From The Ground Up

I will never forget the evening of the 9th of May. An ordinary day for most of the world, the day of reckoning for our country. After casting my vote, I threw myself into a pool to temporarily relieve the anxiety caused by waiting. And then the numbers started going up and up and up and up for candidates that were the last on my list. 

We reached home and my husband and I found myself in the middle of an emotional outburst unlike any I've experienced before. There were tears, so much of it; short breaths, my chest aggressively rising and falling; words, that spoke everything I was feeling. 

'Why are you crying?,' my husband asked, nervously. First, there was silence. And then the thoughts spilled out, one after another. 

The demise of good, the demise of good, the demise of good. I said many, many things but in essence, that's what it was for: the demise of the good. I was afraid to live in a place where goodness and kindness had no more place in the hearts of men; afraid to walk alongside people who have forgotten history, who have wiped off the suffering, the prayers, the revolutions of the past; afraid to hope when hope has been taken for granted; afraid to be part of a generation that blindly believes in the lies that have been passed down. The fear led to deep sadness. I have never felt it like that before, because it was a collective sadness for the many faces I see on the streets every day, the faces who deserve to know what truth is, what respect is, what true freedom really is. Then the sadness led to hopelessness which felt like a total absence, a fierce abandonment. 

There was nothing else to do but get down on our knees and look up, at the real Mother and the real Father. 

And just like that, the numbers of the potential mother for our motherland started to rise. The potential father was a clear winner but out of nowhere, the mother's voice was heard. 

Someone tweeted, 'What do you do when only half a dream comes true?'. It sounded heartbreaking at first and then later on, much better. The country took the dreams of discipline and the dreams of tenderness and weaved them together, hoping for a better life.

I will never forget the morning after the elections. I stumbled out of the bed, embarrassingly close to lunchtime, to find breakfast prepared for me and a letter written for me by my husband who left for work. It was a beautiful acknowledgment for my dreams of goodness and a calm reassurance that everything will be okay if we don't stop hoping. 

Hope seems like an overused word but it's only overused if it is taken for granted. The rising of our potential mother's voice is a sign that there is hope, that there are still so many countrymen who believe in the same things I do. I just have to get offline - face it, we all do - and seek their faces, hear their stories, and unite with their spirits. 

After all, if my husband can still get up the next day after what seemed like a period of darkness for all and do a simple, loving gesture, then there still is hope, right? If we multiply that love by the power of millions and millions, we can each hold a brick and build a beautiful monument together, a beautiful monument that proudly declares, 'Mabuhay! (Live!)'.