PinoyWrimos

If you’re after seafood and cheap, yummy cookies, then Iloilo is the place to be. But if you want to rest in the arms of your family, cry your eyes out, and get some sympathy, then look elsewhere. I should know; it’s where I ended up after I had my heart broken just a few weeks ago.

Right – let me slow down for a moment, and start from the beginning, or somewhere near it. I don’t really have a lot to get moving, but I do have a heavy handbag filled with books, and I know how to use it.

Well, except that I know I shouldn’t. That’s the strange thing about family: you can get smacked emotionally by your bevy of impossibly happy aunts, laughed at by your naughty cousins (who, by the way, are all younger than you are, but are apparently more street smart), and berated by your well-meaning, but sometimes pushy parents – and you will not have the slightest urge to wreak havoc. In fact, family makes me want to go, “Hey, beat me up some more! I want another smacking! Hit me baby one more time!”

Chances are, with a world as crazy as ours, you have a family just like mine. It’s the one you go home to on the holidays, the one that makes you laugh and splits your sides – but it’s only fun as long as you’re on the laughing side. When you become the butt of jokes, things aren’t so funny: you want something to the tune of, “Oh, you poor thing!” or “It’ll be okay, you’ll see!” with a matching pat on the head and a long hug and lots of Kleenex.

Instead, you get irreverent jokes, snide comments, and a whole host of cousins with heads bobbing like hyenas on heroin. He disappeared and left you high and dry? Wait a minute, did you feed him something? Maybe you were too available – like he had you on a leash! (cue panting and pretending to be dogs, which isn’t too difficult, considering the hyena angle) She gave you a really low grade? Maybe you were using curse words in your paper! Are you sure you wrote about DNA? You were all about eating roasted pig last week. Maybe you put in lechon ten thousand times in your report!

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera – you get the point. I have a funny family, and I’m fixated on telling everybody about it. Well, it’s not like I can help being fixated. I grew up with them: I visited Iloilo from cosmopolitan Manila, and since babyhood, I learned that the adjustment is not from town to country; it’s from weird to weirder.

And I had to deal with it for the next twenty-nine, thirty years. It’s not like the family’s nasty: we support each other, cheer each other on, make sure that we’re all okay and alive. But like I said, if you want sympathy for your problems, talk to a father confessor, a psychiatrist, or your super-serious best friend. Better yet, talk to a wall. Family is just going to laugh – just hope you aren’t on the other side of the laughter, and you’ll be fine.

Chapter 2
“You’re beautiful,” he once told me. Actually, he said that a lot. He wasn’t a real looker, or a drop-dead hunk, but he did say that he had an eye for beautiful women, and looking at me, he said – the mere act of looking made him happy. “Beautiful,” he said, in his deep, comforting voice, “Beautiful means everything, and that’s what you are.”

So anyway, as I was saying, I grew up with a pretty strange, happy family. We’re talking about the maternal side here, and as every daughter is close to her mother, so bonded is she to her mother’s family. I’m proud of my Ilonggo heritage: I can speak the language, I can get around town, and I get most of the jokes. I’m also trying to get used to the idea of what I would like to call Humourous Judgmentalism; that is, laughing at just about everybody’s mistakes, from short pant legs to moronic answers to simple questions.

Another thing that I’m especially proud of in my family is the fact that we’re a bunch of really religious, prayerful people. To most other families, the phrase, “Don’t worry, I’ll pray for you,” sounds like a lot of spiritual crap. To me, and to my family, it’s something we actually say and do. We really do pray for people. Thanks to my grandmom, we pray the rosary every night, or used to, since our schedules in Manila prevented my family from going regular on the prayers.

But still, it’s the only thing that I have never shaken off – I do pray, you know, even if it seems as though I don’t. I may seem like a happy-go-lucky nut to most people, but really, I do pray. That’s the part of my family that I really love, and it’s not something I want to let go, or ever will. Not everyone understands, and not everyone understands my family.

Sometimes, I don’t think I get them either.

I guess you can say that I was the breaking-free-of-the-mold type. I wasn’t exactly Miss Pretty when I was growing up; and I wasn’t exactly the most street smart of the kids either. I was Isabelle, the sheltered girl who grew up without a sibling for six years, and whose almost constraining convent breeding made her a stranger amongst her cousins.

The getting-laughed-at-constantly part of my upbringing grew old fairly quickly, so after a few years enduring my cousins, I decided that I would get out of the country (the Philippines) be somebody famous (a science communication specialist) and not lose anything I valued (my sanity and virginity).

So, by college time, and through my masters, I studied molecular biology. It sounded like fun on paper: DNA, biotechnology, lab work, rocking the test tubes. Actually, it was so much more than that: I had to work in a laboratory for more hours in the day than I slept. I had to do chemistry and figure out how enzymes worked. Not that I wasn’t good at it; it just grew old after a while. Everything was growing old. Everything felt old.

“You’re not old,” my cousins once told me, “You look like a kid!”

That, my dear friends, is encouragement, from where I come from. And yes, I do look like a kid. I’m short, too, which isn’t exactly the way to catch guys. But I did, believe it or not: I got myself a boyfriend who really does care for me, and who makes sure I’m always okay, and who actually clicks with my family.

Why the heck am I talking in present tense?

Chapter 3
I had been through different kinds of personalities, most of them gentle at the start, but spiteful in the end. This one was different. He said, “I don’t like not telling the truth.” And because I was a Gemini, he labeled me as someone who didn’t, and couldn’t trust me at the start. But I didn’t like lying. I had stopped being a kid a long, long time ago. And he saw it within weeks. And he said I was from another planet, where “earth astrology didn’t work.”

I guess you’re starting to see the point of this novel. Overachieving girl goes to States to pursue her dreams, leaves boyfriend behind with the promise that they’ll see each other again. Boyfriend builds his own company, suddenly starts getting distant – and, in all probability, realizes that he and girl are not meant to be. So he writes to said girl, with a note that is as terse as it is –

You know what, I don’t even want to remember how I felt. The note read like a scroll, with one word per line. But instead of unrolling it, I opened it, wished to burn it, but ended up tearing the note apart. It went:

Isabelle,

I’m
sorry,
but
I
don’t
think
this
kind
of
relationship
can
still
continue.

Alvarez

And that was it.

I’m just going to take this moment to sigh.

I was in my second year of graduate studies then, in a big, prestigious university in the Midwest. I was proud of myself, and extra proud that day: I had finished another paper, my professor in communication was amazed at my abilities, and I had a boyfriend who loved me. I was short of hopping and skipping all the way back to my apartment – until I opened the letter in the mailbox.

Do you know that feeling when you’re placed absolutely high on a pedestal? When all the world seems to worship you and look up to you, and say that you’re the unbeatable this, the smartest that, the best in the west? Now, do you know that feeling when you’re suddenly pushed off it and sent crashing down to earth? It’s cliché-ish, but that’s exactly how I felt.

Mouth hitting pavement, face cracking, head breaking open – I had everything except a heart attack. Everything that sounded so pathetic in other break up stories now felt so real. I wanted to rush to the phone to talk things over with Alvarez. I wanted to throw something at my car. I wanted to pick up my car and throw it at Alvarez.

Well, to tell the truth, all I wanted was to sink down on my front step and sit there, and just stare out at the world and not move. That was impossible: my front step was icy, it was snowing, and it was about two weeks from Christmas. If I sat down and started wallowing in self-pity, I would never be able to get out.

I don’t really remember what I did. I think I went inside, took off my coat, tossed the letter on my desk, and sat down at my dinner table. And I just – stared. My mouth hung open, I hardly breathed, and I was frozen. I just kept my eyes on the wall and stared.

He had just a handful of words for a two-year relationship – a handful of words to break up with me and say goodbye. He didn’t even say I’m so sorry, or I love you, or Hello, or whatever – he just – broke up with me. And he didn’t even send me anything to assuage the pain, like chocolate, Advil, or something to slash my wrists with. I would have accepted a few yards of good rope. Or something made of metal would have been nice, to just plug into the nearest electronic socket so I could fry myself.

For one minute, I had thoughts of suicide. In the next minute, I had thoughts of revenge.

Why would he want to break up with me, the bastard? Was it because I hadn’t slept with him yet? Men were always pigs or dogs, and I was bound to be disappointed: if they couldn’t sleep with a woman within the next week, month, or year, they’d break up with her. And because I hadn’t slept with him, I was, therefore, Cast Away Material. Sure, Isabelle, I’ll kiss you, hug you, play with your emotions for about a year or two; and then when my Little Alvarez gets sick of all the waiting, I’ll run off and –

Was there another woman? Revenge would be so sweet, then, because all I had to do was Google her, email her a novel about The Truth Behind Alvarez, and make ex-boyfriend suffer for the rest of his life. I also knew ex-boyfriend’s e-mail passwords, so I could wreck his life to smithereens. I could change all his passwords, destroy all the websites he had created, blot his name out amongst his clients, and destroy him little by little so that every little bit of piercing hurt as though it were a stab to the heart.

Strangely, I did nothing. I simply – stared at the wall. It took me about two hours to finally stand up, reach for the phone, and dial a collect call to Manila.

“Mommy,” I didn’t even bother with “Hello,” “Alvarez and I broke up.”

There was silence on the other end of the line, and I could hear a dog barking in the background. It was early morning, and my mom was getting ready for work. It was probably the last thing she wanted to hear, her eldest daughter suffering over a lost boyfriend, and forgetting about the best things in life. Like how Isabelle was going to get an A in all her subjects, or how Isabelle was well on her way to getting her PhD. No – Isabelle was sad today, and she wasn’t in a festive mood.

And, strangely, mommy was calm. I expected her to growl, snarl, plot revenge on Alvarez, have a bomb dropped on his house, condemn him to the lowest pits of hell, that sort of fun. Instead, she – well, I thought I heard her giggle.

“Don’t think about him,” was all she said, “Come home for Christmas.”

I just said yes. I didn’t cry, or sob, or do anything silly. I was, after all, almost thirty. I couldn’t afford to be pathetic on the phone. I could stare, and not eat, and yes, get a splitting headache, like I was getting at that time; or I could listen to my mom. So I said yes, I would come home for Christmas; yes, I would bring in gifts; and yes, I wouldn’t think about Alvarez. I had a load of A’s to show off, and I was going to be a Doctor soon.

Hell, I was going to be successful, so bleeding, frigging successful, that Alvarez was so going to weep if he found out who he had broken up with, the bastard.

When I put the phone down, that’s when I realized my mistake. Christmas meant going home, not to Manila – but to Iloilo. To cousins who would laugh at my misfortune, aunts and uncles who would warn me about being an old maid, and a sister who had a boyfriend who worshipped her – the comparisons would never end. I was walking straight into the mouth of Death, and I was going to spend two thousand dollars for the slow, bloody Emotional Flagellation.

I looked at the note again.

I tore it up.

The bastard.

I’d show him.

In the meantime, there was packing to do.