Archie’s birthday
Today, September 24, is Archie’s birthday. He would have been 24. I visited his grave very early this morning. The ground was soggy beneath the green grass. The gate to the cemetery (Immortal) is often flooded during the rainy season but a part of the surrounding wall had been opened as ingress. I carried roses and the usual sampaguita necklace which I bought from the woman selling flowers in front of St. Joseph cathedral. “It’s for my son,” I told the woman whose name I can’t recall. I used to buy sampaguita from her almost everyday, and she remembers Archie. She gave me an extra sampaguita necklace for free. This I placed on his headstone.
Sometimes people ask me if I had moved on, whether I had recovered from the tragedy. I tell them I don’t know. During the last week of September, as I found myself toiling aimlessly at the mountain farm, there occurred to me a thought: “what am I doing here?” I was like Forrest Gump, who after running all over the states of America suddenly stops one afternoon in a lonely stretch of road and says : “I want to go home.” Maybe I have moved on, for the mountain farm had been my refuge from pain since Archie went away. I wanted to improve the land to justify its purchase, to make something of Archie’s legacy. People who didn’t know must have thought me bizarre for going to that place, planting mahogany in the middle of summer, feverishly trying to improve the land. All I can remember is that it took my mind off the pain. It’s like a patient coping with illness. At the ICU during my bouts with heart attack I remember moaning loudly so I wouldn’t feel the pain so much. Working on the farm has enabled me to keep the black spectre of grief at bay, although there are so many things that every now and then remind me my son’s death, like waking up at 2:30 in the morning and remembering it was the usual time he woke me up to take him to the bus station on his way to Bulacan where waited his fate, or a glimpse of his photos at my table, or a dream about him, no matter how hazy. Things have a way of coming back to haunt you, to make you wish you hadn’t been born at all.
“What am I doing here?” I had kept on thinking. After winning the Palanca I should have devoted myself completely to writing, not moping around in some forgotten scrubland. Yes, I did think about it. Perhaps that was a sign I had moved on. But today all I can think about is my son and my tragic losss.