There are a million things I want to tell Ma. I want to tell her that I don’t mean to make her life harder, that I don’t mean to make her feel like I’m wasting all her hard work.
I want to tell her that the real reason I don’t want to go to graduation is because I always thought I’d have Pa there in the audience watching me.
But I have no idea how to let any of these words out without bursting into tears.
The two of us sit in silence until Ma dismisses me from the table. “You should get started on your homework.”
She waves me off when I try putting the dishes in the sink. “Ako na. I’ll handle it.”
Maybe it’s for the best. I’ll probably just make everything worse, like I always do.
Following Ma’s orders, I let her be and retreat to my bedroom.
5
You can hide all the pictures, avoid talking about them, but you know what you can’t do? Delete someone’s digital footprint.
I’m very, very grateful that my dad had a few glimmers of internet fame.
If you searchhappy piano man philippines mall, the top result is a video of my pa playing Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together.” Seeing an unplayed piano was Pa’s weakness. When we went to the mall in our area on Sundays, he couldn’t resist playing at least one song on the piano down on the first level.
At the start of the video, my dad asks the crowd around the piano for song requests, then he points to the person who shouts out, “‘We Belong Together’!”
“Of course I’m going with Mariah Carey,” Pa says as he takes a seat on the piano bench.
PalovedMariah Carey. Even though his voice could never reach her high notes, he always belted out her songs during our drives to school. Achi once teased Pa that listening to Mariah Carey was a “girlie” thing.
“If appreciating talent is girlie, then I’ll be girlie,” Pa replied. He then continued playing Mariah on repeat while educating us about which scales she’s able to hit and how she writes all her songs.
Singing was something Pa and I bonded over. Achi called me the “queen of unsolicited singing” since I used to sing everywhere—in the shower, while doing homework, during car rides. My sister gave me time-outs and placed her hand overmy mouth when she needed moments of peace and quiet. But Pa was the one person who always wanted to hear my voice.
I make a mental note that there have been twenty more views on the video in the past week. Even if I watch the video every day, it still doesn’t explain the rising view count. I like thinking that there’s some aspiring piano player out there who gets inspired by watching Pa.
My dad was always the happiest when he was playing the piano. And it’s not the classy, cool smile singers have once they finish a mind-blowing performance and grin to the crowd implicitly communicating,Yeah, I did THAT.No, even in this video, Antonio Ilagan looks like some happy-go-lucky dorky dude who got high from playing the piano.
Pa always embraced whatever made me happy, no matter how ridiculous. It’s the reason why I still have snowflake stickers glued to my ceiling. I had thisFrozenphase when I was younger and kept telling my family that I wanted to see snow.
Achi and Ma were on the same page and tried educating me about geography and climate conditions. “Nika, we live very close to the equator. See?” Achi said, pointing to the Philippines on the map. “That means we have a tropical climate and if we do have snow, it’d be a nightmare for agriculture, livelihood, infrastructure.”
But that night, Pa went into my room, knelt before my bed, and said he had a surprise. “Guess what?” he whispered to me. “I found you snow.”
I remember I was confused and said, “But it doesn’t snow in the Philippines.”
“Dinala ko dito. Special delivery for my bunso.”
“But Ma and Achi said it was impossible.”
“Superstar.” Pa used to call me that all the time. “That’s why we dream bigger.”
So Pa took out these snowflake stickers and spent the night decorating the ceiling on my part of the bedroom. Achi asked me once if I wanted to have our ceiling repainted since cracks began to form, but I hated the idea of not having those faded, tattered snowflakes looking down on me.
I count the patterns on each snowflake while I wait for the moment some higher being finally grants me the gift of slumber.If I fall asleep right now, I’ll get a respectable seven hours of sleep.Every time I get bouts of insomnia, my sister always suggests that I try some guided meditation videos that make false promises like:Fall asleep instantly, fall into deep sleep in FIVE minutes!
Fun fact about me: Meditating makes me want to stab my eyes out.
I usually end up spending an hour, stillwideawake, feeling even more frustrated after a voice instructs me with bullshit like “find your center of gravity and become aware of your pinkie toes.”
How can I find peace when my brain is suddenly confused about what my toes are supposed to feel like?!
