Others wiser than I declare: we make our path by walking. Life is what we make it. No one has a ready-made path that ensures he gets what he wants every time and in the end. We each stumble about in the shadows (since the future is always dark from where we are in the present), take one step after another, steps that on looking back appear a coherent whole. Why, I know the plot, I know who I am, I understand why I did that!
In Manila while struggling through medical school I met Tina who became my first girl friend. Girls had tried to get close to me before but I was too immature to see what they were trying to do. Tina represented an ideal and suddenly I understood the concept of a girl friend. I learned many things about myself those first years in Manila but this discovery ranks among the most far-reaching.
Tina inspired me to write poetry. In my cramped room at Clark Air Base Hospital I wrote verses in a Steno notebook that today make me blush to read but they were the real start of my love affair with words. I took a break from medical school one summer and took classes on English and American writers and the philosophy of literature back at San AgustÃn. I little knew then how important that time was going to be. Those two classes were the only classes I took in literature that informed my writing through the years. English Lit and Comp classes in high school and college were useless. I memorized what I needed to pass the tests and that was all.
On those dark nights in that cramped hospital room, writing by the light of wall sconces not meant for reading, somehow I elaborated my wild scheme of escape. Books had opened windows into a world that felt to me wondrously open, bright where my world was in shadow, and wide enough to contain fledgling hope that somewhere in a larger world I might find myself.
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