Wednesday, March 18, 2015

12:37 AM | Lost Spring

In his later years, Albert Einstein concluded that how we conceive of time is an illusion, a construct we have created to box in the simple matter that everything -- the past, the present, and the future -- exists simultaneously, is happening all at once. All at once. Perhaps this isn't so hard to believe. Last night, for example, I went to Kurambo's for dinner and while waiting for my order to come, I allowed myself to absorb the sight of this newish grill in Tubod, a neighbourhood I used to live in as a kid. I could feel myself occupy two spaces at once: that moment last night while waiting for my meal, and also an entire childhood spent passing by this very spot to go home to the house my family rented somewhere in the interiors of Tubod -- or Springville, as the people who lived here would rather call it. That very spot was once a big old house, now gone, which tottered beside an abundant spring -- the "tubod" of the place's nomenclature. Here, everyday, I'd catch the neighbourhood's women do their laundry by hand. (Many of them worked as laundresses for students living in the dorms in nearby Silliman. No washing machines then, nor laundromats.) Last night, while waiting for my food to come, I closed my eyes and I could still hear those women's loud chattering over the icy spring waters, the sound of their paddles batting thick wet cloth which punctuated their gossip. The spring is now gone. There's only this restaurant built on top of it, the waters below sealed off by concrete. We have become so good at paving over everything. I felt delirious afterwards, having to occupy both past and present at the same time. I saw the boy I was then -- this was easy; but did he perhaps also see me in the shimmer of the spring water soon to be erased, an older form of him forlorn in the future, looking back across the aching gaps of memory, thinking about what we have exactly gained from the loss of so many things, like a spring?

Labels: life, memories

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS