COUNTDOWN: TEN DAYS

(Mike’s Final Appeal)

So you have made your choice.

I beg leave:
Let me journey with our children
Back to Baguio
Where the past still hovers nigh
Where Love smelled fresh
As pine scent after the first rains
Where Faith was unsullied
As a newborn’s innocence
Back to where the biting cold
Was conquered by your feather-light touch
Where every space of emptiness
Was crammed by your presence
Where the wonted wine glass
We shared on a thousand nights
Was not a corpus of myriad shards

Let me and the children
Dunk into the familiar
Before it morphed into fiction
In our old hotel room, we will relive the laughter
Which once echoed repeatedly in our life
May it burn in their memory
Like footprints purposely abandoned
On wet cement.

There, in that honeymooners’ arcadia
I will break free, at least momentarily
From this searing melancholy
I will probably shed some tears
But –thank Providence- they will be disguised
As spatters of Baguio’s incessant rain

Then you can take my children to your new life
One without me
In the dining table
In the living room
In the bedroom
In your heart
Because someone else will be

But at least, tomorrow
I can put my feet up, assured
They will always hark back to the Baguio days
When there was love

And, in it, there was I.