Gala Night Program.p65 - Silliman University

You find yourself most displaced in yourself. You
wake up, wanting to follow the sounds of the
morning.
So you slip quietly out of the soul for some
fresh air. Take a walk. Find a curious other
Elsewhere, other Elsewhen, lying in the gutter, or
warm in the outstretched hand of a beggar, or
stowed away among old tickets in the compartment
of a bus bound for a place whose name you can
pronounce but can’t remember. Pick it up. You
decide that this, what you have just found, could
derail you. It could be a useless divergence you’re
afraid to admit you have all the time for. You’re
afraid it will rain for a million years within you,
forming new seas; sail you away to a purer shore.
Could usher you back into the discrete homicides
of squat, ordinary life.
But let’s say you’ve run into a profound
enough moment of tenderness—your first
awareness of how great of this world the Negros
Sea seems to annex, for instance, when you reach a
certain hilly point of Siquijor. You get wind of this
possibility while top-loading a jeepney, and a year
later you are still suspicious of where the ride had
ended. You spend weekends at beaches within the
proximity of Metro Manila, wondering why no one
else notices that the “white” sand the ads were so
proud of more closely resembles gravel, or that the
milky waters have forgotten how they had
themselves once seemed to dream up the color
cerulean. You arrive home and greet your mother
ma’ayong hapon (your family hails from Batangas).
Obedient to a warning you once heard about
vampires in Siquijor leading human lives by day,
you avert your gaze from men wearing reflective
shades on the way to school. And you have been
breathless so often from the dressings of strange
plants sprouting from the lawns of random
neighbors, from the grain crackling all over the
corners of old silent films, from the word decadence
and how it sounds like the butter melting in the
cleavage of your morning pan de sal. You become
difficult to please.
Your wife, your lover, a classmate, will at
some point harbor suspicion from your attachment
to precious little instances of life. They will doubt
the triumphs you find in a can of soup, a better
edition of The Shipping News; of lying on a seawall,
observing a lamppost. That they will declare your
sanity upended and recommend a good
psychiatrist is a possibility. Live with it.
Stuff the new wonder in a place whose
sound and silence only you understand. Often your
thumb will seek it out and attempt to stroke it,
reacquainting itself with the rough corners and
willowy indents in reverent little gestures. Let it.
A tacit smile, in turn, will find a way to seek out
your face when this happens. Let it grow.
Now begin the walk back to where you
remember your old house was. Lose your way. Find
it eventually, in a place between the tagline of a
slimming tea ad you once read while taking a piss
during a stopover, and the second name of the man
who sold you your first harmonica. Try to act
surprised when you find yourself unable to walk
right back in.
First published in UNO Magazine, March 2011. Miro
Capili was part of the 49th National Writers Workshop.