EVANESCENCE

Perhaps it was the house you lived in throughout your childhood. The house was built on lopsided land and overgrown plants that had no time to be trimmed or re-rooted. It made for fun games; a scavenger hunt between sisters, a roleplay between leaf gazillionaires, climbing mango trees while screeching like monkeys, or the absolute race to see which pee trail ran first on the lopsided cement. You were always the first to suggest. The first to take action—the first to run free.
 

Your house invited more chaos than peace, both inside and its surrounding block. As chaotic as all your siblings’ voices converging into a mess of sounds in the middle of an argument. The reason for the argument was most probably the empty spot in the refrigerator where a piece of chocolate used to be. Accusations thrown at each other, and to you as well when you did nothing wrong. The tense silence over the dinner table broken by a joke your dad made. It was as chaotic as those coral vines or cadena-de-amors invading the whole unoccupied land right in front of your house. Fields of pink washed over the patch of land throughout the summer, then disappeared just as the strong winds came. These small, pulp-like petals that spread through vines, hovering over other ecosystems. You only looked at them from the safety of the concrete street, never venturing into those knee-deep grasses because of your mother’s fear of snake bites. That was where your love for pink came from. I often wondered if coral vines were invasive. But I have only ever seen them just right there, in that big patch of empty grassland. Not like the vines with heart-shaped leaves invading electric posts all over the city. The coral vines remained. Coming and going, creeping over the newer houses’ firewalls and the remains of a playground.     

The peaceful cemetery sat just a hundred meters from your house, but it fed your unquenchable curiosity of a child’s heart. Your head filled itself with conspiracy theories, mostly stemming from horror films where the dead rise from the cemetery. On tippy toes, you look over the walls at night, wanting to catch a glimpse of any bony hands escaping the dirt. But it was the lamp posts that caught your eye. When the lights were out, all of your family would come out, and it was either the stars and moon that kept you company, or it was the lamp posts in that cemetery that shone brightly in a blacked out village that reminded you of how unfair life can be. 

I could imagine the carcasses of hindless grasshoppers being buried under rubble as the construction of my house began. Coral vines crushed by hardened soles of workers shoveling up gravel and sand to mix with cement. The sleeping dead and my neighbors must have been awakened by the disruptive noises from the cement mixer as they poured down the floor all through the deepening night. Each day was as chaotic as the last. And each passing day, I feel you slip away from me. The ever curious child, the adventurous kid. The child that took the time to sit down and admire the Santan flowers that decorated the gate’s walls. The child walked up to the army camp’s gates to buy Pali Kambing or Pritong Saging, whichever the vendor felt like making out of ripe bananas, and buy one for each of her family, and walk back home. The child who always took a peek inside the cemetery to watch joggers and visitors, and perhaps catch a glimpse of a lone figure in fading white standing behind a tree. The mango trees. The arguments. The scavenger hunts. 

As my house was finished, yours was gone forever. It took you away too. It was a quiet house now. A big, quiet house. In a subdivision of a growing city, what once was grassland are now lots for houses. New blocks in maps, new people to watch. But I caught a glimpse of pink in those newly-erected walls. A scatter of them. A child’s laugh echoed through my mind. And when night came when the lights were all out, I looked over to the stars, then at the lamp posts in the cemetery, and felt at ease. I thought I lost you forever.

But you were here all along.

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Always dreaming,

Lady