the amazing spider-in-the-book

I dunno if it’s just the thought of leaving home again, or the gloomy weather, but the sight of my books slumped shabbily against each other feels like a rock growing bigger dead center where my heart used to be. And if that’s not melodramatic enough for you—there goes lightning and thunder ka-blammming in the middle of noon! Yeah, today is the perfect day to be maudlin. The scene is straight out of tear-jerker school—rain pelting down on drooping leaves outside; spiders, ants and termites playing catch across my rows of old books; luggage gaping open not a few feet away; and a melancholic human being dragging her feet around, running slow fingers over familiar titles lovingly and patiently collected over the years.

I’ve certainly come a long way since my Nanay’s pastime made me curious. Ever since I can remember, Nanay Son always had a paperback either in her hands, or lying face down on her side of the bed. It ate at me what she found so interesting in between those pages so I started reading them, too. Pretty soon, I was going through most of Mommy Ching's--my grandmother’s--collection of novels, and before I knew it I had graduated to serious fiction.

Now this has always been a minor crisis every time I pack my stuff to head back to The Country That Pays More: which books to take with me? Sadly, much like the teeth of a gnarled octogenarian, there are already some significant gaps on the shelves.

I read each title and remember those times of my life when I bought them—starting from when I first got to sail to Cebu regularly as the editor of the Josephinian. The brown, brittle pages of these cheap paperbacks remind me--unnecessarily--how long it has been since college (and how long since I’ve used my maiden name on a page before FB!). The titles showed my inclination then for the authors that always got mentioned in the popular fiction I had been reading voraciously at that time. Yeah, Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, Victoria Holt, Barbara Cartland, et al invariably alluded to Dickens, Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, etc. So I looked up these names and bought their books at a bargain in Music House in Manalili before it burned down. That’s the beauty of allusion for you! They’re still here now, gathering dust, waiting for the next curious mind.

Then there are the books stamped with my new family name. There’s a number of them as I already had a job then. Same sort from the canon, nothing contemporary.

And then come the books with just my nickname on the flyleaf. No family name—maiden or married. A silent foreshadowing of another milestone that was coming in my life. This time, the authors include Rushdie, Stendhal, Achebe, Marquez, Zola, Camus, Hemingway, Kafka, Joyce … more contemporary and more diverse as I collected them when I started my graduate studies, and my eyes were opened to the vast minefield of wonderful writing in the world. I can still remember the utter thrill and fascination I felt every time I devoured those books. It almost beats falling in love and just falls short of the much-vaunted orgasmic bliss! haha!

There is another shelf I’ve had made containing newer books from a time in my life when everything had changed. The authors are mostly Nobel Prize winners in literature. They went hand-in-hand with stupid love, weed, RH and RNB. But these were before I left for Jakarta; before the internet, social networking and pirate bay held firm reign over my days; and before everything was just about surviving until the end of a contract.

I pull out a couple of books from each row now. Every time I take away one to bring with me to another part of the world, more gaps are made in the place I call home, and that rock in my chest becomes bigger and heavier. I look at my interrupted, abandoned collection and wondered when I’d be building another shelf again… if ever.

But—as if on cue—the rain stops and I realize I only have a few days to bask in the joys of home. So I shrug the melancholy and memories back to their dark corners, and throw Beloved, The Kite Runner, Things Fall Apart and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies to the gaping maw of the luggage where they will soon fight for space with Skyflakes crackers, buwad nokos, goldilocks polvoron, purefoods corned beef, datu puti white vinegar, and—godwilling—lechon paksiw… as all OFWs know.