Things I remember

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I remember pineapple slices so paper thin you can see the sunlight through them.
I remember baby booties and table doilies made in one single telenovela episode.
I remember Liwayway magazines and being old enough to buy them for her at the corner store.
I remember lumpia rolls as small as my little finger.
I remember beautiful intricate embroidery on pillowcases and bed covers and table runners.
I remember her cooling off champorado off the edge of the place before feeding it to me teaspoon by teaspoon when I was maybe five.
I remember gifts during Christmas.
I remember her being so radiant during her golden wedding anniversary.
I remember her concentrating so intently during her soap shows.
I remember her looking like my mom sometimes.
I don’t remember a single cross moment with her.

Right now I’m all dried up.  The memories won’t come.  Maybe when I get home they will.

1 comment

  1. This was written on a plane on the way home to for her funeral cause she died. During her wake there was one time when I was the only one who stayed up, watching horror movies on my uncle’s laptop. He had his downloads organised by genre and by year, and I remember adopting that same folder structure up until recently, before using a local file server that does that automatically. That night I learned how not to be frightened by scary movies. I saw too many jump scares and ghostly figures and shrouded terror faces and it lulled me into disbelief, numbed my brain and smoothed out the parts that get terrified by these cheap shots. Also, the ones who told me about the superstition, that there should always be at least one person awake during a wake (I mean it’s right there in the name) all fell asleep, and left me holding the fort. I remember looking over at her casket, and seeing her smiling face, and thinking that she was amused with me, that she was pleasantly puzzled by how I was being and by what I was thinking. Of course she wasn’t, she was dead, and I was projecting my own thoughts, my own emotions, upon her corpse. But anyway, these are the additional things I remember about her because this post popped up on a spam comments alert email.

    ‘Tis the season after all.

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