I am D. Yes D, the sound you make when the tip of your tongue will come up to the roof of your mouth, just behind the upper teeth to block the airflow, in order to create a noise in your vocal cords that stops as quickly as how it started. My conception is almost similar to a terrible idea that was not supposed to be created but came to be regardless. A blocked idea that slipped through and efforts were even made to control its damage by taking it back while it was being released, hence the sound you make when you say my name is short. D – D – D. But, you know what they say about terrible ideas. They start in the wrong foot and end up in the right one later on. Or for a non-thinking man, you can just say D, the letter.
I was the first sound she created at 3 months. D – D – D. Unlike other babies, she swerved away from the usual vowel repertoire expected from her lot. She chose to utter a consonant that was not even first in the alphabet. I was the third one in the list, by order of usage for an English-speaking man. She was not, however, an English-speaking man. She was as brown as brown can get, a sun-kissed woman from war-torn Mindanao. Not many people know where Mindanao is. If one happens to have known about it, red flags immediately start flashing in their minds. Mindanao is not safe. Mindanao is the lair of Abu Sayyaf and Maute, extremists led by a dayu – an outsider, a foreigner who distorted the Muslim values for their own gain and used the locals as pawns; yet they were branded as Filipino terrorist groups. Further, the news would broadcast there is war raging in Mindanao between rebel insurgencies and the government army. Avoid Mindanao. Foreign ministers launched travel warnings to their citizens not to visit Mindanao. DO NOT TRAVEL TO MINDANAO, the circulation will say; forgetting that Mindanao is the largest composition of several chunks of the archipelago and the food basket of the Philippines.
She knew English was not her native tongue. The air that flowed in and out of her mouth was not expelled so extravagantly like how English speakers do. So wasteful. Her language preserved every breath, for air was life and life was precious. One does not exhaust something precious in one swing, at least not from where she is from.
