Si Emerson at si Leia

30. Amazing Night

Love is magic, they say. But I beg to disagree. As I know, magic doesn't hurt anyone, even if it lies, which is very much unlike love. When love lies, oh! the pain...the agony of love. If you lay down different kinds of pain in a scale, the pain caused by love would be at the farthest end of that continuum. So, no. Love is not magic; for magic doesn't hurt. And love does. Deeply.

And I was afraid to be afflicted with the pain of loving. Well, to be afflicted again. But as love isn't magic, it still moves in mysterious way.

It was a Friday night, our last school day of the week. During weekends, going back in my home province, Pangasinan, becomes my tradition, and I uphold onto that however inconvenient it may be. I am used to problems occurring during travel—lack of bus to ride on, missing things (stolen maybe), hunger, to name a few—and they haven't changed my willingness to carry out my tradition. But, that Friday night, it almost changed.

The bus was already traversing the NLEX when I woke up, and looked out the window and saw on the horizon a thick black cloud ornamented with red, slow-moving lightnings, which seemed to carve out art on the canvas of the night. I was really amazed by that scenery; it was my first time to witness such a phenomenon in my entire twenty-four years of living.

While I was staring at the clouds, with my luck at the very edge, I experienced something which, well, not that new to me, but was weirdly a stronger urge. Deep within my abdomen, my soul became restless. I knew it was a call of nature. Not the grossier one, but the more irritating one. I tried to control it just like the other times, to hold it in, but it was unusually persistent. My spirit was willing but my flesh was weak. Silently, I cursed myself for not peeing before riding the bus. And so, after accepting my fate, with great humility and humiliation I asked the driver if I could alight from the bus for a liitle bit so that I could pee. Surprisingly, he permitted me, and so I thanked him greatly. I told him that I will be back as soon as I could.

He dropped me in the middle of a beautiful nowhere—a field that starts with trees and ends with mountains, shaped by the dim light of full moon. But I could not appreciate the beauty of nature if it called me. No lady would want to be a show for her co-passengers while she was peeing, so I sought quickly for a more hidden place to pee. When I found one—faster than I expected at that—I also found out that the driver did not understand me.

I was already doing my business when I heard the bus driving away. And I couldn't do anything! I just waited for my nature to finish before I slumped on the truth that I might not be able to go home anymore. Then I realized that I was in the middle of nowhere. That made me tremble even more. So I quickly pull my pants up, carried my backpack, sat on the side road, and started to think of what to do. And waiting was my best choice. So I waited.

In my surprise, as if the night tried to comfort me, a group of fireflies surrounded me for a time, which then flew into a nearby tree. At first, the tree was blinking with few lights, then in a matter of minutes, more fireflies came about and started making the tree a smaller version of the universe; the fireflies twinkled as if they were stars. I stood up in awe of the magnificence of the shallowly-lighted tree. For a moment there, my worries were gone. But then I heard a shutter from behind me, and when I looked I saw a man tinkering with his camera.

"Who are you?" I instinctively asked. I didn't even know if I had to know who he was.

"Just stay there..." he calmly said, then took another photo of the tree. He then went nearer to me. I flinched away a bit in response but he just smiled, rose up his camera and took a picture of me, with no flash surprising me.

"Hey, stop doing that!" I tried to snatch away his camera, but with an effortless raising of it above his head, it felt I was trying to reach the sky.