Most people say memories were too good to keep, for it’s the mind’s powerful possessor of personal events—specially those times when our hearts were filled with happiness. Happiness brought by love, shared friends, and strengthened by families. But in my case, and as from what I could recall not all stored memories were happy,
I think.
Now if I’ll go all the way back t my childhood, I find only unhappy memories. Memories shaped by a medium size brown country house, blue dingy walls, pale visions of ceiling lights, and silent hallways around the corner. Walls that remains still for years only shows I was nursing a broken home. It’s description only pictures out that same vey place where I’d grown, the place I had lived most of my life as a kid—my family’s house. Located under the changing climate in the city of manila, it is the place where most of my childhood memories were formed throughout the years. Every day the city itself buzzes in consequential motion that only lessen as the dawn breaks in land. I liked how it goes on and on, through every each day that passed. And leaving it could meant forgetting the life I had there. The noise of the city itself never annoys me at all, it just reminds me that everyday is precious symbol of life. The breath of it envelops me the kid I’d been once, till I’ve come of age, enough for me to actually love all the city itself. If ever there is a silence I heard, it is only in our safe nest, in our house. The silence I was talking about takes place inside of me, a silence I first understood back when I was young enough to absorb all facts that later would suit me just unperfectly fine. A silence I first heard back in pristine morning days of May, and I’ve found it was louder that I’ve expected on what it would sound like, a sound that forever would remind me of a scene that seems to be the waking point of my sleeping sense and the absolute total realization of mine that makes me believe that not all fairytales and happy endings do really exist,
Particularly to me.
In years so many things have changed, and it’s only when you’re old enough to understand that the past is gone forever, that childhood years would truly be over. I wish I could be nine years old forever, but even if it became true, it would never erase the scene I am talking about. Or at least the scene I was about to tell.
I was barely ten years old—By the time my younger brother Luke was four—when my father left me and my mom, without any valid reason for his unannounced departure. I heard them talk in hush tones while I was about to go down stair for my morning meal. From the high pitch voice of my mother it looks like they are fighting about something, something that follows the slipping of words from my father’s mouth saying he was inlove with another. As their voices gets nearer I hid myself beneath the shadowed doorway and stood there for a couple of seconds until with my own eyes I watch as the mother I love tried to stop my father from walking out the door, her eyes were wet with tears that I am certain flowed at the sight of him eager to leave. For the first time as a child, I saw my mother’s heart badly broken, she was too moved to even speak, as the door slammed and shut. I saw her turned to me, and after a while she walked towards me and embraced me tightly whispering the words “Mia, it’s alright. Mom’s here.” From the way her shoulder shook in pain I knew it’s not alright, and not so long after I knew our lives will never be the same again. That tragic scene of my childhood stays with me, until now. It’s like playing time for me had suddenly stopped, and waking up seems to be the only thing that makes me realize that things in life are not permanent. They would past, and so does time.
