My answers to mama.

 

My mama would ask me on most mornings when she’s struggling to write, how to write. Most days, na pe pressure ako,(I am pressure) for I do not have answers. Today, if it would save her, I’ll try…

 

 They say an average heart rate ranges from 60-100 beats per minute. I write because sometimes mine runs 200 or faster. I wish to turn every beat into every single word so it goes back to normal again.

 

I like to write when I’m sick. I had been 22 years out of your womb, and yet I am reborn all the better when I am close to you. Like in a world full of chasing, you are the only safe place I know.

 

I write when I wake up to realize you and papa are not home yet. I write to still my mind, to make the road promise me they will take you home. To defeat my fears or just stop panic attacks.

 

I write when I can’t cry and tell you why at the same time. There are things I tell you, and there are things I only tell Rose.

 

They say your odds of being strike by lighting twice in a lifetime is a 1 in a 9 million. I write because sometimes, when you make me laugh so hard I ask what are the odds that you are my mother and I am your child. haha

 

I write when in the middle of the night I wake you up because of an earthquake or a thunderstorm and you are weirded out by how scared I am.

 

The thing is- I do not know if somebody, somewhere, sometime really taught me how to write. Probably. But how do you know you know how. And why do we do it if it makes us suffer. When I see you just collapsed your head, when your eyebrows meet, when your day that doesn’t even begin end.It steals all your hours.

 

It isn’t even the process of writing per se. It is the holding on to things you are writing to let go- that makes it hard.

 

Sometimes, it surfaces your pains. It hurts. My answer is maybe people like us do not have a choice. On why I still take the walang-lasang (tasteless) malunggay (moringga) juice, and why I had to force myself a ride to a hospital for a blood test. I dreaded both at the same degree. But it has to be done.

Because at the end of the day, it heals, or at least it  gives us an answer as to how.