“Sa malayong kagubatan ng W302, may isang nanalantang dragon na nagngangalang Fortidit. Lubos na nakakapangilabot ang nasabing nilalang kung kaya’t namuhay sa masidhing takot ang mga hayop na naninirahan sa gubat na yaon. Ang kwento tungkol sa mabagsik na halimaw ay kumalat sa iba’t ibang kaharian at naakit ang dalawang kabalyerong nagnais na iligtas ang mga kalunus-lunos na mga hayop na nakatira sa kagubatan. Nagtagpo ang dalawang kabalyero sa bukana ng gubat at dito napag-alaman na ang dalawa ay hindi mga karaniwang kabalyero lamang. Sila ay mga prinsesa. Si Meg, ang prinsesa ng kagandahan at si Bam, ang prinsesa ng kasinungalingan…BWAHAHAHAHA! Meg wala akong magawa, boring ang klase.”
Four years have gone by but I still have the tattered half-crosswise intermediate paper where I wrote that “tale”.
I remember last year when I decided to bade half of my piled junk goodbye – boxes of old newspapers, ballpen caps with my teeth marks on it, musty manila papers I’ve used during presentation reports, and stacks of past examination sheets – I uncovered that one frayed piece of yesterdays gone by. Beneath mildewed cardboard boxes and unused plastic covers, it sat patiently as if bidding its time, waiting for the moment that it could shake off the dust on its dog-eared edges and see the light of the day once more. Though that frayed piece of paper is miles away from where I am now and I may not remember the exact words printed on it, the thought of the story is pretty well imprinted on my mind.
It has been four years now but Meg will always be Meg. Meg-a-Watt smile and all. Aga's loveteam (now Kuya F’s). The adorable klutz whose unexpected clumsy moments stand at par with my most embarrassing moments. Meg could make me look like I've graduated from finishing school but WE will always be the clumsiest girls in the world. There's no way I'd let her get away with that title alone.
It’s weird how it took me a while to organize my thoughts in writing this when we only had one clear timeline of moments shared together: FIRST YEAR. I believe my 2005 and 2006 would be less colorful had I not met her. In as much as I would like to write a simple organized paragraph of how she touched my life, all the thoughts start jumbling one on top of the other before I could have a chance to place them where they should be. Maybe because it simply reflects the way things get when we're together: the RANDOMIZATION OF EVERYTHING IN THE FACE OF THE EARTH.
I used to believe that I’m the weirdest and most random person I’ know. But I know that if I continue doing so, I would be making up one of the biggest stories and my alter-ego won’t forgive me for that. Sure, I’ve met a lot of interesting persons along the way but there hasn’t been anyone yet who can put a lot of meaning to the word “interesting” than the giant goofball of curls and teeth that is Meg.
If I could only name one thing she reminds me of, it would be… difficult. Haha. So for lack of a better word, I’d use sunbeams. Sunbeams and sunflowers and all sunshine-y things. All things that could save an emo kid from his depressive made-up world. I don’t know if Miggy has the same effect to all people as she has her happy-dopey effect on me. We never really had the chance to share some uber-deep drama. Our mental scrapbooks will always be filled with thoughts of laughter, smiles, and everything that is crazy.
Miggy never fails to crack me up. May it be a simple YM conversation or a few seconds interaction as we chance upon each other on the hallways. Somehow, those moments would stretch to hours as I was still left beaming about the encounter. I remember there was this time when we bumped into one another under that shady canopy between OSA and the SICO Vols office. It was supposed to be a brief interaction but we ended up standing there, wiping our eyes out from an hour of laughing. How we took longer than what was intended, we can never really explain. Maybe it just works that way. The way when, even if we’ve known each other for four years already, we caught ourselves off-guard on that YM conversation when we asked each other’s likes and dislikes for the first time in our lives. Meg and I share a lot of inside jokes: on Zobel de Ayala, Pacificadora, Chubi del Rosario, fortidit, her YM ignorance, and Marco Polo, because basically that’s what we do most of the time – fool around. We have a lot of funny moments but the funniest thing is our friendship itself.
My relationship with Meg is unique --- bordering on the thin line between unique and weird. It’s like walking into a meadow and suddenly finding yourself submerged in a pool that you didn’t even know was there. You think back on how, by some absurd turn of events, you got there without even feeling the fall. You wonder how you didn’t notice the body of water before but still you enjoy the feeling of being in it. And weird as it is on how you ended up there, it just gets weirder and weirder because you find yourself unwilling to get out.
Meg and I never really had time to know each other well. Our encounters were brief, spontaneous, and more often than not, disaster-related. We never had sleepovers, heart-to-heart talks, and the casual tambay mode with one another, but we often end up reading each other’s minds or finishing each other’s sentences. It is funny how we never really lifted a finger to make things work, but it did.
As I’ve said, we never really had our own emo moments. The only time I could remember that we were serious and less goofy than usual was that specific night, during the first months of 2007, when we strolled along the dusty streets of El Rio so as to stretch our limbs after a hearty dinner in their house. I’ve restrained myself from cracking up a joke for a whole forty-five minutes then because I knew that what was happening is something that might not happen again. I can’t help but smile as I remember that certain moment, when Meg and I, dorks as we may be, lasted forty-five minutes of no-goofy-jokes talk. It’s an accomplishment, really. Stuff of legends. =))
But even with all the happiness that is present when she’s around, I still regret the fact that I never really saw her cry. I have yet to prepare myself for the scene where I would see her without her renowned smile pasted on her face. That means that if the time comes when I see her coming to me with tears in her eyes, it would break my heart knowing that I don’t have any idea how to save her from her pain. Maybe, the least I could do is send the person who made our Meggy cry to purgatory with his epidermis turned inside out. So I hope and pray; which is rather strange as what I have now is a rather shaky idea of religion, that I will not bear witness to that day. But in case that would not be the case, I wish that I will be ready and be worthy to share her suffering.
They say life is a box of chocolates. You’ll never know what you’re going to get. Honestly, I didn’t understand the quote when I first heard it. I mean, how could a box of chocolates be full of surprises when it’s already stated that it is, for a fact, a box of chocolates? It’s not as if Michael Jackson would suddenly pop out of it.
But on that fateful day on July August, when the whole of Davao was too preoccupied with the Kadayawan festival and my feet had its first feel of the Marco Polo floor, I knew. My box of chocolates does not only contain chocolates; because for some miracle, a nut also ended up in that box and, surprisingly, I was extremely happy that it did.
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