Chapter 3: The Weight of Memory is Equivalent to the Pull of Gravity
The rest of the afternoon felt like a broken flow of time. It brushed past me as a quantum breeze: voices, lectures, gray events slipping in and out of consciousness. The entire time I was dreaming—yet still caught in its suspension. No matter how fast time seems to project itself, I couldn't get myself out of it, grounded by my own mortal limitation. All I could do was to wait for everything to end. And the waiting felt like an eternity.
This time, I am waiting for the rain to pass.
I have an umbrella that sits tightly in my hand, but I still don't have it in me to leave school and go home. I'm staring at something outside, but the point is slowly unfocusing, vanishing into reverie. I feel as though part of me is still floating somewhere in the transience of time. My mind is drifting away, going nowhere.
I think I'll never know why I'm helplessly drawn to the rain. Though there's some form of enlightenment in how each raindrop comes into form. Surely, science has it unraveled: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, rainfall—but everyone forgets that each drop comes from the clouds, from the sky. All throughout history, people have gone immeasurable steps to reach it. They built the tallest towers, airplanes, space shuttles, air balloons, dragons. But they have forgotten that each raindrop is a fragment of the sky. If you gathered all of them, they would amass into an ocean— a mirror, reflecting what it once was. But most people would evade them like atomic bombs. Others just get wet.
I stare down at the big puddle in front of me; ripples are continuously blossoming. Sacred Geometry right before my eyes—until a little pair of boots stomps and it splashes. Splinters. Fireworks.
The little girl has now become the center of my universe. She's about four or five years old, wearing a pink raincoat that matches her boots. I watch her playing on the puddle when her parents, holding separate umbrellas, approach her to give her shade. The umbrellas intersect, and she giggles and turns.
The girl looks exactly like me.
A throbbing pain hammers my head. Cracking my skull open that I scream. But they don't hear me as they begin to walk away. All three of them holding hands, smiling, laughing. I run, but my limbs give in, and I splattered to the ground.
The weight of memory is equivalent to the pull of gravity.
No matter how much I stretch my arms, I'll never reach those figures fading in the grainy mists of the rain, going back to a time capsule that sinks into the ocean, where getting there means to drown. But still, I hold out my trembling hand and never let go.
I don't know how long I've been lying there, but I feel Raven's hands pulling me up, defying gravity. I hear her screaming at me. I can feel her force as she drags me inside, the stings of friction as she wipes fabric against my muddy face, my wounded arms, elbows and knees. The electricity as she shakes my shoulders, waking me up. But my world is staring desperately into the rain, wondering what else it's hiding.
...
The next morning, I feel restless.
I wake up an empty vessel. Weightless. Like I can float myself away if I want to—and yet at the same time, I cannot get myself up from the bed. So, I pretend that I'm still in that rainy moment yesterday, reaching my hands to the ceiling.
There's a soft knock on the door, and Raven enters. I can feel her eyes watching me. "What are you doing?"
"Drowning in paradoxes."
She smiles. "Good thing I made rice porridge. Get up and eat."
Struggling, I follow her to the kitchen and sit at the dining table. She serves me the steaming food and hands me a spoon. "How are you feeling?" She asks.
"Fine." I blow on the hot porridge in an attempt to make it edible soon enough. I was famished from missing dinner last night. But Raven's eyes are still watching me like a hawk. "What?"
"Go to the hospital," she says.
"I told you I'm fine." I realize I have various scars on my arms, elbows, and quite big ones on my knees. Thankfully today's a Saturday. "These will heal in a few days."
"I'm not talking about your scars…I'm talking about your memories."
I look away. "It was just a minor hallucination. I was just daydreaming, that's all."
She widens her eyes in a fury. "Daydreaming?! Do you have any idea how you were like yesterday?! You were a freaking zombie! I have to drag you for us to get home!"
I tell her to calm down. The red highlights of her hair make her look like the Big Bang on a minuscule scale.
She takes a long breath and says, "The last time you were like this was when we were kids…when we were still in that place."
Raven spills the last words like they're made out of acid and I, too, feel the burning sting. An old fuse buried for years that have ignited to life.
We do not say anything for a while. Pulled into a recollection, in the past that gives us no choice but to remember even if we never want to. I begin eating the porridge Raven made for me in the hopes that every spoonful might fill me inside.
Finally, after several horrible minutes, she breaks the silence. "By the way, your father's colleague called last night. I answered the call for you since you were pretty out of it."
"Dr. Sy?"
She nods. "He wants to know when you can visit him. I think now is the right time."
I sigh and tell her I'll get ready. I stand up and head my way towards the bathroom, but I remember something, so I turn and face her.
"Thank you for helping me…and for not ignoring me yesterday."
And we fall into silence again.
...
My first memory began when I was four. That day when I woke up, the first person I saw was five-year-old Raven. She told me, in her child voice, that I fell from the monkey bars, hit my head, and then gone out a lot of blood, along with my memories.
"We were playing since babies," little Raven said. "But you forgot already."
Ever since that day, Raven has been a part of who I am. She told me everything I had to know, but it never changes this long, constant feeling of emptiness, this regret of eating away all the first three years of my life. It may only be three years, but if I would cluster all those wasted ninety-four million and six-hundred eight thousand seconds together and line them up, piece by piece into stepping stones, it would take me more than a lifetime before I could reach my destination.
I arrive at the hospital, still dazed. But somehow, I was able to get here while my mind was elsewhere, nowhere.
If my past is an unmapped territory, Hermosa Vida Medical Center is a wild ship I can navigate even with my eyes closed. I know every part of the hospital, the five buildings it encompasses from the main entrance to the morgue. The smell of bleach and ethyl wafts in the air.
When you are lost in the wilderness, my adoptive father told me that you can always follow the stars. I thought it was inaccurate because you have to master celestial mathematics for that, but now, I understand.
Dr. Sy's clinic is located on the fifth floor of the main building, in between the rooms of the Pediatric Ward. In the elevator, I come across Nurse Vicky, a good friend of my father. She gives me a big hug and asks me why I haven't been dropping by.
"School's been hectic lately."
She holds me on the shoulder, just like every adult I know. "It must have been so hard for you."
"Yeah, the exams are getting harder and harder," I say, ignoring the fact that she was talking about something else.
After parting ways, I head over to my destination and knock at Dr. Sy's door. It reveals a chubby man with a broad nose and a moonish face. He gives me a wide, toothy smile and pulls me in for a hug. "June! It's been a long time!" He says. "Come on in!"
Dr. Elmer Sy's office is still the same since I was five. His walls are still neutral gray, which he repaints every year but never bothers to change the color. His salmon sofa still sits at the same spot beside the door. And above the furniture hangs a galactic masterpiece painted by a child prodigy, which was given to him by my father on his fiftieth birthday.
He tells me to sit down as he grabs his office chair and sits across from me. "Tell me, how are you doing in the past months."
"I've been doing a lot of reading." I say, "especially on Jung's Collective Unconscious and Freud's take on dreams."
He leans forward, and I realize he's been studying me the entire time. He glances over the Band-Aids taped on my arms and elbows. I made the right decision about wearing jeans to conceal the larger scars on my knees. "I see," he says.
Dr. Sy is a pediatrician but with the soul of a psychiatrist. Though he couldn't finish his psychiatric license, he is more brilliant than any shrinks I know. In my younger years, when my adoptive father is busy dissecting brains in the operating room, Dr. Sy and I would watch crime documentaries on his laptop while he's checking my tonsils with a popsicle stick.
"How about you?" I ask. "I hope you are doing fine, uncle. You and dad were the best of friends."
"Well, I'm still coping," He says. "It's so hard to get used to your father not being around. Philip was a very brilliant neurosurgeon…although with a bit of empathy issues." He laughs. "He may be quite distant at first, but he's truly a great friend." A tear falls from his eye.
I give him a tissue.
He thanks me. "If only he's not into astrology, he would've been more intimidating, but your father's so brilliant he's even got the chance to view and study a portion of Einstein's brain in the US."
"He used to tell me that every night as my bedtime story," I say. I miss those times.
Dr. Sy is quiet for a moment, then stands up. His face much softer now.
"Follow me," he says.
We walk past the fifth-floor lobby to the halls of the Neurology department. I know where we are going, and I feel my stomach slowly sinking until we make it to my father's office. Dr. Sy opens the door, and I instinctively clench my fist as I step inside.
It has been months since I last saw the Swiss-coffee walls that express my father's love for warm drinks and colors. The jade green sofa that faces his mini altar of crystals, pendulums, planets, and other astrologer paraphernalia. Paintings of constellations and galaxies tacked on the walls alongside his doctor licensure certificates, awards, and a poster that demonstrates parts of the human brain. I take time reviewing his office, as though I'm reliving a faded memory. I gaze at the big windows, where there's a small coffee bar occupying the space behind his desk area. After everything that has happened, it's still filled with his jars of favorite teas, coffee beans, cinnamon, and coffee filters. The yellow gooseneck kettle still glints against the sunlight.
My father's office looks so alive at first glance, but as I touch the brown turntable that sits on the coffee table, it's already powdered with dust. No matter how vibrant everything looks like; there's an after wash of emptiness hovering in the atmosphere.
Dr. Sy clears his throat, and I snap back to reality. "I want you to take some of your father's things you may deem useful."
"I don't think I'm allowed to…"
He shakes his head. "Your father personally told me that someday you'll take over his office—which reminds me, what do you want to do after high school, June?"
"I'm thinking of taking psychology then going to med school." I reluctantly say.
He walks around the office. "The higher-ups are not planning to do anything about this room anytime soon since Philip is one of the hospital's major shareholders. But I encourage you to take whatever you need, June. You're his only child, after all." Adopted, only child.
He asks me if my father's shares have already transferred to my name, and I nod, but I still have no idea where to invest it in. I just turned eighteen a few months ago.
"You'll figure it out," he says.
"The board also offers to sponsor my tuition fees…as a gesture of expressing their sympathy."
"That's good to hear." He taps me on the shoulder, then glances at my scars. "If you need anything, I'm just an office away. Don't forget that I'm also a hypnotherapist in disguise." He winks and excuses himself.
But after a few seconds, I hear his footsteps coming back and calls, "And say hello to your mother for me!"
My world stops for a moment, and there I see it. Standing at the corner is a large, vintage globe I've been avoiding to notice all these years. It is my father's most prized possession, given to him by his ex-wife; his biggest black hole. My adoptive mother.
...
For now, I decided to take two things: the turntable and the photograph sitting on his desk. I wipe off the dust from the turntable before putting it in the paper bag. I also find my father's vinyl collection on the lowest shelf of his altar. I take a mental note to take the crystals next time. I'm afraid if I don't take the things he values the most, they will all break on their own.
Before slipping the picture frame into the bag, I study it for a while. I look at my parents' faces. They don't look like me at all. It was taken on the day I officially became their daughter. We were standing in a flower garden. Behind us, white roses blossom like snow. Both of them are holding my hands, beaming like it's the happiest moment of their life. My father was still young in the photo, but his eyes never changed. They were summery, glistening, the kind the makes you want to smile too. My father was beautiful. But now he's gone.
He's dead.
And beside him is the little me who looked exactly like the girl in the rain. But in this picture, she's drenched in sunny oblivion, thinking she's going to be happy forever.
I step out of the elevator carrying two heavy paper bags. I think of visiting Mr. Domingo, one of my father's closest friends. He's a nephrologist, a kidney specialist. And from what I remember, his clinic is just beside the Dialysis unit in the Nephrology Department here on the ground floor. And to get there, I have to walk across the hallways of the PACU (Post-Anesthesia Care Unit) where recovering patients stay.
My father used to tell me that constellations are not just images formed from connecting the dots, but they are also layered with insight that explains the way of life. "You see, June, stars are not just cosmic balls of hot gas," he would say, "they also provide a pattern, milestones that guide you where you're supposed to go, sometimes, you just have to follow whatever is in front of you, and eventually, you'll make it through." Back then, his mystical view of things hardly convinced me, but at the present moment, I don't know what to think anymore.
Because the person in front of me brings all sorts of supernovas wherever I go. Despite the distance and the way he sits in the waiting area, outside the rooms of people who are having their lives on the line—I have come to recognize him in a heartbeat.
It's Daire.
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