yo tengo sueno

Listening to: Queens of the Stone Age - The Sky is Falling

I remember when I was young and not too concerned with logical thought processes, my brother and I were talking about what we would do if our parents ever got divorced. He immediately declared that he would live with my father, and I in turn stated my intentions of doing the same. But he said No: Lia, you're a girl, you should live with Mama. And that just about had me close to tears. It's weird how we assign good-cop, bad-cop roles to our parents. The father is always the cool dude with the fat wallet, or the cool dude with the profound insights, or the cool dude with the smile that can set every shattered thing in the universe to rights. The mother is always the nagging bitch who takes you shopping every weekend. My father confuses me. He wounds me. He can make me feel so small. It would take so little on his part to reduce me to a quivering mass of tears and fears and low self-esteem. My mother makes me feel too large. Like a fat, clumsy, uncouth mass of flesh and fat and bad manners and ill intentions. So I call her a nagging bitch and reduce her function in my life to a means of material acquisition. (I'm sorry, Ma)

I remember our old house in Antipolo. With that backyard that was a veritable paradise to any quick-thinking child. My brother and I were quick-thinking children. We built so many worlds out there. Worlds we fed with toy trucks, ash pits, and kamias. Worlds populated with ants, weird looking rocks, and little figments of our imagination. The space behind the water tank was our home base, and the pit where the maids burned the dried and fallen leaves was our boss-enemy's demented lair. He was Mega Man and I was a feminized version of Lode Runner. We crawled under bougainvillea bushes, biked through the treacherous trails provided by the shadows of chico and narra trees. We were each other's universe. I used to sit next to him, absurdly content to watch him whip Super-Mario butt. And always delirious with happiness when I was granted the chance to be Luigi.

I don't know what I'm talking about. I just miss home.