Davao

I can now put behind me the nightmare that my pangga and I experienced a couple of weeks ago. Yep, we're both back together again. Yipee! I flew to Davao last week and stayed with her and her family for a few days.

It wasn't totally a negative experience. Something positive also came out of it. For my part, I realized how weak I was. I realized that there are many things I have to improve about myself. We both agreed that it is also important for us to flourish as individuals so that our relationship can also flourish. When two people can get too close to each other, when they become too preoccupied with each other, or too wrapped up in their relationship, they can neglect their individual selves. We understood that we need a balance of things. We have other areas too in our lives which we need to cherish, in addition to our relationship.

But the reason why what happened two weeks ago happened to us was not that we became too caught up in our relationship. It was the other way around. I neglected her, took our relationship for granted. Maybe I became too confident that she would always be there, that she would not go away no matter what happened. Josh Groban's song struck me at the right moment, "Now I've learned that love's not possession, and I've learned that love won't wait. And I've learned that love needs expression, but I've learned too late." Corny, but it's true.

I'm really glad to see Davao again. I missed the place, especially where my pangga used to live, in V. Mapa, and the places we went to whenever I was there. Now they live in a quiet subdivision somewhere in the south, not too far from the NCCC mall. You can catch the aroma of durian in many places in the city. It's peak season for the king of all fruits (hehe); there's an oversupply of it. I used to contest the idea of it being the king of all fruits. My favorite used to be the jackfruit (nangka), but that changed when I became accustomed to the taste of durian. Other fruits are merely sweet, flat. The durian on the other hand has a three-dimensional taste. It expands in your tongue, opens up portals to many dimensions of sweetness.

Tomorrow my family and I are heading off to Negros for the Kalag-kalag. I'll be behind the wheel probably for most of the road trip. I miss going on a road trip. I miss going to far away places, driving along farm lands and seeing mountains and trees and the sea. Thank God I was able to get a duplicate driver's license this afternoon. I lost my original one last week along with my wallet, when it slipped off my pocket inside a jeepney on my way home. Now I can drive legally. Pwede na ko dakpon og CITOM, without getting jailed.

Tomorrow is All Souls Day, and it will be exactly one year since I last saw a ghost in Sanke, my mother's home town. It was late at night and I was on my way to my lola's house. I was taking a leak behind some bamboo fence when all of a sudden I noticed that there was someone outside the house's gate. It was a child, and he or she was just walking. He or she was wearing a white shirt and I couldn't see his/her face. I walked towards him/her because I got curious that a child was still taking a stroll at that very late hour. But I already suspected that something was wrong with the picture. I already felt that it was a ghost, but I went ahead and tried to follow him/her. Sure enough, when I got to the gate, the child was nowhere in sight. Before me lay a vast area of land; the child could not have disappeared that quickly. They said that the child was probably telling me something, that he/she needed to be prayed. From that night on I've always prayed for him/her.