First May rains.

Dear friend,

The first May rains fell as P and I were on our way to the car for a night out and I swear I could almost feel steam rise out of the concrete that had been beaten mercilessly, day in and out, with 34–36°C heat (one point short of a fever) in one of the most punishing warm summers of my life. I could almost hear the earth go “aaah” and, of course, all around was alimuom (is there an equivalent English term?), the sweet scent that mingles with the steam rising from the earth during rainfall—heady and addictive—one of my peculiar favorites. I felt a smile well inside me. A few days earlier, I saw my first gamu-gamo circling the dining room lamp and I realized that just as summer came early this year, so have the rains. The showers come everyday now—sometimes tentative, other times in torrents and even though I said in my earlier letter that summers excite me, I must also say that the rains bring me an altogether different joy. A sense of peace, a Zen-like calm, descends upon me during times of rain and often it makes me feel capable of loving everybody. 

Happy birthday, buddy! Mwa!

Dear friend,

Why do I keep going back to the familiar? Always the past shadows me like a parallel universe I can slip in and out of. Like osmosis. A whiff of a scent, an idea, an idle thought and I disappear, my mind's eye bringing me back to old places and haunts; to past sensations and occasions. Like today, I was just reading a book when suddenly I remembered our house in Mandaluyong, the one I grew up in--that rickety, old apartment--and just like that I was there again, standing in one of the second-floor rooms. I could actually feel the coolness of the floorboards against my bare feet; feel its polished smoothness broken occasionally by the chips on the wood here and there. I could walk to one of the gothic-looking windows and peer at the lone narra right across the street--resplendent in summer, bursting with yellow blooms in May--delicate buds that fall gently to the ground that my friends and I liked to throw in the air and kick around--and barren in November, its branches splaying out like bony fingers. I could also see the huge metal post where I once had my picture taken while wearing my sailor outfit, my hair in pigtails. The same metal post my friends and I liked to hug when playing hide-and-seek; liked to throw stones at just to hear it clang like a bell.

I also remembered the time I sat on the hood of a green VW beetle, a boy at my feet. We were just shooting the breeze, talking about unimportant things, when he looked at me, smiled, and told me about a girl he liked. "She has a mole near the lip," he said. I thought of my pretty friend M and so I said, "You mean M?" "No, not M," he said, looking intently at my face. "It's not really a mole. More like . . . a thing. An indention near the upper lip, right under the nose." "Oh," I said and looked away. He grinned. I thought of the tiny mark under my nose created by the tip of a pencil I had the habit of pressing there when thinking in school. It never went away and I have it to this day. I felt a warm gladness spread through me then--from my toes to the tips of my hair--making me giddy. I was seven, he was ten.