One must have experienced at least once in your life, standing on a bridge and looking down at the flowing waters below. While there, following one particular foam of white water from right under you until it has flowed a few distance away had always been a little game I indulged in which aided me in my daydreaming.
It’s not that looking down from a bridge was a regular thing for me. It was because, many a time during elementary grade, the school bus would leave without me and cause me to walk from Matina campus to our family residence in Ponciano. Not that the bus driver’s actions were intentional; I was just always so pre-occupied back then with extra-curricular activities like play and hanging around after school that everyone left me. It was at such times when, as a placebo perhaps for a long walk ahead before nightfall, I would look forward to reaching Bankerohan Bridge, a good three-quarter lengths from home, and stop there awhile to rest and watch the river flow from under me.
Looking back now, I’m of a mind to compare that, like those foams of white water from long ago, I too may have watched life stages and people until they have flowed far from my sight and totally-disregarded them altogether them for newer distractions. Directly from a child’s viewpoint, I have seen a tidy sum of my family members parade by my eyes; some starting as little babes until they have grown to be adults, with babes and families of their own in tow. In the same manner, I have witnessed our uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, cousins and other relatives progressively morph from agile and lovable entities to slowed-down versions of their former sprites. Sadder still, many even never got to reach their expected prime when their journey to life’s ocean was cut short. With that, how I just wish every death was as forgettable and fleeting as those tiny bubbles of foam. Truth is, every single one is just simply on its own, a sharp and raw pain that one always remembers in detail.
The passing of each year is nothing like that. Some look back on their days as mere milestones of personal accomplishments, while some regard these as jump-stages which drop and fall as the year goes by. There are others who just love to analyze trends in everything; from business to weather, political to religious or whatnot, and simple forget that, whatever the outcome, they were never really in control of the whole drama. Or are they? Whether we matter or not is still as vague as that idea of a butterfly wings fluttering in a rainforest having an effect on something thousand miles away.
In a nutshell, we merely tend to lean on to what is more comfortable for us to remember and then tick them into our year-end. Then, we put aside those that leave a bitter taste in the mouth, funneling them as resolutions for the coming twelve months. And it’s December again.
