Patron Saints of Nothing

by Randy Ribay

It’s a sad thing when you map the borders of a friendship and find it’s a narrower country than expected.

When you grow up in a country like the United States, you’re constantly told it’s the greatest place in the world. But then you go somewhere else one day and find out that bathroom doors like this exist, and you start to question everything.

Sometimes I feel like growing up is slowly peeling back these layers of lies.

English is a language that lives in the middle of the mouth, but Tagalog is more of an open throat song that dances between the tip of the tongue and the teeth.

Surely the air your lungs first breathe matters. The language your ears first hear. The foods your nose first smells and your tongue first tastes. The soil you first crawl upon. My conscious brain might not remember, but something in me does.

It strikes me that I cannot claim this country’s serene coves and sun-soaked beaches without also claiming its poverty, its problems, its history. To say that any aspect of it is part of me is to say that all of it is part of me.

I wonder at our hidden depths. We all have this same intense ability to love running through us. It wasn’t only Jun. But for some reason, so many of us don’t use it like he did. We keep it hidden. We bury it until it becomes an underground river. Until we barely remember it’s there. Until it’s too far down to tap.

That’s not how stories work, is it? They are shifting things that re-form with each new telling, transform with each new teller. Less a solid, and more a liquid taking the shape of its container.

We have more power and potential than we know if we would only speak, if we would only listen.