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.
