I noticed him smiling directly at me. He obviously didn’t work there, so it couldn’t have been just good customer-relations strategy for the diner. I paid no attention to him so I didn’t notice where he sat or when he finished his meal, but when I left after a few minutes, I found him just outside the door. He started talking to me, asking for my name and number and ignoring my polite request for him to leave me alone. I quickened my pace, but I couldn’t get rid of him, so I entered the nearest store, thinking he wouldn’t follow me there. He did, and he kept doing so until I finally asked for help from a security guard. Only then did he leave me alone. It wasn’t the first time I’d been accosted by a stranger (for some exasperating reason I seem to be a magnet for odd characters), but he was the most persistent. And he was an adult, for goodness’ sake.  I can understand obnoxious young men who think they’re God’s gift to womankind (actually, no, I don’t get them either, but I’m resigned to the fact that they exist)– but a full grown man acting like an annoying teenager? It was absurd, and more than a little scary.

 

So in the span of seven days I saw two different sides of Dumaguete: the friendly, gentle side and the other that was just a little too friendly, if you know what I mean. From other encounters, though, I’m inclined to believe that the side represented by the gallant workers is the more authentic one. I’ve received a lot of willingly-given assistance from different people — from Silliman University faculty making my enrollment easier to tricycle drivers guiding me to the best places to shop and new-found friends giving me an evening tour of the university. Even my unpleasant experience had a redeeming quality — the security guard was very helpful and made me feel quite safe. So when all is said and done, I would say that Mabuhay was right — this is a city of gentle people. As a university town, it is vibrant and youthful, but so far I couldn’t sense any undercurrents of the cynicism that is so common in big-city universities. And the trees, those huge acacias that loom over the entire campus and the seaside boulevard — any town that cares about trees like Dumaguete obviously does has to have something special in its character. I’m farther away from my beloved Palawan than I’ve ever been, but who knows? My Giant Tomato might just turn out to be a second home for me. I find that I’m looking forward to the possibility. =)

 

Weirdest Things That Have Ever Happened to Me

• A friend gave me a copy of the lyrics of the Tagalog version of the song I Will Be Here. He had the verses printed out, but he wrote the guitar chords by hand. It was one of my favorite songs, so I kept it in my wallet folded in a certain way. Some time later, I went on an out-of-town trip with him for a meeting we both had to attend. Our hosts had a guitar in their home, so I took out the song lyrics so that he could play it. A few days after I got home, I discovered that it was no longer in my wallet nor anywhere else I could think of.  I mentioned it to my friend a couple of months later, only to be told that he had already guessed that I’d lost it.  The week before that conversation, he had gone diving on Snake Island, one of the cluster of islets in Honda Bay near our city. He found a piece of paper on the table in one of the beach cottages on the island, and it turned out to be a copy of I Will Be Here, with guitar chords written in his own penmanship. The paper was even creased from the special way I’ve always folded it.  He showed it to me, and it was undoubtedly the same piece of paper. He thought I had gone to Snake Island just before he did and left it there by accident. However, I never went anywhere near Honda Bay since our out-of-town meeting. So how my copy of I Will Be Here got to an island to be found by the same person who gave it to me in the first place is a riddle that I haven’t been able to solve until now.

 

• Some college friends and I were watching a movie in our boarding house one day – I think it was The Last Samurai. The person beside me borrowed my phone for a while and was playing around with it. Suddenly, it rang, and he handed it to me without looking to see who the caller was. To my surprise, it was his number flashing on the screen. All the while I was also holding his phone, and it was right there in my hand with the keypad locked. I checked his call register, but my name wasn’t there, yet my phone kept ringing with a call supposedly made by the guy whose phone I was holding. My friends wanted me to answer the call, but being the chicken that I was (and still am, hehe), I cancelled it. A similar thing happened later that month to my roommate; only in her case, the two phones involved were lying side by side on a table on the far side of our room. So go figure.

 

• More coming up when I can remember…=)

 

Psalm 139

by Rebecca St. James                           

You search me
You know me
You see my every move
There’s nothing I could ever do
To hide myself from You
You know my thoughts
My fears and hurts
My weaknesses and pride
You know what I am going through
And how I feel inside
But even though You know
You will always love me
Even though You know
You’ll never let me go
I don’t deserve Your love
But you give it freely
You will always love me
Even though You know 

A Tribute to Royal Highness, Kamarikutan, and Paper Boats that Sail for Home