So is love, so it is

How I loved my life, its details, way down to its simplicity. More often than ever, during my home-away-from-home years in college, I'd wake up at the tickle of sunlight and at the sound of my mind singing my mantra, "Life is ever so beautiful!"

I've always believed it to be, thanks to my family, not for what riches we don't have, but for raising me into someone who believes that life is not so unkind; into someone who believes in chances and change.


I think I miss the mantra. It's like someone inside had been both too loud and too silent at the same time. The melody...of serenity had escaped me, gone with my mastery with the flute. And did I see it coming, that the most wonderful thing in this world would come all the way to rob its own description from me? I didn't.

Almost eight years ago, one fair afternoon in 2004, there was this boy sitting on a high wall that separated the highway from the sea, under the shade of Talisay trees. "If you're doing it, you better get yourself pretty darn ready for pain," he told me.

Scary and true, I knew. But I used to believe in fairy tales, so what I managed was, "But one is the irony of the other. Pain is its irony."

"I thought so too."

I miss the mantra, and how I believed that, "Om shanti, I am a peaceful soul." Because that thing ever so beautiful has suddenly become unfair, or so I thought. It's 'the wonderful' against 'the beautiful', and in the end, life gives in to its ugly curse. Now, this is silence without serenity. What's to be said when you bet your worth and now it's gone?

If sometime someday, I'd happen to see that boy again, I'd tell him, "You were right. It was a necessary irony."

Maybe he'd smile. Maybe he'd shrug.

"But I'd still be praying that one day I could prove you wrong. You know, life is ever so beautiful. So is love, so it is."

Inshallah, those beautiful words would come back to me.