from "The Flower Girls That We Were"

And the snapshots, of course.

The times that I looked at the ten or so pictures which my mom put in an album, my mind registered a blank, and I drew up more questions than answers: Why was I frowning all the time? Were the flowers in my basket real or not? How did I feel, sitting there on the pew with the other white-clad flower girls? Why did I look so anxious, while they seemed so much at ease?

Looking at the photos felt a little strange, as I did not have any actual memory of them ever happening. I did not recall how it was to be wearing the white, boat-necked, ankle-length dress, bare except for a wide orange sash tied around its waist; or how the headpiece made of orange flowers felt on my head.

It was my aunt's wedding, but I did not remember being aware of that, or of anything at all. The orange and white-colored flowers arranged along the pews did not look familiar. I did not remember seeing my Auntie Nene so young, so vibrant in her white gown; looking dazed with happiness, sitting there across the altar with her equally young groom, an ineffable smile spilling from her lips. Neither did I recall my uncle to be half as handsome as he was in his medal-festooned, white military suit. Did they, on the other hand, remember the whole thing—from beginning to end—it being their wedding and all?

I didn’t know.


Running my eyes over the photos, I remembered the things my parents had told me about each frame; and, in time, I began to gather a sense of familiarity, somehow, of the captured portraits. Still, it was different from having an actual memory to anchor the familiarity on. Somewhere between the pictures and my eyes, there always seemed to be a hollow that would have only been filled by memory itself. I looked at each snapshot with a perceptible lack of emotional response, except for something akin to regret—regret that I would never be able to say the words, “I remember.”

-March, 2004, CW 141/ Creative Nonfiction 2-

Something from College

This is something I wrote for a FICTION class (under Luis Katigbak) reading journal blog.

Monday, August 09, 2004

Reading The Locked Room (from THE NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster)

I found the story very fast-paced. Perhaps the author’s knack for suspense had a lot to do with it. I felt myself drawn into the story once I started reading it (I couldn’t wait to get to the next pages) and, if not for pressing matters which I had to attend to, I think now that I would have finished it in one sitting. But that is entirely another story.
I found the premise extremely intriguing. Interesting would be the wrong word to describe it—it would be quite inadequate. The speaker’s obsession with Fanshawe was remarkable; so were the conflicting mixture of envy and admiration that the former had for the latter. I, myself, was fascinated by this kind of fascination. He felt these emotions quite intensely and this was conveyed with clarity in the text. It literally jumped from the pages to the reader’s perception. The man felt so strongly, and it showed.
Fanshawe was the quintessential angst-filled artist. He embodied the qualities of the deviant individual (redundant? I got carried away); so well tuned to his inner self that the rest of the world seemed—or was—abnormal for him. He very well knew that he couldn’t possibly bear to live in such a place; therefore, he ran away as much as he could, if little by little. In the end, he fulfilled this very strong need to ultimately run away from it all, under the guise of death. Yet it was also ironic that, for all the hiding he had done, and in spite of the disappearance he had staged for himself, his name and his writings had inevitably served to immortalize him. He had given away small bits of himself to the world he so shunned that in the end, he was never truly lost.
Sophie was the balance, the anchor to which the “I” could hold on in order for him not to completely lose sight of reality, the someone whom he could come back to after it all ended, the reason for him to come back at all. As I saw it, he did become a little mad in his pursuit of Fanshawe; when he felt that, in his desperate search for this person, he was actually the one being hunted down.
When I think about it, there was something spooky about the entire thing, something sinister. I wouldn’t go so far as to put the story under the horror category, but I have to say that there were certain parts in the story that sent shivers down my spine, pardon the hackneyed expression.


posted by chansonata 11:35 AM