“Your friends already thought you are dead.”

Not a long time ago, my father would arrive home from his night-shift work to find me by the window on the second landing of our rented apartment hunched over the iron-board doing my practice writing. When he woke up early in the night to prepare to go to work, he would be startled to find me still writing by the window. He then would tell me as he dressed up that I should go out because my friends already thought me as dead. From then on, whenever he would find it to his comfort and alarm at the same time, he would tell me:

“Your friends already thought you are dead.”

Memory as to when the exact time when I firmly decided to become a writer already fails me. But I remember during my sophomore year, coming home from the campus clutching James Joyce’s Dubliner’s that I would spend the entire night that time and the succeeding days after that intent on learning the craft of writing. It was during the time after we had just moved to another street which I considered the beginning of the severance with my ties with my true home. The 1992 Presidential Election campaign was on full force and I had copies of several major broadsheets reading the barrage of attacks on candidate Miriam Defensor’s state of sanity. (On the day of the election I would participate in the process serving as a PPCRV watcher but wishing I could have participated as Defensor’s watch man instead.) It was also during that time when The Inquirer launched its new section Young Blood. Now, this section was the first target of my writerly endeavor. But I just started to hold a pen to write then. I never knew how to write. It would take me the literally the whole day just trying to compose a decent sentence, much more a paragraph.

When my father would say to me “Your friends already thought you are dead” I knew I had discarded the old lackadaisical life that I had. It used to be that there was nothing for me to do then in the house. What I was used to do was to spend the time at the entrance of the alley in our street engaging in a never-ending senseless yakking with young guys like me. We barely engaged in any activities then. The time was spent purely to kill and bid time because we thought when we grew up all the time that we would have will be spent working. So what we did before that time comes was to embrace time as if we had so much of it.

And then I decided to become a writer. And I also decided to read. It would take several years more before I could finally construct straight from my head a good sentence and a decent essay too good to be true for me that I could pull off. When my writing buddies read somewhere that Nick Joaquin’s reply to the question whether he thinks in Pilipino first before he writes it in English was that he thinks in English, we considered it as pure braggadocio coming from a literary genius. It would only dawn on me when I myself was already starting to pound on my keyboard as I write that it is indeed true that one thinks in English when you write in that language.

Now, almost halfway done with my language learning, my friends think more that I’m alive when I’m at home and can bring them, from time to time, a couple of cases of Red Horse to celebrate and share life.