By: Iris P. Concepcion
We are supposed to be grovelling by now, frozen and cold and wintry under a summer heat. Never mind the clash of this weather forecasting. Instead, I am facing the computer monitor to experiment with blogging at night which I have not done as a matter of habit.
For me, the perfect moment to write is not quantified by a time frame. The best time to grab the pen and notebook by their necks are upon hitting a phenomenon, eyeball to eyeball, that makes my spine innocuously alert to the textures of different creative senses.
Yala is situated in the southernmost part of Thailand populated by Buddhists and Muslims alike. Today, the Muslims are celebrating Rayu (Eidl Feit'r) which is their equivalent of a New Year celebration. Firecrackers waft in this rather serene time of religious rites. I did not venture out but instead gather my thoughts on a variety of thematic meanderings, none of which had spined my productive sensibilities.
You remember a place within the melody of an aural context. Firecrackers I usually equate with the wake of my departed mother who passed away during the Christmas season. Within this intersection of grief and celebration, you remember the smell, sound, voices and critters of small insects ruminating the very fiber of your extrinsic awareness, those little gaps of, personally, historical people who had curiously flipped through your life in cemented patios, dining tables, sofas, comfort rooms and beds, creeping into the pages of your unwritten biography, scribbled by a person who might not have known that you have ceased to catapult the black color into your wardrobe's first choice.
I remember the warmth of my nieces and nephew's foray into I-pod music and their seemingly unimpressed look with all the lights and colors mixing up in the air. With our hood sweats, we had embraced and hushed our familial pain and left it without screaming freakingly at the loud world outside with their obese barbecues, flayed salads, roasted cods and senseless taunts. We hated the flatulence of unsymmetrical banners proclaiming fiestas and had instead pointed at blinking stars and had decided to pick them through our fingers.
This is when these children had learnt to dream about mini cities, hopping in trains with Elliott as that New York ditty reins in and when they talked, for the first time, in twangs reminiscent of Oliver Twist and the Wizard of Oz.
We had survived that because we are pioneers at surviving. My late father had written voraciously during night time too, with his elegant penmanship scratching the papers in late hours, producing proposals to build another classroom in a hinterland I shall never know. This is a family who had known letters and how to change the world through words and mentoring. Our skeletons are free to be devoured but we had left volumes of papers for these communities to partake on in creative molds. Most especially on teaching.
We had survived it sans elaborate hidings into the woods without reappearing after nor were they accompanied by hysterical dramatics. That is who we are and shall ever be.
I wonder if there is an owl circling his eyes outside, looking at my shoulder for me to crow early in the morning. Thus far, evenings enable you to retrace the footprints of your past and as survivors endure, I had discovered the most magical expression of all:
We had been transformed by the natural bounty of Thailand: its people, its culture, its humanity, its embrace of the universal.
This is night writing and to my surprise, this piece does not read like a sleepy manuscript.
That Cute Press can multiply this.