Last day last month, I forfeited half of my day’s work to catch up with a bus trip to Bicol. If you could read my previous blog entries written during the same season of the year, you’d probably know how eager I had always been to get home.
Mama has a habit of lighting candles for me and my cousins whenever we take our school exams. She believes that by some divine, supernatural intervention, we could beat the exams without sweat. Call it weird, or even absurd. But since I started schooling, I have always felt the spirits were just around to guide me. Yes, I have a sort of unfounded belief in them. Thus, it’s always been like my personal pilgrimage to visit the burial place of Daddy’s ancestors.
I never found success in slipping through that tight military cordon (that was my job) just to be home during All Saint’s Day for the past 3 years. I should be anticipating the holiday, now that I’m a free civilian. But I went home half-heartedly. The excitement wasn’t there.
Need proof? Although I’ve been expressing my desire to spend the holidays in Bicol, I never laid out a plan. Nothing motivated me to get a reservation ticket for that ever elusive air conditioned provincial bus. And the pasalubong? Nada. Just a few candles hurriedly bought from the National Book Store in Ali Mall. (As if you’d count them as pasalubong for the dead.)
Apparently, there’s this ultimate factor that’s been dampening my spirits whenever I “go back to my roots”. I’m not at peace with how my folks see my current life. Or I’m constantly troubled by the truth that we can never think alike on several personal and family matters.
Half-hearted but determined to overcome the challenge posed by the holiday traveling rush, I rode the “air-continuous” bus (as Fluffy referred to ordinary, non-air-conditioned, open-air buses) to Oas, Albay on the 31st of October 2007.
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