Do I remember?

I use to write all the time. I still have all my journals, from my first pink diary with the gold lock in kindergarten, to last year’s semi-scattered neglected leather bound book from Ross. I always loved to write, and to write where I need to go brings back the happiest moments in my childhood with my family. Those happiest of moments come hand in hand with the most painful butchered hemorrhaging heartache I can verbalize with words. Love has always been about pain. My heart was broken at the age of 5. The more questions I asked about the past, the angrier I became. How could something so beautiful be so fucked within a matter of moments? I string them along, bit by bit, part by part. Playing the scenes over and over…where did it all go wrong?

It was my mother’s fault. It was my nanay’s fault. It was my tatay’s fault. How does my brother feel? It was America’s fault. Like a teenybopper crazed over their pop idols’ poster son the wall, I placed my father on a pedestal. It was always someone else’s fault until I learned how to blame it all on myself.

Whose fault is it that my happiest of memories are so locked away that when I return to them all I am is a ball of mucus and stinging eye balls???

Do I not remember the full day because I was 5? Or did I repress it? What is memory?

I must’ve wore my gray dog-eared fuzzy cap that day. I wore it everywhere. Aside from my red, yellow, blue, and white Nike’s, that hat was always on my head. Except that day. The day I was taken into America. None of my photos show my hat.

I don’t remember posing with my childhood friends, whom I would play dolls, hide and seek, make-believe, tag, etc. But I have photos of it all.

I don’t remember the blanket I woke to that morning when I had to say good-bye to everyone I knew and loved. But during my last visit to the Philippines my dad took it out of his drawer and asked me if I remembered it?

I don’t remember how I said good-bye to my first pet: Zero my skinny mutt of a puppy. But I later found out that someone had poisoned him because he would not stop barking. Did he bark so much because he missed me? I don’t remember him being a troubled pup.

I don’t remember the hot sticky drive to the Manila International airport from Baguio in my dad’s red Jeep. Did I sleep the whole way?

I don’t remember what I ate, what it smelled like, what I felt, or when I got my passport photo taken.

All I remember, without the help of photos my dad took is: my mom asked me to pack my toys in a bag. It was a big pink clunky vinyl bag with colorful shapes sewn on the front. Funny thing is, I don’t remember what I packed. All my mom said was that we were going on a trip.

No one told me the trip would mean I would be leaving my homeland forever. No one told me I would not be seeing my dad for years, if that. No one told me that my father had to sign papers stating he had given up custody so that I can leave the country. No one told me that the only reason my father signed those papers was because he was lied to about their intent and actual purpose. Nonetheless, the consequences stuck. No one told me that all those trips we took to Manila before hand was so I could get a passport. No one told me I was an accident. No one told me that when I was being born my mom lied to her parents telling them she was taking exams and that’s why she couldn’t go to Manila to welcome them back from America. No one told me my mom thought about aborting me, and my dad had to talk her out of it. No one told me it would hurt. No one told me it would still hurt.

Piece by piece I try to mend it all into one cohesive story. But the antagonists and challenges tear and claw away at the happiest moments of being with my family: my father, my mother, and my younger brother.

No one tells me about how I use to run around and laugh when I was a kid, No one tells about all the trips we use to take along the Pangasinan countryside. No one tells me about how I loved Taho. No one tells me how I loved to go to the market and travel the Baguio streets with my view from my father’s shoulders. No one tells about the purple stuffed monkey with Velcro paws I use to wear around my waist as a belt. No one tells me about my cousins in Bolinao and how much fun we’d have together catching dragon flies, playing at the beach, and eating mangoes.. No one tells me about that here. But my father would remind me through his letters, and the few talks I’d had with him over the years.

All I have left is the past. I can’t make new moments with my family. My family is dead. There is no longer my father, my mother, my brother, and I. My mom and dad haven’t spoken in years. My mom hates my dad. Shes managed to survive the onslaught of loneliness. My dad never got over my mom. He hasn’t formally dated anyone since her. While my brother and I drown in the lack of something we once had.

Dreaming of a remedy. Dreaming of satiating the pain. Dreaming of a new kind of happiness.

No one told me this is the American dream.