Parentheses

There is a certain kind of kindness in people that we sometimes mistook for hard-handedness. Those people whom we took for “villains” but are the ones who stay up late at night, worrying sick if you’d ever get home drunk again or that if you’re ever safe at all. They correct you in so many ways. The way you dress when church bound, the way you laugh in front of guests, the way you spoke or pronounced each word or structured your grammar, or the way you chew your food and how you are not supposed to loiter about while doing so. And you wonder why? And the wisdom you took upon your teachers “So that you may live a life somewhat different from theirs, somewhat better” only fell on cold shoulders and deaf ears. And instead, you wage on a war against them. Them, your own flesh and blood.

That though they knew of your rage that made you senseless, of how you purposely took for the wrong curve to make them feel the fault of being too much on their authority over you, of how you took up a vice only to hurt them, then hate it as you hate them. Yet still, they wait in silence for you to change your mind about everything, though it took you till you’re old enough to live on your own. Through the oppressive turns in life, they are still there with their cow-like eyes and wearied faces, mute with the unspeakable. All through the love, the longing and the lies you tell them, they are still there.

You are now at the prime of your life and you realize that it’s never too late to win them back, thinking how you lost them in the event of losing yourself on many Friday nights, over heartaches on men or women who would and could never love you back the way they do.

I know of a man who spoke highly of me in times of insobriety, when he took on the liquid for a legitimate courage yet spoke with me in his more coherent state in terse and dour words on how to set about my nights, to look after my belongings, to look after myself.

With him is a woman whom I took after many traits. The love for laughter and dancing, among many things.

I am their son, a mere anagram of themselves and probably of the food they ate.

They will forever be knotted into my life. They taught me how to make a person out of myself.

I have also learned that in every time they spoke to me with implied exclamation points; I shall answer back with a tamed full stop, or a word trailing off into silence, in ellipsis – nay, a meaningful parenthesis.

Photo: My beloved parents on their wedding on June 05, 1975
Agnes Vaño dela Serna, 16 & Danilo Mangubat Lanzaderas, 19