Joshua picked up the last week’s issue of Sunday Inquirer Magazine on his way out to the hospital. Di pa rin sya makapaniwala na si Charice ay binawian na ng buhay at the tender age of 23. Esophageal cancer.
It’s been 7 years.
Pitong tao na ng unang marinig kumanta ni Joshua si Charice.
It’s also been seven years since he last saw Michelle. It’s been seven freaking years. And yet, parang kahapon lang. It was only yesterday when the heavens poured its wrath on the parched earth and this morning the roads were still inedible chocolate éclair.
It was a sad the way it ended. He knew Michelle was the one. They had it going for them, until Theo came to town.
I
It was barely 10 years when Joshua first laid eyes on his Michelle. Nagcross-register sya sa UP Mindanao, “for a change of environment”, at least that’s how he’d always answer the curious people, when asked why he opted to leave Diliman for a sem. He did not shadow it was not just his environment that’s going to change. Everything will. And he will forever be ambivalent about this crucial decision he made barely 10 years ago.
Yes, a change of environment. For a change, he wanted to be far away from the inane basic unit of community that was his family, or lack of it, really. He’d always known his folks don’t lie on the same bed, ever since him mom discovered his father was having an affair with one the junior partners in his accounting firm. His mother never knew Joshua knew about his father’s peculiar bodily cravings.
It was one afternoon in his senior year. He had always known his father was a major 007 fan. Premier nun ng Casino Royale, and he bought two last full show tickets at Power Plant Cinema, he wanted to surprise his father for some quality father-son bonding that has been like looking for chicken’s tooth, ever since his father made it senior partner in the accounting firm. In the ultimate joke of the Olympian gods, what he thought would revive their bond would forever sever their already scissile rapport.
It was almost 9 in the when he headed towards his father’s office in Ortigas. He excused himself from the Chemistry group project he was doing with his classmates for the plans he had made for him and his father. He entered the lobby of the his father’s office building and getting a go signal from the receptionist, he went up his father’s office.
What saw in there would require years of therapy to heal.
The junior partner was scantily clad, lustfully licking his father's earlobes. His father, equally compromised, eyes closed, as if in Nirvana, never saw him leave, running away from what seemed like the preacher painted as Sodom and Gomorrah.
He never told anyone about this. And years later, it would be the subject of the many sessions he would have with his shrink. After getting into the country’s premier Univesity’s Biology program, he has always wanted to become an oncologist, his family saw less and less of him. It went unnoticed.
He was only so happy when his favorite bachelor uncle announced that he seemed to have won against the battle with cancer after six months of intensive chemo. Prostate cancer. His uncle invited him to stay with him in Davao for recovery. Joshua was just so happy to oblige.
II
UP Mindanao was entirely different from Diliman. It was beyond diminutive. Simply put, it was a hamlet in the middle of nowhere, where you have to be so conscious about your position in the face of the globe if you want to get a good signal. He, all at once, regretted having cross-registered in this campus. He never thought such a technological divide still existed.
---to be continued---
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