We are stories

We are stories we tell each other. We are stories told of us. We experience the world personally. That is true. But to make sense of what we experience we need always to refer to someone else. We need always to check that experience against the experiences of others. Only by doing that do we come to an agreement of what the truth of the experience “really” is.

And so we talk. We write. We argue. We negotiate. We reduce experience into words. Text. And since we know the limits of how words describe all that is around us we also know there are limits to how the truth may be determined. It is not determined. It can only be described. The truth as we know it is expanding all the time just like the universe itself. It is expanding at an accelerating pace. No matter.

In truth, the universe is only a story that has yet to stop being written. And what we know of it is only an evolving understanding of what we see and inevitably talk about with each other. Does something truly exist? Does it not exist? When and where is the question being asked? Who is asking it? Who is giving the answer? Can anyone prove the answer either way? One can only believe what one must. That was why we  coined the word “faith”.

All these was what the teacher said in the course of describing post-modernism to his students. Not once did his faith in his words falter. Not once did he wonder if he was speaking above their heads. And then someone asked from the far end of the classroom: Have you ever seen a sigbin?

The question itself told him the student had read him before. The teacher took his time to answer. The question was good enough to require a story.

The sigbin is a story told to him by his father, Venancio Jakosalem Fernandez, who believed the great Cebuano hero Leon Kilat had a sigbin. This creature of ancient myth helped him fight the Spanish in the Katipunan revolt of the 1800s.

“Si Leon Kilat naglataylatay sa dagat…” literally means Leon Kilat is walking over the sea. For indeed, as told even now in the deep South of the island, the sigbin is a creature that would take its master anywhere he or she wants to go. It is only a magical mode of transport. However, its owner cannot die unless the creature is given away either to someone else or to the dark. Its master could still get sick and suffer. But while it is there, its master must have to bear with sickness and suffering until he or she parts with it.

And as time requires, Venancio Jakosalem Fernandez, inevitably grew sick. He was in and out of hospital for several years. The doctors did all they could for him but he only grew sicker until he was only a thin shell of skin over bones lying on his hospital bed. His second eldest son often watched over him in the hospital. In times past, he had prayed for his father to get cured. Then he prayed for him to get better. Until one afternoon he prayed for him simply to pass away and be relieved from his suffering. And he was only a boy of 16.

He prayed this prayer as he awoke lying in one of those ubiquitous sofas they put inside hospital rooms for the patient’s watcher. A nurse in a mini skirt, her posterior towards him, stood next to him caring for his father. A yellow lightbulb burned in the ceiling. Outside through the window he saw it was late afternoon going into dusk. His mother and siblings started arriving one by one. And then his father whispered for him to massage his hand. This request irritated the son. For after all, he had watched over him all afternoon. Still, he wonders to this day if he had not squeezed too forcefully.

The hand, no more than thin skin and bones, squeezed him back. It held his left hand in a tight grip that grew ever tighter that it began to hurt. It held him that way for what seemed like a long time. The force of it so surprised him he wanted to cry out. And then he felt it letting go. The grip began  to relax into an ever gentle hold fading into a touch, disappearing altogether into a soft gentle peace until he knew. He knew he held in his own hand his father’s lifeless hand. Something had left it. He could only guess what.

Has he ever seen a sigbin? He carries with him only a story. It is what carries him, sometimes.