Leticia
I must come to accept that soon you will die. The light will fade from your glaucomatous eyes and you will finally be at peace. You will finally feel the release of being reunited with your children who beat you to it. The pain and the longing to see them animated, just once, will be inherited to those of us who you leave behind.
I admit many times in my life I have wished you would die. The many nights spent aimlessly wondering why I feel pain the way I do all point back to you. You were my earth for as long as I was a child. You taught me suffering from absence, you taught me everything about myself I should come to hate. You taught me shame: of my wants, my laughter, my body. You loved me in the toughest way you possibly could. Some nights I can’t find it in me to forgive you for everything you did. But I have no trouble forgetting. Even now I still struggle to string the pieces together.
I find it nearly impossible to remember anything of my childhood except the moments and vignettes of the worst times with you. I remember you slapping me on the parts about myself I would come to hate the most, as if it was nothing. I remember you chastising me for coping with and understanding my growing body through jokes. I remember the nights you would sob about how you wanted to go home until I woke up. The nights you would whisper to me that you wanted to die. I remember trying in vain to comfort you.
Now what is left of you is a child. You are unaware of yourself and less aware of others. You repeat to yourself, umiihi ako, ay nako, ay buhay, saan ba’ng pera, may utang ka, ‘di gustong mag salita, ‘di maganda, aray ko, over and over as if that is what your world consists of. You sigh between coughs like there is infinite weight on your chest.
Just this December a wave of remembrance crashed into me. Now the waters have settled into the shore and I see you in a spectrum of lights. I know now more than I ever have, and I know that with you, thousands of stories untold, thousands of pains ungrieved, thousands of joys unshared, will fade away. That much we have inherited. I would ask you if that was your intention, or if you knew what that even meant, if you were able to remember. We are a family of secrecy and discretion, and you have made it as such.
I sit now surrounded by love. Not the kind that you showed me, and continue to show me, but a kinder love, one that pierces and seeps through the membranes of all that you built around me. My only wish is to reflect that love into those of us who are left. We are separated by oceans, by language, by money. I mourn this every day. But oceans were meant to be traversed, languages meant to be learned, and money meant to be burnt to a crisp.
What lies before the both of us is a path, unknown to us, but taken perpetually. People have come before us and people will come after. As your lung continues its collapse mine will grow stronger, until it too grows tired of carrying the weight of the world and stumbles. As my father does now, I too will have to hold in tears to save face while watching my mother slowly die. I wish the only difference to be that by then I would have known her, more than he knows you, and that she would know me.
This morning I woke up from a dream that you were in. You were making bread in a kitchen I have never seen before. You were also a teacher, showing us a video I don’t remember. My mother asked if you were happy or sad in the dream, because she dreamed of her father right before he died. I could not tell. It seemed you were neither, or both at the same time.
