iced lemon tea

there are things you can only wish to understand… things that keeps on evading from being understood. sometimes you are left wondering why after all this years you still can’t fathom the depth or the certainty of some things.  is it really that perplexing?

you feel like you’ve exhausted already all the means, yet you found yourself in the midst of ways you haven’t tried yet. you want to try all of it at once, but you can’t.  now you know you haven’t counted hours or days, but years already. you don’t know if you have to drain your mind out or fill it up more.

yeah.. you know it… but you don’t want to accept it. probably you’re not comfortable with it so you still keep on looking for something you know doesn’t exist. you are not into satisfying your mind but your desire.

you can fault yourself too. you shouldn’t be spending time for it in the first place, yet you like the ecstasy of having just a thought of it. Although you know that there is a very thin line of enjoying it and be enslaved to it, yet you proceed. it’s fun anyway to enjoy being hurt.

…but have you ever think that i might be experiencing the same?

Why i posted Fabrica for my hometown when it is not a town, rather a small (now) village in the city of Sagay, north of Negros Occidental, Philippines?

I’ve grown up on this memorable place where once the cosmopolitan  area in the visayas and is the biggest barrio in the Philippines. Known internationally since the early 1900s up to the year 1976 as the site of the largest lumber company and sawmill in the world, the Insular Lumber Company (ILCO), owned by the Americans, it produces hardwood lumber and has its exports to the U.S., Australia, and to many countries in the world, bringing dollars to the Philippine economy.

In the early 1950s and 1960s, it is among of the most developed barrio in terms of infrastructure, water system, electricity and lighting facilities of which majority of Philippine barrios don’t have.

From 1910 to 1976, it boasts two large movie houses, a cockpit arena, number of medical clinics, drugstores and two private secondary schools (the Holy Trinity Academy run by Augustinian nuns, and the Faraon Institute from which i and my siblings graduated), which is a symbol of progress then.

During the ’50s to 70s, Fabrica was also the commercial and industrial  center of the province of Negros Occidental and the Visayas. Many Chinese businessmen had invested and put up stores in Fabrica especially on the opposite of the steel bridge constructed by the Americans traversing the national highway, crossing the big and navigable Himoga-an river system now called Brgy. Paraiso - named by Bible-believing christians as their sanctuary after planting a Church  which was later washed out by flood.

Now, they called the place a ghost town. All the magnificent constructions during those glorious time are buried under mud and bushes. You have to go through thick bushes to discover the huge foundation of the hospital, huge water tanks were now used as a foundation of one house. Road bricks were dogged out. The place has been literally stripped of its beauty and grandeur. Something that can be kept only in memory… a memory.

We see people the way we want to see them. We are seen probably on a very same manner. Overlooking the very essence of friendship and love, we are enjoying the superficial benefits of companionship. Sometimes, what matters to us are just things that would benefit us for a moment. We don’t care for things that last. To value an unseen is quite expensive… we feel it’s too high to pay a price. We want to enjoy its benefits but we prefer to remember things with regrets. We console ourselves by mumbling such "If only i…, i should  have…" phrases.

We see people. We meet new acquaintances. We select to ourselves what they should be to us… that would maximize our need of them. If their need is greater than ours, we dump the man.

Truly its quite hard to carry someone’s burden. We do know that we have our own struggles. To each his own. And so we go as far as pleasing ourselves and stop short extending a hand when it is supposed to be our turn. Though we found some people doing more, we ridicule them. We find the things they do such a waste.. they’re such a foolish victim of their own inability to reach the height of your intellectual capacity.

But seeing more and looking deeper, there’s something innate in them that we don’t have.  They’re blessed, rich, and happier than we are. When the storms of life hit to the extreme, these people stay calm when we can’t. We’re left wondering how and why.

The most essential in life are things that can’t be heard in the classrooms or lectures. It is something that can’t be read from the pages of life’s manual nor scanned in the works of great men, neither something than can be observed from a distance with our own two eyes.

It can only be learned by living it out.