What It is to the Core

It's 1.48 AM and the night is cool. The window's open and the nighttime...it has a voice. And it speaks to me. Its whisper penetrates the window screen and brushes past me; I can feel it.. on my arms, my nape, against my ear.

I am listening to Caetano Veloso singing, moaning out "Cucurrucucu Paloma".

And though I understand not a word, my soul can't help but sigh in direct response to this person's crooning out for a lost love, perhaps, I don't know; like I said, I don't understand the words as they are in Spanish.

... And the flow of my blood sings along.

And instead of crooning for a lost love, it seems to be crooning instead for lost days. When innocence was pure and unwavering and solid as a mother's love for her kid.

My last affair was a loss of innocence for me in itself.

And sometimes I can't help but think about it. In retrospect it seems so distant and far-off. Fuzzy, like paint drying on the walls of my bedroom. It's tough to say it out loud, even though there is that mixture of apathy and acceptance mingled with it: He used me.

And yet I don't know what it is, ego or pride that keeps me from believing in it totally. At least, all day everyday. Because there are those moments that you just know. You are jolted by reality and accept it: He didn't love me. He wanted to use me because I have beauty and youth and brilliance and I am a novelty to him. But he will still marry her. He wanted me because I was like nothing he's ever seen before.

And to think that I thought God was giving me a sign... "Sasha, this it it, and I have used a bulldozer to knock him into your path. But here. Here he is. Take him or leave him."

I didn't know that God wanted me to pick Leave him.

But I know better now. That's why I don't compromise anymore. Especially when it comes to men. I am still finding my voice when it comes to my writing. I feel I used to be better at articulating what I felt before, I sounded a lot smarter a long time ago. When I was younger. Before I had lost so much innocence along the way, getting by what life was throwing at me.

But I want to believe this all serves a purpose. And I do, when I have my bearings around me. When I'm not injected with the crazies.

But yes.

I love.

I was borne of love. I will die for love. I love my people. I love my country. I love my planet. I love my passions. I love my frivolities. I LOVE MY GOD. I love.

Maybe that's all there is to me:

... I love.

New Directions

So now I'm starting things all over again.
I have worked since I was eighteen years old.
And it's only been these last three months since I've been back in Manila that I have stopped being a work mule and have just started to have fun.
I tell you - that my fun is no longer fun.
That I have been out all night and all day and in my craving for fun, I have forgotten my search for happiness.
I have short term fun and I am doing nothing as yet to work on my long term happiness.
Let's face it - my grandmother isn't getting any younger. And yet I leave her most nights in search of these "fun things". Drinking. Celebrating with friends. Forgetting that I have not yet done anything in these past few months of my life worth celebrating.
I am now in training once more to be a Radio DJ at a local radio station - at last, at least a step in the right direction.
But what about everything else?
In my crusade to prove to everyone in Brunei - not everyone really, but simply the man who is the main reason I have been sent back to Manila - in my crusade to prove that nothing I am is diminished by what I have gone through in the past, I have totally and completely forgotten what matters.
So now I am going to slick my hair back (with these long curly locks, good luck with that!) and I am going to once more begin my search for balance. Go down that road long enough, and I know I will finally find my happiness once more.
All it takes is one small step.
The right one.

THAT Year in Brunei

You have to think about it though.

Didn’t it work itself out perfectly?

The year in Brunei. From now on until the day I’m old and gray, April 2009 - March 2010 will be known as “THAT year in Brunei”. For those who are unfortunately visionally impaired, I’d like to reiterate the emphasis on ”THAT”. 11 months to be exact…like Life. Exact, random and oh so spontaneous, but at the same time right on the dot everytime - only you would be able to see this not as you’re going through it but when you look back in retrospect.

I read my writings from each month of the past year and I am amazed at the speed and the intricate beauty of all the circumstances, misadventures and fated things that happened. Even the previously personally conceived weeks of so called boredom. But only the wise know that even in the quiet weeks, fate is working and certain circumstances await to pounce on you like rabid bulldogs unleashed after days of imprisonment. Whatever it may be… like childhood, like highschool, like your first real romance, no matter how long it went for, it always seems it had gone by in a blink.

Not to say I’d do it again.

Like that snap and ill-fated relationship with Mario (sorry I still just have to giggle noncommitally whenever his name comes up) .. I’ve learned so many lessons of importance to equip me for the highway of life ahead of me which wouldn’t have come to me if I hadn’t done the the things I did, and if things hadn’t happen the way they had. I cherish everything and am in awe of everything but at the same time, I am also too relieved at watching all that I’ve gone through and looking at it now from my sideview mirror.

Certain things don’t have to be repeated. Only certain people know what happened. Only a handful know something resembling the truth. And yet only you know, at the end of the day, what has truly transpired in the year of your adventure in a foreign land.

I promised a friend of mine that I would write a book on this one day. Before I left for Brunei a year ago, countless people kept asking me in coffee shops: why don’t I write a book based on my family? They were talking about the Nava clan, my mom’s family and the captors of my childhood and my heart. And now, people are asking me to write about the Rahmans. Those behind that part of my name which have been shrouded from me as if behind a shadow or a passing cloud for most of my life.
But you know.. a light has been shed upon them. With my own eyes, I’ve witnessed the miracle of people and lives and heritage unfold before me. Unfurling like a leaf reaching out to touch a raindrop falling by the grace of God. Mischief, adventures, misadventures, personal catastrophes, and happy celebrations of Life that make up this glorious family that I was unknowingly born into.

On that day, I finally decide to push ahead and write my autobiography, the pages will be so colorful from the richness of characters and exploits that make up both sides of my family, of my friends - of the people who have made up my life, those I’ve already met and those I’ve yet to meet - that I’m afraid it might resemble her very own Majesty the Queen’s float at a Gay Parade.

Needless to say, I’m done talking in definitives. Life and things never pan out the way one plans it anyhow. It usually pans itself out in a more fascinating way than you could have imagined.

And I don’t want to write about Brunei as if it’s a casket being lowered onto the ground. It’s not. It’s a trophy and a portrait hanging on my wall, making me witness to the glory of God’s delight in my life. “Do you see how full it is?”, they seem to say.

And of course, my answer would be - always be - Yes.

I do.

I told my friend Izzy, one day I bet I would make a lot of people in Brunei famous. And we would laugh at our own private joke.

But at the end of the day, you know that you were supposed to go down that road. That there was no avoiding or escaping it. And that you never in a million years would have wanted to anyway. These were people who you were supposed to meet, and love, and contend yourself with, and know, and write into your own personal history books: some because you know their roles in your life weren’t played largely enough for you to remember their names after time has passed and the others, most of them - no matter how short or long the time you knew them - because they have personally contributed to the lessons you now know and as well as to the color scheme of your life.

Regardless, or, to be more precise, in direct response to all the events that have transpired… If I had not gone on a whim to attend my sister’s wedding last April, and en lieu of that had not accidentally stumbled upon the chance to spend my year in Brunei:

Ah, safer and smoother and smaller would be my heart.

The September Theory

I fell in love with a boy who eventually became my first love.

Fell out of love as another boy broke up with me, leaving me to experience my first painfully sober heartbreak.

My grandfather, who I lived with for the first 15 years of my life, died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest. Silently, I began to celebrate the day he died as his birthday in Heaven.

It is a month where something always happens. And those somethings usually consist of happenings I'll most likely remember forever. Good or bad, nothing escapes September.

It is the annual, month-long era of: finding love... losing love...births...deaths...and now apparently I could add reincarnation to the list.

A few days ago, imagine my shock when a boy I'd loved (as only a twelve or thirteen year old can, ofcourse) popped up once more on the grid from out of nowhere.

I stared at the pending Friend Request on my Facebook inbox page, disbelieving.

Ivan Bacungan.

The name held its own myth, history, legend in my mind. If our parents generation had the Beatles to grow up with and be constants in their own adolescence, I had Ivan to bring me into mine.

He was the first boy who introduced me to romantic frustration, secretive glances, butterflies in the stomach, butterflies in the chest, butterflies everywhere, weak knees, the beauty of hearing a song publically dedicated to you playing over the school speakers, the confusing and unexpected ability to cry during love scenes in chick-flicks, tactics at inducing jealousy that would make Sun Tzu sob out loud...

Most importantly we are talking about Ivan Bacungan, the boy who made me first aware of the fact that I carried a poetic license.

God, I can only imagine how many notebooks I've kept hidden dusty and forgotten in my closet that are filled out with rambling and endless poetry about him.

After gradeschool graduation nearly nine years ago, he moved out of the Philippines into the U.S. and completely disappeared. No one has heard from him or about him since.

...Until now.

A flooding of mutual friends' messages came pouring in on his wall and mine and everyone's excited about his reappearance. In the initial excitement I felt like I was part of the LRT crowd at rush hour, trying to keep afloat, as I felt myself being squashed and carried by the current of the crowd rushing up to greet him.

Life is so definitely unexpected.
And it has an advocate in the month of September.

September never fails to stump me and make me realize that no one ever trumps it. That it's Life job to constantly keep changing the game plan. No time to step up to bat? Well, too bad because this curveball is headed straight for you. Awake yet?

So to September, I will close my exposure and love letter to you with the last update I'd typed into my twitter page:


"Being found by an Ivan Bacungan in US Marines uniform gives me the the heartiest laugh and the weirdest expression and the giddiest stomach."

Aug.12.09 Poem & Prayer

The thing is I never knew what hit me until it did. And I recognized it in an instant - in the mirror. A girl who was no longer a girl but a lady in fact. No, the girl may not have even been there in the first place. That's right. Perhaps in truth, there was never a girl. But an entirely different entity just as there is now, dwelling deep inside the dark pools staring back at me in the mirror: An Observer. Yes. An Observer. That was what this being was - behind the curtain of kitchen scents and familial warmth and blue burning love and barbeque laughter... And yet this Observer was present and not present. This Observer melts away, back and away into a puddle of stars swirling like frapuccino creme in the universal abyss whenever that spark, that flame of Passion Burns. Her writing, oh yes, her writing, her changing expressions so naked and stark on her face, her tongue sliding through a man's mouth and cutting into his intenstines trying to feel its way upwards into his soul. These men who were not men on the outside but men on the inside. These boys who were not boys on the outside but boys on the inside. Deep, deep down inside the mass riots of stagemanship protesting in the descending rings of their esophagus, or their hearts, or their penises. The Observer flies back home though. Every night. Right on time. Just as the clock strikes 13 on the Moon and She smiles. She has been waiting all day. And only when 13 o'clock comes does the ghosts of memories dance back down into the moonlit passages that curve and split, spirals into your waking reality, greeting you with fresh sighs. For it is not enough for memories to be ghosts themselves, but they need to have ghosts of themselves to remind even themselves that they exist. Not only in slanting moments but in the concrete haphazardness of All Encompassing Time. Right now though This Observer observes: a young girl wanting to find her home as well as reclaim it. Her family, her eyes tell me, have been scattered across the Universe and this girl has condemned herself to either

A) setting out into the vast world alone, not unfeeble but not unafraid either, to put up her white Chinese junk sails and carve out her own path, the trace of her scent mixing with the too often sour and eternally innocent scent of the wind until she finds a place which is totally isolated from all the lives she has lived and all the worlds to which she has travelled and drives a wooden stake that glitters like Gold into the earth and acknowledges that this land is her own, and what's more, that She Belongs to This Land.

Or

B) slitting her wrists so that she may draw the blood which she needs to drop into a sidewalk puddle which in turn sets its wide mouth agape for her to jump in and fall through until she finds herself swimming in the shallow waters of the Milky Way doing a backstroke and a breaststroke until she finally climbs out and uses the stars as stepping stones to reach Paradise where no doubt her entire Childhood, her Home, not lingering montages but all of her actual family waiting for her arrival - they, along with her, breathless to take part in the Grandest Reunion to ever take place. Because this girl, she knows that it is all Worth It.

The Observer notes everything down, even though she's clocked out for the evening...Like how this girl, she watches what happens outside the window of the car. How she sings songs in her head but feels them drowning out her heart. How she notes the exact moment hovering within a nanosecond when the realization that a person, a friend, maybe someone she may even share the same blood with, has two faces. Notes how this girl swallows her anger by the spoonfool. The expression on the girl's face when she knows that Time Flies so quickly...even when she's not having fun. The Observer notes how it has been aeons since this heart inside the soul inside the woman inside the girl has fallen truly in love. Notes how this girl who's become a woman has Saved herself, though this fact leaves her in constant repression and frustration, admiration and awe.

Notes most especially, her Prayers tonight:

Dear God. I believe in You. I need to confess (INSERT LIFE HERE). I need You and I cannot do this by myself. I am not worthy of all this Love but I am taking it. Just as I hope that You are taking Me, although You know my weaknesses and the times I am at fault. I have deceived myself and continue to do so: I tell myself that I am not angry. That I will let it pass because I know in the end it will not matter and only the love will. But how can the love survive the end if Truth does not guide it? Therefore I humbly ask Thee, Lord, to please give me Honesty. If not with the Rest of the World, then with myself. Do this Lord, and I will do the rest. I ask Thee, too, Lord, for Forgiveness. For giving into temptation and doubt which darkness has placed in the balcony of my bones. I only want to Praise You, even if sometimes I end up praising myself. I hope You, of All Beings and Energies, know that I have a good heart. That I want to make You happy. That I find a simple and elegant beauty in the lines that thread through the sequences and events of my life which you have so clearly designed. I know not, Lord God, the roads you have paved for me or the tragedies and illuminated kingdoms you plan for me to take in, but I pray that You will not leave me alone to cry, alone to laugh, alone to break and alone to fly. For I know that You love me, Lord. That You have died on the Holy Cross to open to me the door of my Salvation. Which is Eternal. Which is All Encompassing. Which is You. Good night and wake up with me tomorrow morning, won't you? As I am a 21 year old grown up still afraid of the silence of the dark, I ask Thee to please not turn off the moon tonight.

In the name of Jesus Christ...

Amen.