The rainy season has started with a big bang, taking along with it a couple of tropical storm. For a week now, the rain has continuously poured down on this god-forsaken place, keeping me inside the house alternately twiddling my thumbs or pounding on my computer keyboard.
Today is much the same. The only difference is I can see little boys from my window who are gleefully playing tag amidst the downpour. I smiled at the way they were totally absorbed with their game that they do not seem to feel the cold bite of the wind on their brown, naked bodies glistening with rainwater. I watched their little feet carelessly stomping on the rivulets of muddy water racing down the incline to lower grounds. Above the din of their screams and laughter, I couldn’t help remembering the way my brother and I used to do the same when we were kids. But that was before the advent of leptospirosis.
Ahh, what a day for memories. With nothing much to do and nowhere to go, what better way to spend the day than to look at the threads of my memories, good or bad, happy or sad, yet interweaving to create the tapestry of my life? I journeyed back to the carefree days of my youth, seeing my brother and myself enthusiastically living each day as if there was no tomorrow. Like these little boys, we’d manage to escape from my mom’s eagle eyes to play in the rain, staying out until our skin looks like raisins, all wrinkled from the cold. I hear our childish laughter echoing through the corridors of my mind, as if it was only yesterday. I see the coronet of bright-colored flowers sitting cockily on top of my head, and with my twin, black braids lying on my shoulders, I felt like an Indian princess. A wet princess. What fun we had. It was worth the spanking we got when my mom finally caught up with us.
I see us in high school, my brother the typical rebel, and myself, the model student. I kept covering up for his multitudes of sin. From two innocent children, we became conspirators. My parents never heard about how my brother threw an eraser at his nun instructor because she threw a piece of chalk at him. They never heard about how he would miss classes to go to the movies with his girlfriend. With my father a very strict disciplinarian, I don’t know how he would have dealt with the numerous offenses my brother has thought up to challenge the school authorities. It was up to me to talk and deal with the principal, to make up excuses that my parents were out of town or that my mother was sick and has delegated me to discuss my brother’s problems with the Dean of Discipline. With the way I have built up a reputation for being a hard-working and disciplined student, my integrity was never questioned, so I managed to get my brother out of the scrapes he got himself into. Thankfully, he outgrew this phase and turned into a responsible adult.
Adulthood has given both of us a different path to travel. We both went our own way to fashion a way of life that we thought would make us happy. He went to live in the west to be with his wife who is a westerner.
I stayed here in the east to live with my Australian husband. I lived a life that was riddled with both beautiful and tragic episodes, created memories, maintained old values, built new ones, met new people, saw new worlds. Through it all I can look back and not regret a thing, because for every decision I have made in the past, they were made because I thought and believed them to be right at that time. And the memories that the past has bequeathed to me? They will be mine to cherish, mine to take out from my treasure chest whenever I feel like traveling to the past. They will make me smile, shed a tear or two, but I will never regret having each one of them, for they have made me what I am today.
My brother, he too, must have created memories of his own. They will be his to look at on a rainy day such as this.
