08 ncpoph+
IN THIS SECTION
by QCEngC
LITERARY Editor: John Jared Garcia
LITERARY09
LITERARY09
The best thing about being 18
In Retrospect
If life was a video game, being a child felt as if I was playing just the ‘lite version’.
History was never my favorite subject in grade school. I dreaded the rote memory work that my teachers demanded.
WORDS BY JOHN JARED GARCIA
WE ALL HAVE our version of fears. Many fear death, fear public speaking, or fear creatures that crawl, and others might even cower from the dark. But mine was simple; I was scared of being reduced to nothing. 18th of September 2016—I still remember that day, although not as vivid as before. With obscure fragments of it in my memory, I recalled how I shivered with fear, gritted my teeth, and cried. But what makes it interesting is that I was never used to crying. My mom would always tell me that I would rarely shed a single tear, even when I was spanked as a kid. In fact, she said that she could count with her fingers how many times I cried, and that day for sure was definitely one of her fingers. That day, I remembered waking up with The Beatles music. I love The Beatles for sure, but there’s something different about it. The sound of “The Long and Winding Road” was different this time. Paul McCartney’s voice was raspier, accompanied by a low but distinguishable hiss in the background. His voice seems to wobble every now and then. It almost took me a minute to realize that I
ART BY VINCE DIZON
wasn’t listening to my usual Spotify music, but instead, I was listening from a cassette tape! That is weird since I never owned a cassette tape in my life (aside from my father’s, which is already broken years ago). What makes the situation weirder is that I am not at home. I am lying down in a sparse dry carabao grass with the heat of the sun scorching my whole body, my eyebrows singed by too much heat, and I was drenched in my own sweat. I immediately got up, walked towards the highway, and head back home—but things got even more bizarre. I was suddenly in the street, and the place was loud. It was jampacked with people and was filled with shouts and shrilling sounds of police whistles. Banners and placards were all over the place. One of them says, “Victory to the National Liberation Forces!” These are mass demonstrations, I concluded. Rallies are not new to me, but this one is different, I thought. Aside from the sheer number of rallyists, the atmosphere was more intense. It was as if the life of everyone in the street was in real and imminent danger, like a ticking time bomb waiting for that one big Boom! A few moments later, I was proven right. All hell breaks loose when the street was suddenly silenced, for a moment, by a loud explosion. And then suddenly another one—Boom! Two consecutive blasts. Everyone snapped. The silence was replaced with cries of panic and overwhelming chaos. I don’t know how I got the courage and the strength to move, but I remembered running. I ran, ran and ran—I was bumping people, I can’t feel my feet, and I am almost out of breath— but still I ran. I remembered feeling utmost relief when I got home. I’m home, at last, I am safe—and so I thought. Aside from the fact that our house looked different, the people inside were somehow familiar but different, and our flat-screen TV was gone. I staggered when I was met with strong, incessant, and heart-rending cries. I did not mind the peculiarity of the situation—how strangers were inside my house, and everything looks different—I mustered up my courage and asked, “What happened?” And then one of the ladies
in the house answered, “Jose is gone! Jose is gone! He is in the plaza! My son is gone!” At that moment, I realized I was talking to my grandma. I froze. I felt like my whole body was soaked with ice-cold water. How can I be here? Why is Jose, my father, gone? Then suddenly, I felt something different. A tingling sensation was crawling in my skin. I suddenly can’t feel my feet, and then my legs, and when I look up to my hands, there was none. My crying grandma looked up to me and asked, “Who are you, Hijo?” “I am Jose’s son, grandma, your grandson,” I said. “But, Jose never had a child, and he’s gone,” she replied. As soon as she answered, I felt a big whoosh of air rushing out of my body, and all of a sudden, I was nothing. Then I woke up—in the real world this time. I was crying my heart out. It was in the middle of the night, and I heard my parents opening the door of their room adjacent to mine. I peeked through my window, and I saw the neighbors’ lights turning on. I think I’ve woken them all up. As my parents entered my room, they asked the expected question, “What happened?” to which I replied, “Nothing, just a dream.” However, the truth is, it was never just a dream for me. I was able to visit the past, way before I was born. But history changed—my dad died young, so I was never born. In my dream, history was literally distorted. Moreover, imagine all attempts to distort historical facts; how would this affect our reality? Yes, time-travelling only happens in our wildest dreams, so we can’t literally change the course of events in the past. But changing historical narratives in the present time might even have the same effect—we will be reduced to nothing.
