TWO weeks ago, my dad and I found ourselves back at Buyong.
It was a Sunday, early in the morning. And there we were to our complete surprise back at the beach that we had spent much of my childhood in. Every weekend actually, growing up.
Our family would troop all into our brown station wagon, cross the old Mactan bridge, twine our way past the empty lots, scour the shore, the sea to our left, and to our right, one, maybe two houses.
Till we reached that small rugged road we all recognized, where we’d turn right, head straight, right up to the sign that said “Chances Are”—a beach house owned by the Chans—Tito Cesar, Tita Mila. To spend the rest of the day at sea, or beside it, with the rest of the family’s friends.
A whole motley crew really of doctors and their families, who loved to sing, and play mahjong, and talk, and eat, and drink, and play poker, and tell jokes, and laugh and laugh— they called themselves the Sunday Group.
And every Sunday it was—from high noon till dusk, in the water.
Or scouring the shore when it was low tide gathering sand dollars and starfish, watching a slew of multi-colored crabs claw their way out of there holes, till one clap one step sent them back to hiding. Who knew about sunburns or SPFs.
The water was there for the taking, and the sun. And especially in summer we were all dark save for our teeth. All up until high school. The whole of childhood really.
Now of course, the whole place is changed. The small backroad’s still there only this time, thinner, scraggier, potholed by years and years of tires and rain. When wooden fences turn into cemented walls, apparently it’s the road that’s first to go.
Where used to be empty dry lots of rock and weed are now two-three story houses, little overnight places, dive shops.
Uphill climbs are leveled into pavement. A view of coconut trees gives way to the latest kitschy ad of a cellular phone’s load promo.
What did we expect? Urbanity, or at least our version of it, had arrived in this place.
And the old beach house? Well, the lot had been sold a few years back. Now, the whole place has been leveled, except for maybe the old cement foundations of where houses used to be.
Gigantic versions of a map for the absent.
In the face of what’s lost, what’s missing, it’s a wonder what the mind chooses to imagine—where the veranda used to be, the rooms, where the old beachhouse by the shore used to stand before a typhoon had blown it away, where one used to run, swim, sit down idly playing with the sand with one’s foot.
Also a wonder what the eye chooses insistently, almost desperately to recognize—an angle of light, a tuft of grass, a wall perhaps now dislodged and left leaning against the ground, anything really that would confirm that this indeed and without a doubt was the place that one had left.
Strangely, it’s the trees that remain: the one right beside the now-invisible porch, the other one nearer the shore. And yes, the rocks. The rocks remain. The one right by the sea that one could swear was exactly the same one one had sat on years ago, feet paddling into the water. In the greater scheme of things, it’s these that remain—background and landscape to our stories.
While it is us, the purported protagonists of our lives that barely survive.
Unlike the shrub and the stone, whose own persistence and power rest on their stillness, it is our very mobility which betrays us—moving away, coming back, never coming back. Time to the rock is mere erosion, to the tree another ring round its trunk.
It is only to us that time wages this strange insistence to confront us, in the face of our fleeting resistance to it.
Through the years, we become relentlessly stubborn to it, knowing perhaps that we are most vulnerable to it: its tides, and weathers, as restless as our own moving on, our growing up.
Tito Dodong and his telescopes. Timmy’s shades.Tita Olga swimming in the late afternoon. Marnie, Alex, Bado, Edwin, Melissa, Teddy, Tina, who are all no longer in Cebu.
Twenty years!