I am Home

21December 2012

I arrived at our house the same day, December 19. Our room was messy as usual and inside it was musty and ammoniacal. My sense of smell usually is heightened at home.

Olfaction is not my prime sense but I had the idea that mine’s a bit more sensitive than others. Shouldn’t that fact make me able to live more in the present since olfaction is a sense of the present? Compared to seeing and hearing or tasting and feeling, we get vivid memories related to these senses, olfaction becomes the background sense. I remembered discussing with Gab when we met May Idy in Luneta that scheduled events generally are concerned about all the other senses other that olfaction. There are no museum exhibits at all that involve historical evidences related to smell like this is how Rizal’s urine smells like or this is the scent of Bonifacio’s morning breath. No one decides to hold smell fests or scent buffets. It’s as if olfaction as a sense cannot stand by itself. It is transitory and intrinsic. You cannot hold it out if it’s diffused like fart or keep it in bottles like perfume at will. If someone could, I’d have Shiela’s smell in a bottle and I would sniff it day by day.

Scents last not forever and they could not be preserved into photographs or audio records. Scents can only be a commodity in terms of perfumery. Even if scents are not that much profitable (I know how much profitable it is for Joel Cruz) as events of commodity like concerts or the theater, they are the usually unconscious markers of the present, the background where other senses take turns being protagonists. How would I not know, in my dreams I could not smell anything and my experience of reality becomes complete by it.

How would I not be convinced of the claws of poverty mingled with opulence in the streets if not for the smell of polluted air and the every now and then occasional whiff of a walking stranger’s perfume? Or the stink of cockroach, urine, spit and feces? What about my self-labeled peppery smell of vagrants who haven’t bathed for I don’t know how long? Because of odors I know I am there.  Know I am in a putrid pest infested place or fancy being in a dreamt of place with the more ideal scent of foreign air as has seeped into those balikbayan boxes through those imported, taped and named pasalubongs. Or that I am home amidst the bananas, pineapples, mangoes, rambutan, guavas and the madre de cacao? Is this gift of keen olfactory sense not conniving in making me go out of over speculating in my mind and into enjoying the sensual signals my senses could richly perceive?

I am with the people I care about most in this world. I am home. How I missed this child. She’s gotten fatter. I have gone thinner with worrying. The scale shows I’m only at 41kg now. No wonder the first remark I get from my college friends I met recently, even from my mother was that I had gone skinny, “Ampayat mo Steffi.” That was not a compliment or a criticism for me. But I kept wondering, is that all that is there to see in me? Or is my being skinny really already alarming?

I will not be able to manage Shiela on my own now. I’m sure, I’ll break like a twig if I try to lift her by myself. I have made myself less useful to my family by getting this light. I will gain weight before the start of next year. But I find it hard. I get full easily. My appetite has shrank, so did my stomach it seems. I am guessing my muscles are already wasting away, I get frequent back and arm aches even without any exertion. What is there with being skinny really? Is it that desirable? I am mentally deranged? Is it really deranged or to put it better, I am over thinking, using my mind fully I am able to disregard physiologic needs. I have been able to go on without eating except if the hunger becomes very pressing. So I got skinny.

Would girls of this generation really do anything to get thin? The price is high and I personally didn’t want to be this light, I am currently underweight. I just want to be under the BMI definition of normal. I was constantly in that category but the self-afflicted pressure of self-realization has disrupted my physiologic mechanics.

My definition of self is not yet intact and my concepts with which I conduct my life are still untested and unanalyzed. How would I know which to trust? Which to follow? Would I get an end to this questioning? I will wait. Being oneself is a journey. I know I will be surprised again by myself. May it be good surprises though.

With Sam at home, we, the three of us, talked on about what has beens and what has happened when we were away from each other. It was natural for us to mention what happened to us and most I could talk of at that point was how I’ve been so blessed with all that I’ve received. I did not speak to them of my distress about it.