Bibliography - Book I

This post is a copy of my now defunct Friendster blog. Friendster blog just isn't good, so I migrated all my posts from there to here.

About a Boy.

Not too long ago, I was a boy who didn’t care about the things I did, who didn’t care about what was going to happen to me or to others because of what I did or didn’t do. I still wasn’t that apathetic or antisocial or pachydermic at that time. Neither was I stupid. I just didn’t know what to do with the things I had or didn’t have. Being only 12, I had nothing much to do, so I had all the time in the world to waste away my time. I was myopic. I couldn’t see the water in my eye called "possibility."

I entered UP High School in Iloilo in 1995. A restless boy who came from a rural town 25 kilometers away from the city, I was thrilled about and proud of the idea of schooling in UP. More especially of schooling in the city.

From our town, Alimodian, not many parents could afford to send their child to a city school and not many could pass the entrance exam test in UP. So I had reason to be proud. And so I
was proud.

When I think of all the things that happened to me from way back the time I could remember, I try to ponder all the possibilities — the what-could-have-beens, the what-ifs — that now are in fact not.

Like Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (or probably it is because of that book I realized this), I arrive at an inevitable conclusion: that the possibilities that didn’t happen will forever remain as possibilities in the past; that they will never ever anymore turn into reality since the time given for them to turn into reality has lapsed. And so they are frozen in time. Like the magnificence of the frozen mammoth in Siberia, the possibility of the frozen possibilities is an illusion.

How can something frozen and stone dead be magnificent? And how can something that’s already past still be possible? Possibility really is a thing of the future. So once lightning strikes a certain point, the factuality of that point having been hit becomes established. The other possible lightning hit points become fiction.

The day I received the letter confirming my having passed the UP High School Entrance Exam was the night my father slapped me on the face. Of all the memories that could be remembered or forgotten, this one memory is still etched on my brain. This one memory which I didn’t chose to remember nor even choose to forget.

Can anyone choose his or her memory?