Feelings
Just like coming home!
By Emmanuelle
THIS is a true story. And I bet no truer more tender love story can otherwise be found. Just in case, though, tell me one just like this, and you’ll read it next.
Their paths first crossed when they were just eight of age. He was deliciously plump and she was gangly thin. They had almost nothing in common except, more often than not, their faces had the most serious of mien. Then, the moment they were free of the confines of their seats and of their room, they would gravitate toward each other’s company. Like flints of steel bound to a magnet.
The little boy’s cheeks would dimple with glee, the little girl’s eyes would light-up with naughty glint. They would reach out and hold hands. And off they would walk, hop, or run. To walk, hop, or run not so very very far. Where else could they possibly flee? They were eight! And in second grade yet!
They would grow to fit like two peas in a pod for the next three years. At fifth grade she swooned in a faint into her bowl of oatmeal. She would be diagnosed with a rheumatic heart, and later, Steven Johnson’s Syndrome. She would stop schooling, and start going home to hospitals and bringing the hospital to her home. She would be brought to a mountain retreat where germs are rare and the view was not so sparing.
First, though, she would place in a box all the mementos of the little childish gifts he had shyly slipped into her hand – chocolate wraps, shiny aluminum foils, crayon bits, scribbling on pad papers lined in red-and-blue. The little girl would dig the deepest hole she can manage with her small bony fingers. She bedded the box with leaves, then topped it with more leaves. She shoveled back the displaced soil and its cover of green grass.
She would sit there for a few minutes more, with the field wind combing her hair and the sun running its warm fingers through the pale of her skin. She did not know why, but she felt that what she had just done was the saddest thing she ever did.
Unknown to them, she had overheard the doctors warn her parents she may not live beyond twenty. She knotted her forehead. How long how short would I have from now to then? Can it be I may be leaving a lot and the best of me here?
You see, she was never less than the first in her class. She was the prettiest too. As if those were not enough comparisons, she was the sickliest of the class, of the batch, even of the school.
She would finish fifth grade in a school up there in the highlands, then graduate from elementary in a school ran by Dominican priests and nuns, where miracles sometime do happen in trickles and sometime in droves.
She would survive a number of near-death encounters. Her mother, by this time estranged from the child’s father, would carry her and her only sibling, a brother, through all these with just their combined dare and sheer guts.
High school was all home study. Surprisingly, she passed the UPCAT. Without the required high school residency, though, she had to study in a university that acknowledged the process of acceleration. After a year of engineering and a presidential scholarship, the UP system swallowed her for three years. She emerged with a double major in Mathematics and Physics and an outstanding academic record.
And she found out, being twenty was not that scary at all. She crossed the boundary to neverneverland. She discovered that reaching Beyond is something doable. Beyond is so very possible.
She was on her way to try for a teaching stint at the College of Physics at UP Diliman when, along the way, she heard two market vendors discuss a small-town doctor who took care of the maimed leg of one of them. The woman said: I can walk because this doctor put me together again. Then she mentioned his name reverently.
The women were talking about her grandfather, one of the disappeared during the martial law years.
She hopped to another path other than that leading to the main campus of UP. She passed NMAT right up there among the top three percentile. She entered UP-Manila, and two years later, UP-PGH.
During her clerkship, while she was President of the Regional Scholars, her path would cross again with the little-boy now grown-up.
(To be continued next week.)
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