Darkness After Dusk

lost and found (#21)

by Jeneen R. Garcia

(and this is my new column pic =)

 

As shadows fall, and the faces of vendors sitting on the pavement outside the church start to darken (candles, roses, peanuts, and apples wrapped in Styrofoam laid out on concrete, waiting for the customers to come out), I wonder if any of them care who will cry out for GMA’s resignation next. (Or who will no longer cry out for resignation). Or if they care at all who’s sitting up there, holding the power to (supposedly) change their lives for better or worse.

 

I, too, have more pressing things to think about than what’s happening in Manila. Yes, I care about what kind of president steers the country, if her policies are socially just or good only for her allies, if she has enough integrity to actually do things for her country instead of for herself and her family. But even if it’s someone else on her seat tomorrow, I will still have to pay P6 for a jeepney ride, 50% more than what I did last year. When I go home, take the plane or boat, I have to shell out 10% more to get there. I already have too many thoughts swirling in my mind without the future of this country weighing down on it.

 

When I was four, dusk was the loneliest, scariest time of the day. I would wake up from an afternoon nap with my mother and find the space on the bed stretching endlessly beside me, the room still there and yet no longer there, some parts of the walls crumbling into blackness. Outside the window, all the neighbors’ houses and even the church across our house became sudden strangers, frighteningly indifferent in the grainy shadows. I would call and call for my mother downstairs in the kitchen but she would not hear me. Unmoving, I would crouch by the window until night fell completely, and the streetlamps came on, and the windows of the houses outside lit up with their cold fluorescent lights.

 

Total darkness offered greater comfort than the half-light of dusk. It enveloped me completely, like a warm blanket, leaving no space for the unknown, because darkness was the pure unknown. I could hide in it and none of my fears could find me. No scary shadows, no ghost-like silhouettes. It was just me and God, totally vulnerable and yet totally safe in my desperate, childlike prayers.

 

As I’ve grown older, I’ve found more comfort in light, in seeing things for myself, in knowing where things stand with absolute certainty. Only stupid people walk blindly in the dark when the light switch is just by the door. I forget there are times when the switch isn’t so easy to find, and there’s no other way to get to the light except through prayers whispered in desperate faith. Times like these.

 

Last night I lay naked in bed, the electricity having gone out without warning right after I had taken a shower, my phone dead and no other way to tell what time it was, or what the rest of the world was up to. It was just me and God again, in timeless space. In that rare moment of stillness, nothing else could be done, nothing that had to be done but rest in the comforting darkness, and wait for light to come.

 

At dusk when this country’s future--our future, my future--looks hazy and unknown, like a beloved’s face transformed by shadows into a stranger’s, I shrug off the anxieties and enter into the blind night, leaving all pretensions of certainty behind, in total surrender to the great All-Seeing, All-Knowing.