August. Summer peaks. Parks
are full. Dogs and kids are stinky and happy. Ice cream is a kid’s best pal
while the adults cool off with their beer, gin and tonics. And here, as life is
bounces everywhere, it all comes full circle. My Aunt Priscilla Cruz Franciso,
my second mother growing up, left her physical body on the 13th of
August, 2012.
She was my mother of affection. She was the
first person who told me I was beautiful, spoke of features in my face which
made me feel slightly elevated than what I normally feel about myself. When
your mother is, for all intents and purposes, a beauty queen (cover for Liwayway, a famous magazine in the Philippines ; muse in University of the Philippines )
you cannot help but, being her daughter, feel like an ugly duckling next to
her. I never liked to fall asleep knowing my Kaka (Aunt) was mad or upset at
me. It made me miserable inside and out. I would crawl out of my mosquito net
and snuggle next to her as she slept, slightly snoring, oblivious to my
presence. All was right with the world once I found my place there.
Life, in all its magnificent
complexity, brought us to that place of separation. I migrated to the United States
with my parents and three siblings. Guilt, sadness, anger and confusion all
balled up in the 19 years of my young life got shipped out of tropical warmth
into the cold, winter Eastern shores of New Jersey. Questions of self that
never needed to be asked came screaming at me from all directions. Questions,
silent and loud, popped up like mushrooms from every nook and cranny after a
rain storm. How do I leave the woman who held me the most? Why did it have to
be? Why? How could God not have given this woman I loved so much a life of her
own? A man to love and have children with and eventually grow old with?