from when i couldn't sleep

for weeks in the last couple of months, i couldn't sleep at all. or when i did, it would be dawn and i'd stagger into class a few hours later, mumbling "miyanhamnida, sonsengnim" to my professor. this post takes from an email i (think i) sent to the polymath around that time. i don't remember if i really did send it. here goes:

back in 1991, when papa was arrested and kept in solitary confinement at camp aguinaldo for supposed leftist activities, he wrote a poem about us, his three children. when i got to read it during one of our visits a month later, when he had been transferred to the camp crame detention center for political offenders, i was suprised to see that he had described me as onion-skinned. it was the first time really that i had any idea how he as a father felt for or thought of us. he's not at all demonstrative or expressive about his feelings.

i'm not sure where that original poem is now. i remember it as being very creased and smudged, having been folded and unfolded many times, maybe by papa. i'd like to think it's somewhere between the pages of my journals. it's not the most lyrical of poems (it starts with "when this forced solitude brings me to the depths of despair...") but still i cannot think how he could write at all. i cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like for him, trying to finish that poem. and i am amazed that he could the find words in that place, at that time.

but i am only half-surprised that he turned to poetry during that dark time. he is, after all, a writer. for a week or so, we didn't know if we would ever see him alive again, and i know he felt the same. and so in those hours and days when no one knew where he was, or whether he was still alive, he was thinking of us, his children, and trying to remember exactly how each of us was like. i'm not really sure what triggered this sudden memory. but right now, i realize he really knows and understands us better than he lets on. my father is a brave man, braver in some ways than in others.

the poem ends with the half-wish, half-knowledge that we will all be together again, and that we can finally finally get to know one another. it's been 15 years since that terrifying year, but i know that i still don't know my family that much. in many ways, we remain strangers to one another, even if we don't have to be. we still don't know how to talk to each other. so many years. i want so badly to think all that time hasn't been wasted. maybe this is all just to say i'm missing my family (papa, bernice, kuya, mama) terribly right now?

why am i telling you this? because i can. because i know you'll let me. and even if you don't always know what to do or say to make me feel better (and i know you feel compelled to think of something to say because you know i go on these talking/remembering jags whenever i'm upset), i know you'll read or listen as you always do, as closely as only you can.

and i love you for that.