Drops of Ink In A Blue Sand

Just can’t help but reminisce a little – from some recess of memory.  More than  four decades ago, I was exactly in this same vein and wrote Drops of Ink in a Blue Sand which I adopted as title to my journal entries from way back. My journal is now a tattered notebook and the prints are no longer clear.

24 October ’77-Monday
2:45pm QC

October is a young girl scattering her days with life’s golden dreams, wishing a thousand wishes and dreaming myriads of dreams.

These twenty years of my life are varied hues of green, pink, blue and yellow. I think of my Octobers, this one particularly, which is rapidly melting into my twenty-first……..

But not without a tinge of nostalgia, for after all, remembering and saying goodbye to everything that has been a part is not without its tears. Twenty is a fragile thing, like a crystal glass wherein  your very soul is reflected there. It is tender, a soothing music of late night’s dreams, yes – twenty is a varied hues of green, pink and yellow.

But hope is a resplendent and effulgent thing.  and so, once more, I gather my dreams and rebuild my sand castles, look back at this lovely season which is slowly and regrettably falling into that never-never world where beautiful and pleasant things are laid to rest.

The hurt and the pain I will try to bury deep in the limbo of forgotten things lest I remember and make myself cry again. I will only recall the good and the beautiful, the nice and the pleasant:

* the evening walks along Espana on rainy evenings of August, Gilda’s and Marilen’s shout of “what are friends for” simply because they didn’t bring any umbrella to cover their heads.  the laughter, despite the knee-deep waters and the all too unpleasant smell of buses and jeepneys, the elbow-jerking and seat-grabbing with other students;

* the little talks with Grace, Emmie and Thea about anything under the sun – from Emerson to Merton or from Simon’s “Bridge Over Trouble Water” to the Carpenters.  the poetry sessions with Rey, Tony and Mike.  the little arguments, Rey saying that he never read Kahlil Gibran and Emmie insisting that Gibran is simply superb.

*and that afternoon I deliberately didn’t punch-in my time card only to see a movie with Grace somewhere along CM Recto.  how we cried at the thought of saying goodbye, at the Little Prince’s farewell to his pilot friend and the fox and the Little Prince’s secret, “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eyes”. how we followed every word, remembering those much-thumbed thoughts and heavily underlined passages of the equally beautiful book of de Saint-Exupery. we left the movie house with misty eyes but filled with new hopes and pleasant thoughts of tomorrow and the next green, pink, blue and yellow mornings of our lives…..

*the cold feet we had in our Speech class, delivering those not-so memorized lines in front of our frowning professor who made us wonder if we got and pronounced the “th’s and the “f’s” right to her over-sensitive ears. and of course, that happy feeling of knowing that you can act after all;

These are just part of the season of my life that I will never forget. Grace, Ailene, Emmie, Thea, Rey, Mel, Fred, Gilda, Marilen, Boyet, Mike, Oscar, Sue, Nory, and Eddie……those seemingly endless names of my equally wonderful friends. Rest assured, I will treasure every moment of our times together.  Thank you Mel for the evening walks, your patience in waiting for a ride with me although you live just a stone’s throw away from UST. You know Rey, I still keep the poems you gave on that red-colored February.  Emmie, I will surely miss your sisterly advice. Grace, what about our daily exchange of letters? Someday, I will visit you at the convent to recall those green, pink, blue and yellow mornings and the thousand wishes and  the myriad dreams we had and will always have with Him. 

And always, I will keep the gifts I received on my twentieth birthday. Of course, there will be other seasons, other places and other green, pink, blue and yellow mornings but this October will always remain tender even if the other mornings turn to gray and the myriad dreams turn to ashes.

One of my close friends is now a nun  while one of them is  now a  priest. Some of them are still my friends.  We still get in touch through Facebook and get to see each other once in a while.

Sometimes it is nice to recall those days, they make you smile and  cry a little, they make you feel young again. The days of youth maybe gone but the memories remain. days to treasure, days to remember.