The lake at the crater of Mt. Pinatubo, on a trek with friends.
This post is a toast to my good friends for almost 20 years, those whose ancestry stems from the words of Pumbaa and Timon. I wrote this post as my childhood barkada celebrate the wedding of one us, Dette-dette, the true bohemian who once swore against the formality of marriage. And also, I'm writing this post because it's my friend Gigi's birthday today.
Memories are rushing in quickly and I cannot keep up as I type this with fresh lemonade at my reach in a high humidity location. Everytime I pause to drink the liquid, a unit of memory fleets away from my mind and I could no longer claim it. It's like remembering a tune but never the song name. Painful.
I remember my friends picking me up at my house and we would pick up our other friends living in my neighborhood, and then we would play pranks and ring doorbells of our batchmates' houses nearby -- wala lang for the fun of it and I realize now the first common thing that binded us was our same sense of humor, and then at school, we would stalk people for no reason at all, calling out their last names and when they see us, we would whisper to each other and run away - with some streak of dementia right there, I'm surprised we were not institutionalized in our adulthood, and then I remember us discretely passing notes during class hours, notes containing profound lyrics of Bon Jovi, Tears for Fears and Claire Marlow, and our thoughts about our crushes -- yep, no texts, pure paper, oh was it so renaissance and so poetic back then, and then we would exchange shoes among each other and we would go home with our shoes mismatched because we forget to return it back, and then we would huddle around to cover any of us whose skirt has some stains due to those womanly monthly visits and I remember my friends would ride the taxi with me going home during school hours so I could change my clothes, and then I remember how proud we were when one of us got an "x" for disciplinary behaviour, first woman in a star class to "achieve" it, and I remember how we shared the love for books and us talking about Sidney Sheldon, Mario Puzo, C.S. Lewis, and my god yes, how we cried over Danielle Steele, and then how we talked for hours on analog telephones (my friends even have 5 digit numbers back then) and I remember how we were touched so easily with each other's recollection letters....
Oh we do make sunggod, we fight like sisters albeit zero physical, and as we grew older, we found our own voices, carved who we are to the person we were meant to be, and all of us became stronger, more independent and our disagreements became more colorful, our physical distances much farther. But we still look for each other - for friendship and comfort or whatever thing that binds sisterhood, as if we have no choice but to find each other. With my friends, I found out that love, in its purest form, overcomes differences. No joke.
As we were preparing for the wedding, it made me realize to trust more in the goodness of each other, to communicate better, to communicate often (thanks WhatsApp!) - no matter how trivial, because in the end we cannot judge what is significant. Thanks to Fe's leadership, my god, how this woman can manage -- she coordinates with people of differing sets of opinion just to come up with one gift and one message :).
To make up for me not much of help, here's the collated pictures of us hiking through Mt. Pinatubo crater during those days when the trail was still unmarked, when endurance was not in our vocabulary, and when we fought hard, clearing our schedules so we could always meet (I hope we still do). We were missing Jenjen and Gigi. This was circa 2009.
I chanced upon Patty Laurel's blog and what she wrote struck me, and I literally nodded my head in agreement while reading it, dumped my laptop and jumped off my couch, raised my fist in the air and shouted, hell yes, woman, I hear ya!
I grew up in the 80s-90s, in the era of patintero sa kalye, biking around the village, and wholesome sleepovers. We didn't have Xboxes and Ipads, we had empty streets and chalk and we played piko until sunset. We didn't have Facebook, we had slambooks and answered "What is Love?" with "God is Love." We didn't send each other one liners via text, we actually sat in the park and talked for hours. Back in the day, uso ang totoong kaibigan. And by friendship, I don't mean random people you bump into in Republiq and tag on your photo. Those aren't your friends, those are just people you happen to know by name. If you have people around you who you can share honest conversations with, people who will love you unconditionally with no judgments, people who encourage you to do better in life, who lift your spirits and make you feel safe---then invest in these FRIENDS. It's not about the number of friends you have, it's about the quality of friendships you're able to keep.
