By Leyn “Nyle” Ferrer
Without a warning, a picture of my favorite home-cooked meal is now the contender for a grim reminder that my dad has never seen it.
It’s been a day. An hour usually passes before I get a reply.
It’s taken me going right back to the city I desperately wanted to get away from to gain some semblance of peace. Even then, the silence on the other side, the static, the quiet — I cannot seem to sit still, knowing that the words my father usually responds with are unsent; non-existent.
My messages aren’t delivering, and the reality is sending me into a spiral of rhetorical questions no one would be able to give a definitive answer to. What’s going on? What happened? Where is my father?
What happened to him?
The car’s engine hums a consistent tone, a near-melody that never gave me solace or relief. Chatter is absent in the space my uncle and my big sister sit uncomfortably in, coming all the way from the city I was born in to pick me up after the news. Considering that the engine is already quiet enough, I wondered for a fleeting moment, if the car doors are unlocked, would a slight pull on the handle cause me to meet the rough road with a grazing of its surface on my skin?
I slink back in from my wandering, weary on the leather covers of the seat. Patches of yellow paint my immediate, albeit unfocused perception. Red dots these patches with utmost significance, demanding and splitting attention from me and the yellow hues along highways of highs and lows and curves. I notice this, I fear, as a form of distraction from what is now reality — my father is missing, and we have no idea where he is.
It’s almost comical how I would always jokingly beg not to be sent back to San Fernando. Here I stand before my bed with my suitcase wide open, eager to be with my family. Here I sit before my phone in between my antsy fingertips, composing emails to my professors explaining that I had taken a leave of absence to be with my family. Here I freeze, willing myself not to shed tears because frankly, I have no idea what will happen if the worst rears its uninvited presence.
I’m sure he’s fine. I’m sure I will lose all sense if I think otherwise. I’m sure that because of this, I have to stay strong for my older sister and my mother, whose eyes are swollen from the worry seeping out of their hearts.
The worst, however, and fortunately, never found fruition, as on the seemingly usual night of December 19, my other uncle unusually invited us to dinner at his family’s house. There they were, to everyone’s surprise — my mother, who had picked up my father from overseas, carrying their heavy backpacks, shrouded by the dimness of my uncle’s garage.
My big sister was not overreacting when she had been speculating that our parents would be home way earlier than December 26, unlike what they have sneakily told us. The screeching tape she heard over the phone calls with my parents was a telltale sign — it was far too early for them to start packing up and sealing boxes.
A belief of mine with this piece is that it is no one else’s business except my family’s to know exactly what happened to my father. Air has exchanged plenty in his lungs, and his tongue has uttered enough words to our other family members about it that my heart aches for how he must be feeling about being so worn of retelling the same story over and over to no end.
A relief of mine is that, finally, after nine missed holiday seasons, years of loneliness as a product of sacrifices — my dad is finally home. For good.
I feel you there; you who’s conditioned themselves to settle with conversations with their closest parent over the phone. You, whose pillows have collected the weight of shouldering more responsibilities simply because someone in their family was absent. You, whose absence was dearly longed to flip on its head, because everybody who loves you misses you that it pains them to know you cannot spend the holidays with them again. You, who’s had to live through the changing seasons of traditions slowly dying out like the lights dimming from the lanterns that once illuminated everyone’s spirits.
Last I remember, the patches of yellow dotted with red — sunflowers and poinsettia — have now been overtaken by the green stems that support them, and the leaves that regulate them. They aren’t insignificant now, however; just dormant.
Perhaps waiting for the season to bloom in radiance again.
Home-cooked meals are no longer just intangible codes projected on a phone screen. I can still taste the perfect balance of sweet and sour on the sinigang my mother had me prepare and serve. I can still hear my father’s words of appreciation for the delight of Filipino comfort foods, and his disguised but overt stubbornness to consume what is prohibited.
‘Tis the season for miracles; and from my family and I, the happiest of Christmases this year, as for the first time in nine long years, it was a merry day for us. **
