Erica Dionora

Cutscene

Part I: A Memory

My name comes out like a judgment. The dean reads through his list of graduates, and the video pauses for approximately seven seconds when the letters of my name are splayed across the screen in sans serif.

Mama and Papa stare at the screen, watching my virtual commencement alongside Kuya and me.

“Yan lang?” Papa asks.

Three years of graduate school for seven seconds of screen time. I tell him that we can always play it back once the live event is over. He agrees, so we wait for the end — each one of us sat on the living room couch in our old pyjamas. Then we rewind it, stretch those seven seconds beyond the landscape of time — past and present — until it comes to face with a moment I’ve lived in for so long. A story. One that Papa laments over and over, it has become a memory that I claim as my own.

ARTICLE XIV

Pieces of this article have been redacted so that it reads as follows.

Education

The State shall protect promote and

maintain, an integrated system to

limit the right of

the underprivileged;

out-of-school

adult citizens, the disabled, and out-of-school youth

They

are

an

additional cost

March 22, 1982

Papa’s toe peeks shyly out of the hole on his right shoe. The sole of his left hung with each step like the jaw of a ghost bemoaning its fate.

The security guard standing before the door does not move. “Pasensya na, bawal po kayong pumasuk,” he says.

“He’s a student,” Tita Gigi tells the guard, but he does not meet either of their eyes. Instead, his gaze tracks the sweat pimpling their faces.

It’s thirty-three degrees Celsius outside of Iloilo National High School, where all the other students are greeting the day’s heat dressed in their Sunday best and eager to get on stage in their caps and gowns.

The security guard shrugs, staring pointedly at Papa’s worn shoes and wrinkled beige polo shirt and jeans. “Pasensya na.”

Tita Gigi steps forward, face to face with the unyielding guard. “Pasensya?”

Papa puts a hand on Tita Gigi’s arm and urges her away from the guard and the school building’s entrance, which begins to congest with other graduating students and their parents. He pretends not to notice the iron-pressed clothes and shined shoes of his classmates or the fact that their mothers and fathers are with them as he walks toward the school’s quad that he and Tita Gigi passed only moments before. She puts a hand on his shoulder when they reach the sidewalk just past school property.

“Sorry sa sapatos, To.” Tita Gigi eyes the worn pair of shoes on Papa’s feet and pats him on the back apologetically. Papa shrugs, saying nothing of the shoes that Tita Gigi’s husband had lent him. He tells her not to worry, assures her that there is always next time. He tells her that when he graduates university, he will have shoes and clothes, and he will be on stage.

Neither of them believed that.

Part II: A Conversation

My name comes out like a curse.

“Dios ko po, anak! Vancouver?” Mama drops her half-eaten shrimp, and I poke at my cold rice noodles.

The dinner table is surrounded by four chairs occupied with stiff spines and vacant lungs. I am the first to recover my breath, but just barely. “That’s where the office is, downtown Vancouver. It will be a good experience for me.”

Kuya and Papa are quiet, plates too full to take on any more.

“There are lots of jobs here. You have family here!” Mama reasons, waiting for an explanation or, perhaps, an apology for my wanting to leave. Instead, I tell her that I am tired.

“Iiwan mon na lang ba kami?” Mama asks me.

I swallow a forkful of guilt with my noodles, and the words are caught between my teeth; I pick them carefully.

“The office is in Vancouver,” I repeat.

Silence colours in the negative spaces of our conversation.

Mama blinks a staccato rhythm, and her eyes overflow with water, salty, much like the one that stands between her and the home she left behind for this life that I could never seem to love.

ARTICLE XV

The Family

Pieces of this article have been redacted so that it reads as follows the Filipino

strength

is

a conviction

to care

for the

family

August 8, 2008

My right foot was first baptized in a puddle of rainwater just outside of Pearson Airport. In my smallness, I thought I would drown, but the waters here are never hungry, only sanctimonious.

Half past noon, Mama, Papa, Kuya, and I finally arrived at a brown-bricked, ten-storey apartment building on the east end of Scarborough, where the night always seemed to come before its time.

I remember the way our voices echoed inside our apartment and how the sounds of bags and boxes being unpacked had bounced around the walls and ceiling like star projections in the dark. We said our grace before meals over spicy ramen noodles, split four ways, but Kuya and I ate most of it. Papa rewashed Styrofoam plates and plastic forks; we slept on beds of flattened cardboards; Mama cried during her nightly prayer when she thought everyone had fallen asleep; and I counted the minutes down until daybreak.

The next sunrise did not come for another few years.