It's Hard Not to Talk about Feelings
The serpent slumbered even as the rowboats arrived.
I watched the fluvial procession deliver the image of the crowned Madonna and child to its home at the Minor Basilica through the jalousie of my then incommodious, 3-bed apartment. Standing tall and stoic on her pagoda, the Lady of Peñafrancia, endearingly called Ina, leads locals, pilgrims, and tourists yearly through the murky Naga River.
No woman is allowed to set foot in Ina's shrine-barge. To disregard this rule is to invite calamity. According to folk custom, the Nuestra Señora is a jealous woman and must remain the center of attention throughout the procession lest the whole congregation incur her wrath.
The Holy Virgin as characterized, clothed, deified, and propositioned by men. The infant Jesus almost an afterthought or an adornment, a badge on her chest. Both morose, dark-skinned from an apocryphal dog's blood (the Lazarus in this story). The Holy Spirit as a dove frozen in flight against her halo. Underneath her vessel, the silver cherubs. Mysterium, tremendum, et fascinans.
The candles lit on the canoes and on the banks illuminated the water. Silent prayers rolled from the lips of devotees and down the banks. Some were caught between the reeds. Some were stuck on the mud. I wondered if any of them even made it past the paddles. Relieve us from ailments. Exact justice upon my enemies. Provide wealth to my family. Please, Divine Mother, extend your hand and take pity.
I had wished to be elsewhere. The beauty of this ritual was lost on me. Cruel and agnostic, I scoffed at what I deemed as performative devotion. Talking to and begging for favors from a statue was worse than purchasing a lottery ticket. I closed shut the louvre and pretended to be asleep and alone.
If beneath the river Bakunawa stirred, nobody noticed. Long gone are the babaylan who would warn the public of such phenomena. Only one remains, carved by a forgotten artisan, decorated in ornaments and dressed in a gown too large and cumbersome.
Perhaps the serpent is the river itself, slain once again as Ina's ship-sword slices the regional aspect of the Adversary in half.
Or perhaps Bakunawa's spirit has long since migrated into the long line of rowboats trailing after this image of the full moon: a face in mourning, enclosed around a gold aureole.
My life in Naga City in 2012 is as hazy a memory as my childhood in the 90s, but the collective fervor Peñafrancia Festival incites and its iconography left an indelible mark in my psyche that it often becomes the subject of my writing exercises. Every now and again, when I engage in casual religious apologia, I reference this experience, and all the other Christian rituals I was loath to attend.
A., who now resides in the metro, has been worrying about losing her writing voice.
For close to a decade now, she has been a ghost writer for a number of important people. She would write for them speeches, court rulings, official statements. Her job demanded a pious adherence to grammar and syntax and the flexibility to contort her thoughts to match that of her clients. I've always thought her technical knowledge of English was amazing since we were in college but I admire her more for surviving in that kind of environment.
So not surprising but sad all the same that it got to a point when she couldn't recognize herself on the page anymore. She had started using the voices of her employers even when confiding her thoughts in her private journals.
If you're a writer, you would understand how devastating and deeply depressing this is. But even if you're not, workers know the feeling of alienation too well, being unable to see yourself in the product of your own labor.
When we met last weekend, she gave me advice passed down from her mentor to ease her out of this rut:
Describe a memory. Write about how the place looked, what it smelled like, what sounds you heard. What were you doing? Narrate - don't talk about how you felt. That can come later.
I've written less these past 2 years than any other year since I decided I was going to be a writer. It's easy to blame it on my day job and constant exposure to generative AI sludge (though that definitely contributed to my creative decline). I won't forget how dreadful it was when I began struggling to assemble the simplest sentences. Like being struck so hard you temporary lose the use of your faculties. The invisible hand of God seizing her blessing because of your heresy.
It's also to do with preferring to spend more time with loved ones.
And if I'm being honest, I'm just conscious about saying the same things over again, or worse saying nothing at all.
I know I need to be okay with that.
More than losing my voice, which has always been inconsistent anyway, my anxiety stems from my need to ascribe function to my craft, to give it purpose, and to at least pretend it helps me deal with my demons.
I worry about losing sight of who I'm writing for, and most importantly, why I write. I fear the day my words are rendered empty and soulless, self-serving and safe and neutered of politics. I fear that day is getting closer and closer.
A's advice helped me a lot. Though I didn't follow it to the letter. It's hard not to talk about feelings these days.
I have attended two wakes in my lifetime, as far as I remember (there might be more, less memorable ones).
My maternal grandfather was a beloved man. He had accumulated social capital by once being a public teacher, and then barangay captain for five years. When I was a child I've heard my mother's family name, Tamayo, spoken with either gratitude or reverence by strangers. For Tatay's sons, it was a status symbol that allows you to speak over your buddies during drinking sessions, the kind of power they expected to trickle down to their own sons. (Once an uncle got out of jail by invoking the family name.) For my younger cousins, it was immunity from bullies.
The name made that home the unofficial center of town. The entire neighborhood was always welcome to break bread with us.
As for Tatay's daughters, there's much to be said about how that name made their lives more complicated. I won't get into that here, but let's just say there's a lot of emotional labor involved.
I was napping on his bedside when he passed away. I was reading a story from one of his old English textbooks about a chicken that looked like neither a rooster nor hen (Alejandro Roces' My Brother's Peculiar Chicken, as I later learned. My first unknowing exposure to queerness). He had suffered from stroke for two years.
What was he thinking, in his last moments, with no-one else to tell him it was going to be okay? I wasn't his favorite grandchild; we had barely known each other. But I'd like to think he had gotten some kind of comfort with me being there.
It was my closest encounter with death, and I slept through it.
And grief, when my mom found him. I thought then, when she held her father's hand and wailed, that she sounded fake. I had never seen her cry like that before. At ten years old, I was still ignorant to the affairs of the heart.
The family held a traditional Filipino gathering for the recently deceased. There was gambling and sunflower seeds and peanuts passed around that didn't seem to run out. Children were allowed, or were unsupervised enough, to stay up late, eat as much snacks and drink diluted, sickly sweet coffee. The evenings were long, busy, and occasionally rowdy. The mornings were more somber, and meant for cleaning.
Tatay's influence declined when he was buried, and finally disappeared when his wife, my Nanay, died in 2023. I didn't attend her funeral. In my mind she's still alive. I would absent-mindedly ask my mom how she's doing, and if she would accompany me on a bus back to Naga City one last time.
The next wake I attended 26 years later was e.'s father's, last month.
I had slept nada hours the day we took the trip to Quezon Province. Up to that point I have successfully avoided wakes. This time I felt compelled, not only because e. is one of my dearest friends in Los Baños, but because I was one of the people she called for help regarding a matter involving her father's passing, and we had always talked about her family life. I wanted to be there for her personally, and I felt a little guilty because I fumbled for the right words to say over the phone.
Her family's house was lived-in, with barely enough room for the casket in the living room and seats for 6-7 people at a time to pay their respects. When I saw e's. mother sitting in vigil near the casket, resembling my own Nanay, it reminded me of the wake in 2002.
There was a large mirror covered with cloth in their living room. We wondered about the origin of that superstition. Beyond the supernatural, what practical reason had conceived its necessity?
I observed e. as she tended to the visitors and the logistics of the wake, while also holding space for the emotions of others. Perhaps the cloth also served that purpose: so the bereaved would not look at themselves in the mirror and realize their own sorrow before the wake was over.
In truth no metaphor or narrative can accurately portray a friend's grief over tragedy, the way they squint their eyes and clench their cheek before they speak, the way they allow you to hug them a little tighter, a little longer. The way they laugh awkwardly. The way their faces fall when they think you're not looking.
There are days when all we need is someone to listen, be it a friend or a statue. There are days when tears must be shed and prayers must be whispered in the company of others. I understand these better now.
I had planned for a different update for this blog. Something a little less sad, something celebratory, or something mundane, but all the things I wanted to carry back into this space were being emptied from the same well.
Maybe next time?
Side-quests Accomplished
🗡️ Re-watched Witch Hat Atelier in English dub. Perhaps a controversial take that I loved it better than the Japanese dub?
Today's Stat Block
STR: +1 Have managed to restart an exercise routine after neglecting it for 2 weeks
DEX: 0
CON: +1 Sleeping better these days because of the air-conditioning in our room, and well-fed too
INT: 0
WIS: +1 Also reading more books again
CHA: 0