The Midget

It all started one sunny Tuesday morning – my first day in college. 

I looked to the girl on my right and smiled. She's wearing a shirt and jeans. Her hair was long and thick - unkempt but still nice to look at. She doesn't look like she'd bite my hand but I was having second thoughts of asking her. I feel an invisible, impalpable wall between us. I think I'd been staring at her for about three minutes so I looked down. It's rude to stare. Even out of curiosity - it's still, and will always be, rude. My gaze left her face and fell down on her shoes. She's wearing sneakers. Black chucks. 

I breathed in a sigh of relief. Well it seems that this girl do not belong to my stereotyped Atenista socialite/kikay. I gathered all the courage I can muster and flashed my winning smile. I gave a lengthy introduction to which she replied with a single word. Her name. I smiled and reached out for my phone to get her number only to look back on an empty seat. Then I saw her talking to another girl on the far side of the room. How she got there, I do not really know. What stuck to me is that she stayed on the chair nearest the door and never came back to be my seatmate.

I never anticipated any friendly relations with her since then. Oh well, except the time when I have to borrow her color pastels for our history map. And just as expected, she stressed me to take EXTRA care of her beloved pastels. We were civil towards each other. And it did not exceed that level. For the first five months that I've known her, I kept my distance. She complains every time I laugh. She keeps telling me to keep quiet. And she never really smiled at me! Gawd.

Seconds passed. Days ended. The trees outside the window were already bald and dead leaves covered the garden floor. I've found new friends. I'm accepted and I'm happy. I maintained good relations with the rest of the class. Except with her. We still do not like one another. But I found myself wanting to be like her.

She graduated class valedictorian - during grade school and high school. She won her school an award on the National Competition on Feasibility Studies. She claims to hate history but her grades say otherwise. AND she excels in math. Oh no, that would be an understatement. She breathes math. Her brain can do the talking in numbers. My other classmates often joke on how she can sleep throughout trigonometry class but can still manage to perfect the exam. Even Calculus, Analytical Geometry, and Inferential Math spell ABC. She befriends exponents, formulas, and not just that – she has the flair for the arts. I remember that afternoon in our history when she played the guitar. She played the guitar and sang. In fairness, she is a good singer. But that was the first and last time I saw her sing and play the guitar that semester. She says that she does not really play the guitar. She says that she SUCKS in playing the guitar. Oh wow. It is the banduria that is her instrument.

Aside from her skills in music, I watch - fascinated - with her talent on the canvass. She held her pastels and Macario Tiu's poem was vividly alive. I forgot to mention that she bagged an award during the National Schools Press Conference for Editorial Cartooning. And here I am thinking I was blessed for having a drop of artistic skill in my veins. As I know more about her, I keep on thinking why are we not even friends yet.

I guess I was just too impatient. Everything folded out in time. Three school years and one semester after, it is difficult to imagine my first few months of disliking her. We've made videos, made fun of guys crushing on her, made the last days of PTA grounds memorable, and made friends together. We’ve played paper games, silly games. We played billiards and she applied trigonometry on purpose to spark my interest with the subject. We've shoot hoops in a fair during midnight. Sang to a lot of songs, changed the lyrics of some songs, and made songs. 

We passed notes during class. Played notes on the guitar - she taught me how to play. She wrote a song for me. She texted the chords - consisting mostly of Bs and Fs - forgetting that it has only been weeks since I've learned how to play C, E, D, G, and A. We tried beating each other in a game of pinball. We played it hard on volleyball - and I learned that she has been an athlete during her high school years. We fell in love with the moon and courted the stars – as if celestial bodies would respond to what we’ve been doing. We tried catching Christmas lights. We've planned and postponed Christmas caroling. We slept over a friend's house miles away from home. We’ve slept in her home. We’ve watched movies and made bets. We’ve slept late and woke up early. We’ve been crooned to sleep by haunting melodies, corny jokes, silly rhymes, and whimpering electric fans.

She was with me when I had my first guitar. I never really liked my guitar much – but she said it was a good guitar. She initiated “doodles” sessions – on scratch papers, table napkins, used cardboards, old notebooks, and new Microsoft Paint pages. Doodles about our bizarre thoughts, our crazy classmates, our boring professors, our equally demented friends, ourselves. I made friends with her technical pens and blunt pencils but I never saw her pastels again. She introduced me to different statistical tools and she let her calculator sleep in my room for two months. I have had dates with the chi, Pearson, and Spearman – all with her looking out for me in case I change my mind and would decide to run away.

We’ve also talked about a lot of things. Mostly about philosophy. Which would then sprawl out on topics about religion, economy, and politics. We often talk about music – the origins and the future. When things get boring, we analyze some songs. We talked about bands you’ve probably never heard before. And I remember this one bus ride when we talked about the correlation of music to math. From music to math, math to chess, chess to literature, literature to astronomy, astronomy to physics, physics to religion, religion to science – and before we knew it, it’s science to music and to math again. We talked about prayers, confessions, and forgiveness. We’ve talked about how we missed swimming and biking. We’ve talked about how we yearn to play sports again. We’ve talked about daffodils, smelling trees, rainbows, dust, carbonated drinks, and diabetes. We never grew tired of talking in riddles, talking in tongues, and talking silly. To think that we used to not talk with each other before.

A lot of people have been talking about her too. From surfer boys and love-stricken poets, cyberspace admirers and high school “crushes ng bayan”, to talking piñatas and astounded English professors. Her spur-of-the-moment masterpiece “Love Affair with Mathematics” left our English professor talking about her work and her writing skill for about half the usual class hour. She writes only under the mercy of a pen and a report card. Her list of literary assignments to read only includes those mandated in our literature subjects. She chooses encyclopedias over novels, science shows over sugar-pop romance stories, Multiply over Friendster, green over blue, Banoks over Penong’s. She chose not to be included as one of the outstanding third year students in the campus.

Looking back through all the lazy semestral breaks, unpredictable summers, long weekends, years, tears, laughter, arguments, jam sessions, HTML codes, home-cooked recipes, paper chats, broken text messages, YM conversations, dinners in Breakfast Club, plates of extra rice, gallons of iced tea, and additional servings of sunny side up and scrambled eggs, defining and reminiscing moments with her is a jambalaya of pre-existing feelings and fresh waves of emotions. We’ve grown up and we’ve learned a lot about the way the universe molds us into. But then again, there are a lot of things that would never change.

She would still be the same girl, who is afraid of nimbus clouds, who prefers the caffeine in soda than in coffee, who spites the idea of being caught under the rain, who hates posing for the camera alone. The same girl who prefers blending in the background than having the spotlight pointed at her. The same old her, who remained humble amidst all the achievements she had.

She might kill me if she found out I wrote her this but what do I care? This is my super-duper-late birthday present for her 20th birthday. La-la-la. 

And even if she did not grow an inch taller in all the years that passed by her, she would always be the tallest girl in the world for me.

Char.

=))