literature

after September 26, 2009.

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Literature Text

this is what it's like, 7 years after the flood.

at the side of my twitter app,
i keep the account of my local city government
pinned and accessible,
so i always know the water level
of the nearby river.

my mother opens the door
every half-hour
during thunderstorms
to ask me what the number is now.

at around 15 meters
she takes the cars out
to higher ground.
at 18 we bring our appliances up.
any higher,
and me and my sister spend the night
watching news from the television
of the hotel room across our school
instead of at home.

there are life-jackets in our attic now.
we did not have an attic that day.
we swam across to our neighbor's house
to sleep on their third floor.
i fell asleep, to the hushed sounds
of my relatives praying the rosary.

i thought to myself then,
if only i kept the books i loved
on my top shelf
instead of the lower ones
for easy reach.

the day we got back
and i saw each of them safe,
i held and smelled all of them
but knew the letter my best friend wrote
the day before she left
for a school across the country
was gone. i no longer keep valuable
memories in my bedside drawer.

my mom had bought rope
from the hardware store earlier that day,
left it open in a plastic bag
on a table on the first floor.
when the water climbed up the stairs,
the bag somehow found its way to us, floating.
we used that to hold on across the way.
my mom was also not with us that day,
safe in my sister's school
that was too high up for the waters.
my mom doesn't know how to swim.
the water in our house stopped rising
right before it could hit the altar.
you know, most days i don't believe
in divine intervention.
i remember these and i get confused.
then i remember the stories
of our neighbors who drowned in their sleep
and i get more confused.

in 2011, our school made us visit a farm.
most people felt the mud on their legs
as filthy, i felt it as cold.
like what we had to wade through
on the way out the village
to eventually pass by
city officials piling up
the dead at the gate-
thinking to myself: they did this.
open up three dams all at once,
the water rushes in right down
to this very city, bringing land with it.

7 years later, when the rain is heavy
my friends still text me asking
if i'm okay. it's hard to explain:
my place never even flooded once
until that day. i was asleep
when i was suddenly woken up,
i didn't expect to go to school
the next three weeks
excused from wearing the uniform
but getting pitying looks
from all my teachers.
i wore what i could find
for the next few years
and didn't feel like me.
so when people think
it's shallow to spend money
on what i look like, i think:
it's been so long since i felt
like i could stand for myself again.
and if a nice jacket
or great eyeliner
will do that for me,
then fuck your judgement.

a lot of friends say
they love the sound of rain.
i still do, on most days.
but only for about an hour.
maybe two, when i'm lucky.
any longer and i start checking
news reports, weather predictions,
wondering when it will stop.
my friends laugh that i pay extra
for travel insurance.
in the back of my head,
i know it's useless
but it was insurance that paid back
the cars we lost and at the time
they applied for it. my parents
almost didn't check it then either.
i guess i still think
of worst-case scenarios.

i sat in my room that day,
wondering if i should text
the girl i loved that i loved her
before it was too late.
i still didn't, i'm not sure
i could tell you
that it's because of cowardice
or hope that i could still tell her
in person. my phone didn't make it
through the swim. as i fell asleep
in our neighbor's house, i wondered
if i had missed the only chance i had.
i never told her. i guess that's my answer.

7 years later, i remind myself:
you do not need death as an excuse
to be brave.

the current was almost too strong, then.
some days, i'm still scared
of being washed away.
I was looking at Tweetdeck and noticed that on the very side of my laptop, my city government's twitter account is pinned and always visible. Just so that when the rains start coming in, I know when to tell my mom we should probably evacuate.

I dunno if any of you guys heard about this massive flood that hit the Philippines in 2009, all things considered I was still pretty lucky because my family didn't suffer any deaths from that day and we had enough financial support and insurance to recover and get the house redone.

I realized I never properly wrote about this. I thought it was finally time to, and as honestly as I possible could.

Will probably edit this tomorrow.
Comments3
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DSteffi's avatar
I've never experienced a flood. We live up in the mountains, so the water runs down. But every time there's a storm, every time the winds would blow too strong and the rains would fall too hard, I get scared in a way I never get scared. This was a beautiful poem, and more. With things that hit our country, I only have the news' point of view, reading this gave me a much more profound understanding.