Juancho

Everything happened along with the despicable but somewhat natural, rushing, rural wind. Elena was the barrio sweetheart whose charm and boyish grin put her in the center of countless conversations among the local men. She was too charming the dirty pink piglets in her family’s backyard behaved like English gentlemen every time she fed and bathed them. Men from known and unknown places groomed and fattened legions of carabaos, cows, horses, goats and even domesticated monkeys to ask her hand for marriage. But she only loved Juancho. Juancho only noticed her after all his dearly loved chickens died of a lethal strain of avian flue, and they eventually got married. On the day of the wedding, they had every representative of the animal kingdom butchered but none from the line of the flying chickens.


What I have just written was a bastardized retelling of what I have read in grade 5. I painstakingly finished the novel so I could as well brag that I was able to finally read a novel, cover-to-cover. I felt elevated to an exclusive brood of literati students who intellectually bullied classmates who could only read cliché proverbs plastered on classroom walls. That novel I was referring to was entitled something like this: Kailan Iibig si Juancho?


I started reading late, and I innocently read the unglamorous ones. I only got to read english novels when as a high school freshman, I noticed a pretty but anorexic classmate named Dianne write and speak impressive english. I later learned that she had a collection of english novels. What my pretty but anorexic classmate lacked in protein she compensated for with her generosity by lending me her books; the first one I read I can hardly remember the title, but there were cute, yellow ducks on the cover. I soon ventured into Sheldon’s fast-paced storytelling of men and women who slept with other men and women, killed other men and women, found their way to the top toppling other men and women, and a woman who shared multiple identities with other women! Wheww! When I got to UP, a genius roommate named Ralph who was taking up English Studies displayed horror over my immature reading list. He introduced me to Albert Camus, Garcia Marquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Steinbeck etc. Ralph’s erudition on the subject of Literature was evidently displayed in his own writings. Our other roommate Hathem, who majored in Creative Writing, never missed in transporting me into his own stories. His prose was so powerful the entire dormitory room seemed to fold like a carton box.


I was a writer of the school paper back in high school. I even competed and fortunately won in some of the competitions. However, I refrained from writing in college. I thought writing was only for those who can catapult readers to Antarctica in a commanding trajectory of words and letters. I stopped. Soon realizing that it’s not yet too late to write again, I ventured into poetry. But my poems were so dull and at dearth of imagery and full of pitiful wordplay. I write them on tissue papers but I thought they were to set off where tissue papers are usually headed.


Last week, my roommate Pido wrote his first blog entry. Ralph, who still happens to hop in our room every so often, gave Pido a remark so impelling I started contemplating on this entry: “Continue writing Pido, you’re doing yourself a favor!”

I’m doing myself now a favor.