Feelings
Sayang!
(Part 2)
By Emmanuelle
Two weeks later, Sayang! picks up where it dropped off.
A thousand and one apologies. It had been too long a wait. This scribe bows the head, bends a knee, and like Puss in Boots, flourishes a feathered hat on the floor in abject humility. And whispers a fervent wish that this continuing does not pose a measly postscript to the pause.
Cita’s precious sister Nene is revived from her frozen pose of friendly servitude. Cita and her batch resume their bitchy noisy tirades. Everything is normally abnormal once again.
Cita steals a look at Nene, and in a soft voice, updates all those present about her sister’s marital and health situation. Once again, Cita is the center of all ears and Nene, of all eyes. They heard it all before, except for the stragglers, the alumni who had just been found and had just come on board.
Nene, who is five years Cita’s junior, had fallen in love with a classmate in high school years ago. It was a secret known only to herself, and as all secrets went, to half the school’s girl population.
Never mind the boys. At that age, they were generally few and dumb and dense. To these young sons of Adam, the world was the challenge of the court. If they were not challenged by a ball court, they were a-courting a challenge. A challenge to their unmanly manliness. These were no men. They were mere babies. Remember, girls grew up first and faster then.
And John was the tallest, and the looker of the lot. His mind worked, not fast and sharp, but enough to pass for a smart ass. To Nene, he was a god. Her sun rose and set for him and by him. Seeing him was a day perfected in all its reflected refracted glory. Not seeing him was gloom and silence and loneliness. The pits.
Luckless for Nene, she was not the only Nene of the school. They abounded. They multiplied by quatros and quintets. John was the sun to too many moons, and they weren’t wearing sunglasses to school yet at the time. Girls went cross-eyed, wall-eyed, and sun-blind.
One other Nene, she who was unabashedly without pa-kieme, outshone all the moons. She caught John by her webbed claws. O, may pandikit na, may pang-hook pa. What boy, what man can escape such delicious clutches? No boy-man can, John did not.
And so, the girls suffered a collective breakdown when John and Nieme, short for Nene without kieme, eloped right after graduation. Sayang! They all sighed. They all had cried. Nene the most. Her sighs and cries echoed over the school. These were truly deafening to the nose.
Most of this batch went to college. John and Nieme did, but they got hitched formally sometime in-between. Nene sighed deeper. She cried longer and louder.
But like many too-young-married couples, John and Nieme soon bent and shrunk and grayed too early in their primes. The sun had set in mid-day, the moon dulled in poor reflection refraction.
No child issued. The couple listened to so many warnings they overloaded themselves with rhythm and pills and devices to dry-up the steam.
Then Nieme gave up and died. It was cancer of the uterus. The womb that had not filled-up with life, filled-up with a non-life.
When Nieme crossed-over to the other life, it was Nene’s chance to cross-over to her new life..
(To be concluded next week.)
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