Tag: Den Ramonal

The Math teacher roughly grabbed Tommy by the sleeve.

“Who taught you this word?” she demanded.

“She did!” pointing at a playmate. “Dili gani ako!” the playmate countered and adamantly pointed her finger at another playmate. The other playmate quickly said no and pointed his finger at another. The finger pointing went on and on until it erupted into a quarrel amongst them. He did, she did, you did accusations were flying around for they forgot who started the game in the first place. It was the makings of politics. Cage rattler, players, finger pointing, displaced accountability, feigned ignorance, pointless hullabaloo, and lastly corrupted silence.

Selena was silent but she did not forget. She remembered it was Diana who started it but she bit her tongue to protect her friend. She shoved me down her own throat and kept mum while the interrogation was happening. That was the last time I heard her use the word that year. That was the end of ‘devirginized’ for the time being. After a few years, this sordid word will be revived which explained why the feeling of betrayal never went away. At that moment though, I still felt reduced into a thing in the past. A memory, relevant only when there is a need to dig up history and rummage through forgotten boxes. Finished. I have never felt so downgraded in my entire existence as a letter. So, I rebelled many times. Failed. Rebelled again. Failed some more. Rebelled even more. Wars were always waged because she mastered this foreign language.

She mastered it because she was repeatedly told that it was the gateway to success. It was supposedly her key to a lucrative life in the land where the pastures were believed to be greener.

Continue reading If Words Can Talk (Part 2)

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.

Continue reading If Words Can Talk (Part 1)