Endings and Eternal Summers

lost and found

by Jeneen R. Garcia

 

 

Where I live now, it is December, and the nights are warm and heavy, and the sea is always calm, and the grass is fading yellow on the field. A man stands along the boulevard, his feet treading, it seems, on the horizon itself. On a bustling Monday afternoon, only sky and sea matter.

 

January had offered only the anticipation of the unknown and the uncertain--possibility! It was the beginning of the end, I sensed. Only, I had a vague idea of what it meant. Four months later, I had moved out of my office of four years, moved out of my rented place, and moved out of Cebu.

 

I was adrift for the first time in my life. I had no source of income or guidance about where to go next. All I had was a restlessness I couldn’t define telling me that my life as I had known it till then had to end.

 

But surely the end of the present must mean the beginning of the future. The problem was, I could see only a frightening dark wall before me. So instead of moving forward, I turned around to face a past I had avoided for so long. The next five months saw me going back to Davao and then to New York to play daughter and sister to a family temporarily reunited and still getting used to each other’s stark strangeness.

 

It was at this time that my thoughts began to turn seaward. It was deep into the year, and in the life I had known, sea and infinite possibility belonged only to the realm of summer. Perhaps it was because my breakaway from the real world had over-extended this year’s summer, bringing me to a different shore almost every weekend, even as far as the Puget Sound on the eastern Pacific; perhaps my return to the past had also given me clear sight of my heart’s truest ancient desire. Though I still couldn’t see my future, I could hear it now in the silence of the depths of the sea.

 

Dumaguete, surrounded by rich, reef-fringed islands and the sea itself right beside the main street of the city, was a natural point to start from. I first came here for three weeks in May five years ago, and have come back almost every year since, in celebration of a season when I could taste of the islands as freely as did the waves. This time, I would be staying much longer than one season of warmth.

 

What I did not expect was that in this city by the sea, summer is eternal. While elsewhere people are already wearing jackets, here the days and nights are still stiflingly humid, stores and libraries close for long noon naps, and the grass, strangely enough, is as dry as if we were in the thick heat of summer. Students wear shorts and slippers to school. Now I, too, cannot bear to wear jeans.

 

Every weekend I am at the beach, the nearest one only five minutes away by tricycle or bike ride. Sometimes to dive and swim with the fish, sometimes just to feel the salty air on my tongue. The rest of the time, I have my nose to my books, studying what science has to teach about this sea and its elusive creatures.

 

First night of the Christmas break, before leaving for home, I lay on the sand under the stars with a new friend trading stories, about islands we have yet to bury our feet in, and long drawn-out loves we’re still working up the strength to end. With words we held out traces of lives we’ve left behind, releasing them for the ebbing tide to carry away. At our late dinner in the city afterwards, I rubbed the sand still on my calves and toes--a now familiar, comforting roughness.

 

The wind was warm, as it has always been since I arrived. In a field of withered grass, another season of beginnings.