Arisse,
In my memory of you, we were on the fifth floor in gilded light. The nursing building with the baby-peach hallways, our old university. We were on our third year in college and February was just about to take its plunge into summer; we could feel it in the air. I was looking down through the railings where, at the atrium below, I could see students bent over schoolwork, diffused sunshine streaming down from the glass window above. (Has it always been there, that skylight? Somehow my memory was always only of the bright light, never really comprehending its source.) Everyone was always like this, insect-like, swarming from somewhere to someplace else in a hurry, with too many things in our arms. Our uniforms announced our destinations: teal green coats with bleached-white dresses for clinicals, pressed blouses with green plaid ribbons and pleated skirts for theory in the classroom, gold shirts and green sweatpants for physical ed.
I turned around and I saw you. You might’ve said my name. It’s been over a decade now but it’s somehow still vivid, this memory of you crouching on that dingy mosaic-tiled floor behind me. There was a project needing completion in our midst but instead you were playing around with my camera, a new DSLR I got two months prior. We were smiling and laughing because we were college girls and just so damn young. The past belonged to our parents while the future was too blinding to look at. There was only the present thirsting for all of our attention, the coming home late at night after scrambling for surgeries, deliveries, research papers that only made less and less sense the more we worked on them.
Impressive, memory. We get to pick the best ones out of those that survive and stand out, to assign certain scenes to represent a person or a time in our lives. How we hone them to suit our needs. There is too much forgiveness and leniency given to the retrospect. I hadn’t even thought of that day in years; perhaps I wouldn’t have remembered so much if it weren’t for the photos that we took and got stored in my archives. So forgive me, if this ordinary day becomes yours. You spent thirty-plus years in this life and yet I choose that day, that commonplace day on the fifth floor with an unfinished project between us, as the top of the rollercoaster of our friendship. That pause, the two-second calm before the plummeting drop into all of the things that followed that we didn’t know or didn’t want to know yet: graduation, immigration, board exams, adulthood, breakups, falling in love, weddings, births. New things, old things, an entire decade and then some.
It arrives quietly, on a Tuesday. It slinks in unnoticed. The worst things, after all, happen at the most mundane of days, always when the morning appears so much like any other morning before it. Life likes its surprises; it has to catch us on our most unguarded, just when we think we’re only answering a random call from a friend on a random Tuesday at the start of our workday in the middle of an average year.
Props to Kübler-Ross for getting it right. I spend five minutes in denial, consoling Xyla. She is a rock and a mother and I never in my wildest dreams thought we could ever make her cry like that. She could barely get her words out; I think for sure something happened to one of her parents (we are getting to be that age, aren’t we, had you stayed?). But she says your name. I haven’t heard your name in a while and I experience some displacement, as though I had missed a step in the dark, because she’s saying it in the same sentence as suicide and hanging and that simply doesn’t sound right; an unexpected note that hits wrong in the ear. I am so cushioned by shock that all I’m thinking about is how to get Xyla to stop crying.
When it hits, a pin drops. The scale tilts. Wait, I almost say. I almost hold my hands up to stop things from going any further.
With the deluge of ugly-tears and relentless toddler-like sobs that comes, you would think I’ve skip-roped all the way to depression. But in the autopsy of this Tuesday, in those first few hours when my mind is still trying to rearrange itself of you, I am angry with myself because I couldn’t remember the last time we spoke. When did I last ask you how you were? The fault of old friends is that they like to exist quietly in the background and we allow it because it’s easy and we’re all busy and life is just happening too damn quickly to keep up. Had I been more involved, will this Tuesday be ending differently? Would it have been, say, a call announcing that you were about to be married instead?
It’s been two months, Arisse. Time has split to before and after you. I said I don’t want to write here for anyone except myself, that I will not use anyone’s real names, but I’m making an exception now because it’s been two months and I still cry when nobody is looking; there’s still a box of letters and notes from college that I can’t open. There are still regrets I can’t confront on messages that I had failed to send. Your name still catches at something in my throat. There is an irresistible urge to continue denying the existence of your nonexistence because it’s easy. You could still just be in Manila for all we know, still complaining about the rains and the floods. Who is to say this isn’t true? The mind tends, as you know well enough, to choose the path of least resistance.
So forgive me again, if I forget about this past decade. Forgive me if I don’t remember you as a lawyer, struggling to silence all her demons, but only as the gangly nursing student who drank too much coffee and didn’t have a clue yet just like the rest of us. Let me contain you there, at the height of our youth. Back when everything was still possible, ours for the taking by the throat, and our mistakes wouldn’t yet be held against us, wouldn’t end up on the evening news that will drive us to a corner. No, that doesn’t need to come until much, much later. I can keep you safe here in this time and space, preserved in resin, your laughing face in the gilded light and baby-peach hallways. We can stay here all well into summer. It’s the least we could do.
TINY WORRIES 