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.
