A FORGET ME NOT STORY

Prologue

This may sound cliche but I can't figure any way to start this one, so I'll say it anyway.

Everyone has a story.

Everyone is a walking mass of literature waiting to be read.

Everyday everyone bears an untold story. The ghost story. The sob story. The love story. The tragedy. The comedy. The Toy Story. The Wattpad, the FanFiction, the YouPorn, the Blogspot, the Insider. Even Bug's Life. Even Hachiko.

The list goes on forever. Facebook statuses shout what's on your mind. Twitter tweets your opinions about almost anything. Instagram is practically your electronic scrapbook.

I have to say it once more: everyone has a story.

I have, too. And that's what still makes me normal despite living as a side-effect of an unbearable story.

I could've been somebody else's story. The boy who tripped his feet trying to catch a ride on an escalator, the old man who spilled his Mcfloat on his shirt and yelled profanities enough to cost him a lifetime. I could've been anyone, a complete stranger.

I could've been that beautiful sales clerk on 7-eleven who's utter boredom might turn the luck of the shop into a quota loss, or that perky swagger boy who've been in Just Dance for an hour.

But my story was different. As luck would have it, I was one and the same rare case. I could start at any point in my short miserable life but I figured it would confuse you about how I ended up sitting next to her.

So I should probably start about the bar bitch-vah.

You see, my mom was a drunkard, a party girl, a dipsomaniac, but before that she was supposed to be a romanticist magna cum laude of English Literature from Philippine Normal University-- the Jane Austen reincarnated. An offer to be a college professor in her own Alma mater made her life almost fulfilling: got acquainted to both local and international famous authors, had traveled to various promising places that became inspirations to many book settings, and visited some of the oldest libraries earth has. She loved books, she loved reading so badly, she loved fictional characters. She viewed everyone around her as strangers of different poetry.

Despite all these, she couldn't write her own novel, couldn't get a book published. She was a perfectionist. She longed for her own Prince Charming like every typical woman would. She blindly believed that the One Greatest Story would one day come and possess her, and that that will be her greatest legacy of a story.
But it was her downfall.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a husband" was the quotation Auntie Pleng would frequently tell me about mom's infamy. It was originally from Pride and Prejudice's first chapter, which was one of my mom's favorite novels, but the original has "single man" and "want of a wife" instead. Aunt would say it was so far the best line that describes mom--worst, I would defend. Mom met a man who was supposed to be my father. And as revolting as it would sound, he was one of her students in PNU, freshman for that matter, though their ages where just two years in favor of my mom. Their boyfriend-girlfriend relationship was after he graduated, then married two years after that.

Auntie Pleng wouldn't tell me the rest in full details, but she would sum it up by saying mom and dad's married life began as a fairy tale with the seemingly promising happy-ever-after future. However, like most real life stories go, the fairy tale turned into a Greek tragedy.

Mom was an amalgam of perfectionism and romanticism. And my dad thought those two words should never be left in the care of a woman devoted her life as an artist. She became obsessed, a nagger, a demanding wife-- became the homewrecker of her own home, caught in between the promises of her dreams and the desperation of creating her own reality. Their marriage became a singular pronoun known as "she": she wanted this, she needed that, she liked this, she hated that. "He" was out of the pages, none of the chapters.

And that's when all hell broke loose.
Three years of marriage and he left without a word said. Unbeknownst to him, mom was one-month pregnant with me, and that's when she became the bar bitch-vah, as Auntie Pleng would call her because it was the start of my mom's unbecoming of an adult woman. The first six months without him was purgatory, praying dad would come back; the seventh, a hell. The binge boozer, taking bottles of alcohol every single night, either out on the dancing lights or locked up in her own room of desolation. Doctors had told her it will be dangerous to me, but even them couldn't pull her from the roots of agony just to at least save an unborn baby inside her.
She gave birth anyway, and that's what at least I am grateful for. She died eventually because of weakened body, leaving me four months old without even knowing her nor my dad, in the care of my benevolent Auntie Pleng.

And they did not live happily ever after. That's their story, or rather her story. So what? I don't dwell on it that too sentimental anyway. I just like how its process went. I don't give a damn cent for how mom and dad ended. All because Auntie would recall how mom was grateful when she first saw me. She had never despised me til her end, I don't either, even though she left my mind in this seemingly miserable state. That is fine. If anyone would ask me if I can love someone I've never met I'd honestly say yes. I love my mom. I love my dad. The end.
I don't know what happens after "happy ever after". But this one I know, that some tragic histories-- like mom and dad's-- weren't always the same. Sure, some may start cliche or end cliche, but, for me, it's always about the process, the body of the essay. Have to be. Must be.

Some stories weren't always about me or about the bar bitch-vah. Some stories were about her, or him, or them, or even that person sitting by the next table or peeing in the next cubicle.

This wasn't a love story. This was a story about love, about hate, about grief, about rejections, about adventure, about acceptance. About forgetting.

Some stories are forget me not stories.