Angel time

As I write this, it is 4:30 in the morning. The radio is on. I am listening to Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor and feeling a bit out of sorts. In a few hours, I am meeting my friend Argel--if he shows up this time--at a favorite bookstore. The malls here open at 10:00 a.m. I can't wait.

I can't wait to get my hands on Anne Rice's Angel Time, to crack open its covers, to smell its pages, and to savor its words. I can't wait to be taken up on wings to where Rice's writings would take me.

For a month now, Metro Manila and other parts of the country has been battered by storms. We have cried out to God in prayer. We have cried out for help.

God answered. Angels became among us. Miracles abound.

Because of the flood, I took my family and fled from our brick home. The water came up neck deep. We saved the books and left behind everything else. We now live on the third floor of a tall apartment, where the view is both horizontal and vertical. Let me talk of both homes.

Our old home was on the basement floor. In it, you stand chest deep into the ground. Except in the nighttime when it's dark and the neighbors' TV sets blare out telenovelas, it always feels like 5:30 in the afternoon. You have to step out to see if it's high noon or early in the morning. Electric fans needed to be always on for ventilation. Like a mole, I secreted myself in this home. Nestled, I wrote. We were content. Dana could scream as loud as she wanted and no one would hear. Veck and I watched DVDs with the volume up and the neighbors couldn't hear.

If our old apartment was a hole in the ground, our new one is like an orchid's pot hanging in the air. The vertical drop is dizzying, standing on the terrace, and when I stand there to catch the morning sun with my daughter in my arms, I embrace her more tightly. I wonder how it would be to fall from this height. On my way to work, the taxi driver turned on the radio for news. A man jumped to his death from his fifth floor apartment. No one knew why. Family and friends claimed he wasn't suicidal in any way. His mother was devastated. "All he complained about was his toothache. He said it was unbearable."

I wonder if he feels any pain where he is now.

Thrust into the sky like that, you are always aware of the weather. The sun streams through the windows and lights up the sofa like an unashamed guest making itself comfortable. When the skies turn grey, so do the walls. When night comes, it becomes very dark. We are like the canvas that the sky fingerpaints.

Two large windows on opposite sides of our new home, one in the living room and the other in the kitchen, open up a vista for me of rooftops, buildings, flowering trees. The breeze flows freely. The air is sweet with the scent of ripe fruit and fresh laundry flapping and drying on clotheslines.

We moved in Saturday. My first impression was, "Too small. Too claustrophobic." Veck's Ninang Lucy and Ninong Junior helped us move the furniture and clean up. I am grateful because it is through their eyes that I saw I had much to be grateful for. They said it's cozy, and with a little trick to furniture arrangement, can actually appear spacious.

Ninang Lucy gazed out the window. "That's an apple mango tree. Not quite bearing fruit yet, but full of flowers. It will have glorious fruit in season."

I began to like the apartment. My mood shifted. The floor plan of this apartment is very horizontal, like the wings in the theater where actors wait for their cues. The curtain rises.

I witnessed the weather just yesterday when, arriving home from work, I opened the door to the terrace to let the sunlight in. "Hello," I said. It rushed into the room enveloping me in a warm embrace. Late in the afternoon the sky became filled with heavy clouds which unloaded heavy rainfall. From the kitchen window, Dana and I enjoyed watching huge raindrops onto the lower roofs.

Later today, I will sit in the terrace, a cup of chocolate nearby, and read Angel Time. Later today I will meet Toby O'Dare, the character that that Facebook Quiz "Which Anne Rice Character Are You" claimed me to be. I can't wait.

Bach's music has died down, giving way to Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 8, Pathetique, Second Movement. I should get some sleep but can't. I can't wait for the bookstores to open.

I now think of a friend going through a crisis of self. She looks through old emails, trying to find a sense of who she was as told to her by her friends. I fail to tell her that she must move to find who she is as told to her by herself. Her own version of who she is.

But I am wrong. It is God's version--definition, if you will--of who we are that matters most. I AM WHO I AM knows who we really are. He created us.

A friend from Australia, Susan, tells me her life's pursuit is to connect with God. God, as defined by Himself, is "The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations." God knows who He is. He knows who we are. He made the first step. He introduced Himself. "Hi, I am God. This is what I do..." But unlike casual introductions in social parties, an encounter with God leaves one changed, indelibly.

The sky is clear and the air is cool. The sun lights up everything outside. Glazunov - Igor Golovschin's Chant Du Menestrel, Op. 71 now plays in my ears. Like the weather, music changes. But God will always be God. In that we can take comfort.

-=-=-

I was wrong. On TV it said the man hadn't been able to sleep for three nights already, because of toothache. The mom hypothesized that her eldest son jumped seven (not five as I thought I heard) floors because he was still mourning the passing of his father months back. The brother blamed depression due to unemployment. He said he remembered his brother laughing hysterically then suddenly running towards the balcony. Then there were shouts from the neighbors.

The TV news program got a good shot from the balcony from where the victim jumped. Seven stories down, his body lay below, a strange heap, arms and legs in a position that couldn't be comfortable, nor taken out of one's memory once seen. He looked like a human swastika. (Thank you very much, responsible TV news program, for instilling the image in my head.)

Neighbors covered his face with yesterday's papers. Tomorrow he'll be headlines of the tabloids.