A Day in the Life...

One day while darkness crept slowly into the night, I was in a hide-and-seek game when suddenly, as I looked into the area full of banana trees while hiding from my seeker, I noticed a little distortion in the trunks of the banana trees, and as I stared lengthily towards the woods, I noticed that a group of persons was looking at me. Some were standing while a couple was sitting in a kneeling position. They were all staring at me. They looked unusual in that they had skin gleaming like bronze and their body sizes were relatively small like children's body and yet their faces looked old. I should have been scared and immediately run away but they seem to have put me in a trance that fear was absent in me at that moment. I remember it now so vividly, as I try to recollect these past events. I could even describe to you how one is put in a trance. As I looked at them, my head felt a gentle swelling, painless and smooth, as if the rest of me disappeared, except my head and my feet did ...

In one of those nights of enchantment, while the wind remained fragile and ethereal, a collection of thin clouds gathered in the middle of the sky and formed the image of an angel. As the vision fortified, I could see the angel clearly. This angel was different from the rest that I have seen before for this angel had hair so long that it reaches the area of its feet, and wearing a long white robe. The angel must have been a woman or a man with all too lengthy hairs---I just could not tell at that time because the distance from the ground to the sky is of course immense even if the image of the vision was larger than their actual size. Then the angel spread its wings of the widest span and I stared diligently. For some moment, the angel kept on motioning its wings to spread so wide until I felt like imitating it and the angel nodded. So I spread my two arms as wide as the wings of the angel. Then the angel showed its arms and its hands making some varied movements with it, the hands in ...

When I was in high-school, Michael Petralba, an old neighborhood friend from Carmen Street but who is now residing in Los Angeles, once spoke to me in a very animated fashion how the Philippines could one day become the richest country in the world. As a prelude, Michael said to me that his father had some vital information why a number of foreigners were in the country for a very secret purpose. I wondered loudly to him how secret it was and asked him if he could actually let me know some of the “secret’. He then informed me without hesitation that the foreigners were here mainly to study and find out ways on how to extract deuterium from the Philippine seas. I asked how come his father knew about all those stuff and what “deuterium” was in the first place. With gasping breath, and with gleaming pride for that matter, Michael told me as a matter of fact that his father was a war veteran and because of this, he had American contacts in the CIA.  The CIA thing sounded preposterous t...

By tomorrow or a day after, as I am estimating in my mind, I might be packing my bags and bundle some important things as I would be heading for some place else , somewhere that I have been to before but somewhere not many have seen yet or have been to previously. I have decided to leave the city for good. This plan had been in my mind for sometime now and I must assure you that this very drastic move on my part is far from being hasty—-in fact it is to be done with very deep contemplation and scheming that I have etched in my mind for so long now. Mount Pulongbato I have learned before how to drive nails effectively into wood and I reckon now that I have learned such task fairly well.  My grandfather used to do some carpentry work and I used to have observed him so closely doing woodwork when I was so little, putting in mind every phase of the activity, from handling so tightly the wood to be nailed and towards the part when finally the nail is about to be hammered with reasonable...

  In the ancient valleys of Tigris, in the days of still molt and rock, a river sung the serenade of the beginnings of life, as it moved in crystalline fluidity, to brim with sparkles and light, and come across upon a rock reckoned in time, it is a moment set forth as a matter of design. And the river became two, the great parting of waters in the dawning of the Earth, to thread two different roads and two different eras-- one found in the East, another in the West-- to spread further and further, until the sound they hear were merely of their own and nothing more. Rushing in vigor and strength each alone in the wilderness, among the great wars of the world, through the ashes of kingdoms burnt, the mischief of kings and emperors, through scorched earth of conquests, of kingdoms and empires both the fortunate and the inopportune; as they run feverishly, one oblivious to the other, welcoming merely the beatings of their own hearts and of no other, and every other beating of the heart...

San Beda might have been somewhere in my past memory if only memories were so affirmatively credible every time. The minute I went there, I thought I had known just how those gothic buildings would have looked like; as if I had previously walked those high-ceilinged halls before, where my shoes would click and clack like horses' hooves. I felt a little de ja vu as I roamed those halls with their handsomely checkered floors. I must have loved temples and mansions in my past life. So much of the past was in my mind. I burned candles for nearly four months in order to refresh my grasp of those mountains and mountains of law books, as if I had any grasp at all. I rented a room less than a kilometer away from San Beda and for most of my stay in Manila; I must have walked the length between the law school and the boarding house a million times over. I felt comfortable the minute I stepped into my boarding school. My room was overlooking the busy street of Legarda while facing the norther...