I will be your witness

I will be your witness.
As we may be dust in this vast universe, I will be proof that you existed.
And you were loved.
AMM

 


I will be your witness.
As the stars aligned and the universe conspired…Our eternity was nothing less than inevitable.
You were more than loved. You were proudly celebrated.
JPIR

Of a childhood with grapes

12:32am on a plane somewhere between Manila and Singapore

Listening to the Eraserheads

9 years was way too long… But hey, better late than never.  After 9 years of stagnant incognito, I finally saw Daniel Gimenez again. God, what a trippy blast from the past.

He and I spent 12 years in the same school. 12 fucking years, growing up with the same set of, oh maybe 60-80 kids, with about 40-50 others coming and going with the transient realities of expat living. 12 years at the International School of Manila – it seriously makes an impression. Dan said something while we were having coffee that really got to me. He said, “You grow up with these kids – kids whose families own the streets you drive on and the city you live in – and you’re made to think that you are all equal. But you’re not. You’re so not. It gives you misplaced expectations of what you can do and who you can be. It really fucks with you head.”

I couldn’t have said it better. It really does fuck with your head. Makes you feel incompetent and unfortunate. You see your peers graduate from college and rule the country with the business, power, and influence afforded to they by their last names – it really makes you feel like shit. Sigh. But then hopefully you get over it. Hopefully you see that the business and power and influence is not the be all and end all of life. That with the tools (and some of them are amazingly great tools), that you acquired from that amazing educational institution that is ISM, you can be great and do good in your own way. This is what I’m slowing trying to accept this fact. And yes, sometimes it does sound like a copout, but hey I’ve seen so many of my rich kid IS contemporaries hit rock bottom as well, swimming in the complexities of drugs, guns, booze, eating disorders and lies that are brought upon by the conyo-problems of having too much money. So really money ain’t everything.

But hey, IS wasn’t all bad. I had my fondest childhood memories inside the gated walls of that Kalayaan Avenue campus. From hiding in the curtains of the Fine Arts Theater as child to acting on it’s stage as an adolescent. First crushes. Identity crisises. Sexual blossomings. I grew up behind those gates, as my classmates yayas and drivers waited patiently outside. IS gave me a great sense of the world. From such a young age I knew that life was larger than the backwards microcosm that was Manila. It taught me to be a man of the world and by nature a man of no country, sowing the seeds of my emotional nomadism. I learned of courage and strength; of failure and disappointment. I learned to pick myself up, lick my wounds and dust myself off. I found friends that stood by me at my worse, most embarrassing, most unimpressive. They helped shape the core of who I would eventually become. They were the best part. And it really is a shame that it took me 9 years to see Daniel again.

Daniel will always be dear to me. A true friend who is willing to tell me how it is. Sometimes moody and brooding, he has a distinct Ryan Atwood charm. He fed me not just grapes during our highschool stint into the theatrics, but also hormonal fodder for the confused little daffy in me that was way too scared to manifest in any shape or form. Crazy notions of youth never to be fulfilled… He is a brother to me, and it’s just nice to know that you never really lose those who hold you dear.

The last time I saw him, we had all just come back from our first year in college. We were all new kids again in much bigger oceans – hanging on to the comforting days of our childhoods in Manila, yet fully knowing that the world was out there just waiting to take us. Some of us have been swallowed up whole by the big bad world. Others have fought back and landed on top. I’d like to think Dan and I fall somewhere in the middle, slightly closer to those who have “landed on top.”

10 years after graduation, here we are. Men in our own right, but still very much lost boys clinging on to neverneverland’s promise of youth. Neither of us are overwhelmingly successful, neither one has really settled down, neither one is in a total rut. 10 years later we are both doing ok, I reckon.

10 years ago, when I walked on stage in my shiny royal blue toga and grabbed my HS diploma, I thought I would rule the world by now. A business mogul in my large corner office on the 96^th floor of my own skyscraper, sitting on my calf skin leather chair with my ridiculously expensive Italian wingtips propped up on my mahogany table the size of a small studio apartment, I would be looking out onto the world waiting to see what grand challenge I would conquer next. I guess very few kids truly live out their dreams to a T. But hey, I have no complaints. I’m pretty happy right now… Happy to have reconnected with an old, great friend. Happy to be with someone I care passionately about. Happy to have a job that challenges me. Happy to have a family I am proud of. The Italian shoes can wait. Skyscrapers are overrated anyways.