BY next week, these corridors will be empty.
Above the flushing sounds of the toilet at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, I overheard this line exchanged between two women.
The speaker may have been just observing a trend of immemorial predictability. Like other campuses, UP quickly empties after final exams in December.
Yet, the comment resonated again when I stood before the tableau set up for this year’s Lantern Parade, the tradition closing the year in all UP campuses.
The Oblation is set in the midst of a gigantic eye overlooking a field of installations representing children. From pennants hanging around the Oval, I learn that the theme of this year’s Lantern Parade is “Paaralan Palaruan”.
School, playground. Are these terms synonyms or kindred metaphors? Or, from the way the words are positioned on the pennants, binaries and therefore bipolar opposites?
By day, the Quezon Hall tableau remains the favorite for selfies. The gigantic eye, some of the freestanding children figures, and even the “parol (lantern)” ingeniously designed to resemble a child are wrapped in pastel yarn and dangling with strips of kaleidoscopic color.
By morning, the Quezon Hall tableau is a happy place. It is different at night.
Joggers and bikers still gather on the steps or nearby. Unlike the rest of the year, Quezon Hall and the Oblation are ablaze with light and color.
Perhaps there is something wrong with my 52-year-old eyes but the spectacle turns into a stark presence the dark that saturates what’s beyond that golden circle. Many of the “children,” specially those that are bare outlines or unadorned tracery, become more absence than presence.
In the gloaming, these resemble the chalked silhouettes that mark where bodies lie at the scene of a crime. Rushing from my evening class, I glanced at the Quezon Hall tableau, and felt the cold that was not the nip of evening air.
Schools are emptied not only by holidays. Personal crises jeopardize studies.
Midway this semester, the unjust suspension of scholarships by the Commission on Higher Education forced many teacher-scholars, specially those in private and overseas universities where cost of living is steeper, to drop out from graduate school.
The war in Marawi also displaced students and teachers.
And the other war—the bloodiest and most contested in this nation’s history—is blotting out Filipinos, including those who should have been anticipating now the break from classes.
How can we forget Kian delos Santos pleading before the cops shot him: “May test pa ako bukas (I still have an exam tomorrow)”?
Light brings to sharper focus the dark in us.