“Joy is dead”, my sister said. It was the first Friday of December 1990 when I heard of that sad news. Ironing my dress, I paused from what I was doing, my heart sinking fast. In my hometown there were several persons named Joy, but I immediately knew who my sister meant. Still I asked her: “Which Joy”? I could not wish for any one to be dead, but if someone had to be I had wished in my heart let it be but my best friend. “Joy Lozada”, was my sister’s reply. I knew from that moment that my dream a few days earlier was a premonition and I sobbed. So many times following the breaking of that news, I had asked the void out there: How could he go without letting me say goodbye? In my dream, Joy and I were walking hand-in-hand by the town’s seawall. I couldn’t tell if it was dusk or dawn, but there was only a tiny hint of light from the skies, the town is behind us, as always the backdrop of every event in our lives. We were both wearing white shorts and tops. Sitting by the seawall with our feet dangling at the edge of the dike but not touching the waters, holding my hands and fixing those large eyes of his to mine, he said: “We will marry in heaven”. Mystified and smiling, I replied: “But you don’t even love me”. I was anticipating a punchline like his many other declarations, but his mood was unusually gentle and solemn: “Yes, I do and you love me too!”, he reverted. Then comes the laugh, but this time it wasn’t the usual laugh when he teased, he held my hands tighter, gazed at me with a smile and touched my face as if telling me how much he really meant what he just said and that it wasn’t a joke.
I could not remember if I had woken up or the dream had ended there, but I can still remember the dream when I woke up. I still see Joy’s face; wide-eyed with a smile that stretched from ear-to-ear and curly hair that seems to cling tightly to his head; I can still feel his brown complexion and hear the sound of his laughter that seems to jump off his chest as he rolls it out. Many years after, when I saw Jericho Rosales on tv the first time, I had thought Joy could look a lot like him now if he is alive and had put on a little more weight. He was always teasing and laughing, laughing at something he thought was so funny even when I didn’t think it was or at me for something he thought he had accomplished to have aggravated me greatly. Twenty years after dreaming that dream, it is still as vivid as the first time I would recall it and it always bring a tender smile to my heart, sometimes, like today, I would chuckle a little out loud. I had not been able to tell him of this dream, which I really think would have made him laugh. I would have done anything to hear him laugh at me again. Joy was a joy when he was alive and even in his death, he is still my heart’s source of joy.
My parents, his family and our common friends were witnesses to the time Joy and I spent together and the obvious efforts he exerts in provoking me. Because he was such pain in the ass, I was oblivious to all the opinions that were forming in the minds of the people around us. It had come as a surprise to me that after his death, his family and some friends had thought that we were involved in a romantic way. I used to not know how to answer when I was asked whether Joy was my boyfriend. On one occasion, while sitting with Joy’s eldest brother Manong ‘Boy’ Percito Lozada in their home in Paranaque -he too had heard of how close we were- my classmate Cancia ‘Caning’ Denzo, known for being so candid and yes, for being quite talkatively funny as well, had brought up the topic of Joy. “Sil, yagka-uyab bitaw kamu ni Joy?” (Joy and you went steady, right?) was Caning’s remark. Until Joy had died, I have no definition of what we had. I only know that I enjoy being with him a lot; he makes me laugh, makes me angry, makes me want to kill him and yet wants to protect and defend him at the same time. I had thought it would be a great disrespect to Joy to deny any feelings I might have for him or we might have for each other even if it was something I could not put a label to, even if it was not romantic enough to a degree that he would qualify and be called my boyfriend. At some point however, it dazzled me and I’m sure it confused other people too, because I would tear up each time Joy was brought up in the conversations, especially when I am told directly of how much it must have hurt losing him, because we seemed to share something special.
After Joy’s death, I would think of him a great deal more than when he was alive. I would remember how his answers to everything I said and felt was laughter and how he would manage to ruin my every aha moment with a wicked par. My reminiscing is always with fondness, of wishing for him to still be alive, of delight because in many ways, even though mostly in silence, he was my source of comfort, my confidante’ in my quiet conversations, the one that I could lay my hurting self beside and be assured of being healed and protected, no matter what and always. Perhaps what I feel in his presence is both reminiscing and wishful thinking.
When Joy was still alive my parents showed an unprecedented liking of him and they trusted us to be in each others company, he was allowed to barge in-and-out of our home unrestricted even up to my bedroom. We would lay down side-by-side, talking, arguing, debating, insulting, laughing and when we get exhausted tormenting each other, we would nap the afternoon away. But in all propriety, we never closed the bedroom door when Joy is with me and not once did he ever made a pass on me. I could almost hear him laugh now, telling me to dream-on (about him hitting on me) and that I wasn’t in the slightest bit his type. That sounds more like him to deny me the pleasure of believing he likes me in any romantic sort of way. If he’d see me in a bind now, he would most certainly tell me to quit crying, grow up some more and move on. But when I need him, I only have to close my eyes and he is always with me. He always seemed to be more tender and loving, quieter and comforting, always keeping me still when I shake and shatter as I cry in desolation, wounded with what the livings has inflicted on me. “In heaven, you will be happier”, he’d always positively say.
I was fifteen years old when I got to really know Prescillano “Joy” Lozada Jr., I was in senior high school and we became friends after he joined our National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) review class at then Bayabas National High School (now Solomon P. Lozada National High School). Joy had graduated and passed the NCEE exams the previous year at his school in Manila, but the results were declared null and void by the Department of Educations (DECS) as rampant cheating was discovered or at least, this was the brief version of the story that Joy told me. Our friendship would be taken to a different level in the years that followed. After a year in college, I decided to take a semester off from my studies. It was the semester following Papa’s near-death fall at the public market, which made me somehow dejected, homesick and I must confessed, tired of the years spent in going to school, I decided to go home and stayed in Bayabas with my parents. This habit of quitting everything to go home every time I am dispirited somewhere from faraway would become the cycle I would try to cure myself with for most of my life’s never ending bout with unhappiness that seems to not find any effective and lasting remedy. Around that time, Joy’s family would suffer a devastating blow with the sudden death of Sir Percing, Joy’s distinguished father, whom he was named after, and also the beloved mayor of our hometown for many years. I have gotten the rare privilege of knowing Joy’s dad and I recognize that Joy has taken from him his mental sharpness, quick wits, unending humor and sarcastic tendencies. My own father had a close relationship with Sir Percing and I know exactly why he had taken a liking to the son so much as the father. Joy was after all very much so his father’s son in many ways than one, and the most audible and visible examples are their identical laugh and walk of quick and hurried steps.
It was the common emotional experience we had with our fathers that connected Joy and I, bonding us closer as we talk night-after-night, sitting on the pile of lumber by the roadside near our house by the bridge. Joy would tell me how devastated he was with the loss of his father and I would tell him how scared I was with the thought of losing mine. It was unusual for me to have a male friend, very close at that and one that my parents did not disapprove of, in that age of my life. Even more unusual was for me to see him cry, for the only male-crying I would see back then was when my young brother Silver would when forced to go to school or of my father spanking my teen-brothers for misbehaving. A boy crying out of grief, missing his beloved father was all very new to me. I have no idea if Sir Percing had known how much Joy loved him and how much his untimely passing away had hurt him. When Joy would cry, I did not know what to say and the only way I knew how to comfort him was to hold his hands and arms and run my hands across them as a gesture of compassion. This is how I discovered by accident that when I scratch his skin, a reddish line would appear embossed across the part where my nails had passed over. After that discovery, it had become a habit for me to write words and sentences across Joy’s arms. I would write silly things, stretching from his upper arm to his wrist, sometimes along the back of his hands. And Joy would sit there letting me. It would take a few minutes before the words I had written would disappear and we would keep adding words until his two arms are full like being tattooed in prison. Joy would laugh as I write more and more silly things. It seemed foolish and a ridiculous thing to be doing when I think about it, but I now realized it was our secret ritual, something that has held us together in a magical way that we could not explain and helped us cope with the pain of losing his father and the thought of losing mine. Over time, our other friends would become witness to this ritual. I remember sitting there on the same spot, writing on Joy’s arms with Reneboy Limbaro watching and laughing at us. It may seem erotic to some to imagine how intimate it is for us to have to touch, but to me it was all innocent. No matter how many times I review the events of our friendship, there was nothing perverted in any sense to it. All I knew of what I felt was caring for him dearly as a friend.
I am in awe that even when we exist in different spheres in the universe, he was more alive to me than anyone in those moments I needed someone to breathe life into my dying soul. I can still vividly see Joy in my head. I see him in his tiny frame, bouncing and chuckling and almost busting from his skins in laughter while seeing me so exasperated with his practical jokes. In the final months leading to my high school graduation in 1986, Joy was always hanging out in our house. One lunch break from school, I was cooking rice the way we do it in the old times, on a pot placed over the open fire. Yes, mothers reserves the Gasul and Shellane-fueled-stoves only during special occasions like Fiesta or funerals. An expert rice-cooker, whose actually everybody in town, knows the exact timing of cooking rice on an open fire. It would boil in about 15-20 minutes, just about the same time the firewood’s are consumed and the heat would mellow down and you give the pot another 5 minutes to simmer down on a low fire, allowing the rice to fully cook to perfection. Imagine my surprise when I went to the kitchen and saw that the pot was moved away from the fire. I knew immediately that it was Joy, who was chatting me up by the bench at our front door, preventing me to go and check the rice pot I had assumed to be already boiling. I screamed his name and ran after him, attempting to hit him with a ladle: “Yawa kaw gayud, Joy!”! (Joy, you’re the devil!) But Joy would hid behind my Mom: “Na Susan, o si Susil mamagbag ng luwag!” (Na Susan, look Susil wants to beat me with the ladle!) And my mother, not caring at all that our lunch was delayed, laughs with him and orders me to restart the fire and re/cook the rice.
But for all his mischief, I always know that I care about Joy to pieces. So much so that when they hit him with the paddle and he turned black and blue during the ‘Hermanos/Hermanas de Amor’ initiation, I cried and got very livid with Jorge Quijada and Bobot Andoy. I confronted Jorge, “Did you have to get him hit so hard and so much because he was contra-partido or you were so jealous?” I guess it made me so angry, I started to break off from the group, among many other reasons. Back in the days, political colors shaped the landscape of how people associate with each other in town, in Bayabas. You are either for the Garcias or for the Lozadas. Politics was like a religion for most households, you are born into your political affiliation, never given a chance to truly choose and converts are not tolerated, or if you do chose separate from your family, you are most likely to be at loggerheads with the rest of your clan. My parents are diehard Lozada followers, but some of us children are also very close with the Garcia children and yet, it was never a problem at home. I was exposed to politics at the very early age when I ran and won the KB chair in the barangay and won it all the way to the municipal level too. The level of tricks I got exposed at between rival parties was disappointing. It was also during these times that Joy and I had spent a lot of time at his family home, where I got to know more of and got closer to his family. We got trusted to do old men's jobs. It was there that I would learn that candidates can actually count how many people they expect to vote for them by tick-marking the voters list in each barangays and how kontra-senyas (pre-agreed-codes) actually works on real ballots. During the period leading to the elections, I would normally make my way walking from my house to Joy’s after dinner. When I get stuck struck in a conversation with people on the street, Joy would be there looking for me and grabbing me with him to their house. The one night he wasn’t looking for me, I was chatting endlessly with Jorge seated by the fence under the ‘tambis’ tree across Yo Sario Quijada’s house. Joy didn’t like that I spent the night in Jorge’s company and the amount of chastising I received from him of the incident was almost as much as the nagging I would get from my mother had she known.
In hindsight, I can now recall those moments where I thought Joy could have been jealous. At his father’s wake, I would have been about seventeen at that time, the most-talked-about and most eligible doctor in the province spotted me as I sat watching a game of chess. Dr. Primo Murillo, son of then Governor and Congressman, the late Dr. Goring Murillo, appear to have taken a fancy of me and chatted with me. In the morning, Primo went to my house and checked on my father, who has recently returned from a few months stay at the Philippine National Orthopedic Hospital proceeding his fall from the market. At the funeral and around town, Primo had behaved as if there was something special going on between us, giving me special attention alike to someone who is taken by the object of that very attention. In the late afternoon after his father’s internment, Joy and I was sitting at the pile of lumber by the roadside near my house again. When Primo’s car was passing, the driver pulled over, Primo rolled down the car windows, told me he’d be back on Sunday and honked his car’s horn as he left town. I was a little giddy, Primo was prominent and good-looking and I had developed a crush on him overnight. But Joy was clearly not thrilled and made no attempt in putting a damp on my excitement. “I didn’t know he is venturing into the piggery business. He must be coming back to weigh you, after all you’re a special bred- Duroc!”, he said with a jealous ridicule only made more obvious by his laugh and snide. I laughed along with him, none of what he said has offended me, I was so used to my friends and family naming me ‘tambok’ (chubby), that none of it means anything to me more than a term of endearment and a description of my baby fats, which I would carry with me all my life. My classmate and cousin Rezil ‘Bongbong’ Maquiling and another close friend the Late Sesenio Zapanta would call me ‘Tabs’ (chub) all our lives, a word that I could never take offense with, especially because I know that beneath the teasing, they sincerely like and care about me.
Joy had a huge crush on Janet Adante, a very pretty, demure and decent girl from Lapaz. She was a student in our school and I like her a lot for Joy, whenever we see each other we would end-up talking about him. After Joy’s death I would bump into Janet in Lapaz during one of the political rallies that I would speak at. I asked her how she was doing and she has filled me in on what I had missed of the love story she and Joy had shared. I have forgotten all the details now, but she told me of how emotional she was when Joy died. I remember how Joy would go to Lapaz pretending to buy vinegar and I would always tease; “Yeah, which brand? Adante?” He would come back with half a gallon full of vinegar and show me. Of course, I would not be convinced, one can buy vinegar from just about anywhere else in town. I only know one reason why he would dress up not in his normal shorts and singlet to go to Lapaz. Could I have been jealous? I cannot be certain.
As for how Joy felt about me, I had become a little convinced that maybe he did feel something for me only after he was gone. I thought about what his sister Ging-ging had told me of how Joy hurled a saucer over her head because she teased him about me. Ging-ging said that one day, I must have been doing something in church, which was only several meters away from their house above the adjacent hill when I called from the top of my lungs shouting between the distance, asking for Joy to come down and please bring me a hammer. She said, she noticed a surge of energy in Joy, almost jumping to find the hammer and sprinting all the way to church to get to me. That night, she told him: “Da Joy, pag suguon kaw ngane sa bay luyahe kaw, pero pag si Susil mutawag saimu grabe nimu pag kara-kara! Super ka obvious na in-love-be kaw bagan ni Susil, kay isa da niya katawag mulupad na kaw!” (Gosh, Joy! You never get to do anything we asked of you here in the house, but when Susil asks, you couldn’t wait to do as she bids. It’s so obvious how smitten you are of her, you just couldn’t wait to get to her when she calls for you!) That opining observation was punctuated with a saucer of soy sauce landing on her head. Their mother, Ma’am Lucy, who also attested to this event, was mortified that a brawl had taken place at the dinner table. I laughed out loud when I heard the story. Marieto ‘Mayet’ Lozada, Joy’s younger brother, must have witnessed or heard some of this related incidents and years onward had asked me if there was ever a romance between Joy and me. At one point, he used the words ‘believed you might have been engaged with him’. I was honest with Mayet that though I recognize how much I love Joy, there was nothing except a very close friendship between his brother and me. Besides, if there was any romantic love at all, we never talked about it, thus in my old-fashioned mind, such unexpressed emotion could not be officially counted.
When my other dear friend, the late Sezenio Zapanta was still alive, we would always reminisce together about Joy. Joy and Senio are related and very close friends. Senio was convinced that Joy has very strong feelings for me and defined Joy’s feelings for me as being ‘in-love’. He tells me of how he would notice Joy scanning the town’s streets looking for me and when I would wave from across the street, Joy would blush and come alive. I asked Senio why would Joy not tell me if he really does feel that much for me? It made so much sense to me later that Joy would feel very insecure of our physical dissimilarity, I was tall and chunkier while he was gawky and not taller. It did not occur to me back then however that Joy would see me as out-of-his-league, too brainy and too pretty for him. I never saw myself that way with him back then, not at all expect him to feel that way.
Even though, I was acutely aware of how intimidating I was to many of the boys in school, because I have such a superior attitude with my overrated intelligence -boys were to me dumb-and-dumber or so I made myself believe- I never thought boys would shy away from me because I was out-of-their-league pretty. Ha! It makes me grimace now remembering my old arrogant all-knowing self! My friend Senio, who back in the early school days had chased me with a small knife, told me I was quite attractive and mean at the same time that he hated me so much, to the point of enjoying bullying every chance he gets. It was early morning before class while we were cleaning as part of our homeroom sweeper roster when he decided to chase me with that knife, in Grade 5 under Lola Mimang Deligero’s advisory, and I jumped and ran from the classroom to Ma’am Basing Garcia’s office, who was the principal at that time, wailing across the green flag ceremony field. I do not know at that time what possessed Senio to detest me so much to want to slice me, but later he would say how unfriendly and snooty I was of them boys. In fact Edgardo ‘Gagang’ Butad, who would become my boyfriend much later, had the same memory of me, that I had never talk to him or to any of the boys from the ‘ilaya’ or the remote part of town. Gagang was right, I had not a single memory of ever talking to him back in our school days and the only talking Senio would hear from me was to berate him. Gagang would also tell me so himself of his crush on me and how he only had the courage to talk and get near me in his dreams because I was extremely challenging to even say hi to. With a few similar recollections told about me, it is valid to conclude that I am guilty as charged. But this is how youth supposedly is, insecure boys and over-confident girls and vice-versa. Or maybe it isn’t. I would carry this impression, perhaps real to some, until I was in my thirties and now in my forties. My friend Rex Aguado had given me a book titled ‘Bitch! In Praise of Difficult Women’ for my 32nd birthday. Breaking-up with a boyfriend in my forties, my other friend Baba Gozum would remark that no man can last being with me, I can only assume what he means with that has something to do with my insistence that love can only be real if it’s perfect, integrity being the key element or nothing at all. So okay, I am a man-snubbing-bitch without realizing that my actions summed up to it and not knowing as well of how apparent it was. In time, I would make up for my snobbish ways at least to Senio and Gagang, who would both become two of the few people who hold a very special place in my heart.
I went to college taking up Mass Communications in Manila. Back in those days, there were no cell phones and internet chatting and the only way friends keep in touch was through letters. I would occasionally write Joy, who was in Davao City studying. One day, I received a white envelope in the mail with local stamps whose sender was written as ‘Mr. Demetrio Kapalaran’. I thought it was a chain letter and how tenacious that it had to be mailed with stamps paid for. When I opened the letter, I recognized the sardonic tone. Among others, it said, “I will soon take my flying lessons. As much as I would like to invite you, I do not think the plane would be able to take off with you in it!” The bastard got me again I thought, and I laughed out loud. I would not be able to write Joy again after that. Our letters are far in between, and the last letter I would write, as I recall, is to his mother, a letter of condolence which she replied so kindly.
The very last time that Joy and I were together was while we were waiting for his bus back to Davao City a year or so before his death. We were at Crossing, where the bus shelter was, in Bayabas. He was in his usual teasing and laughing manner, provoking his Mom who rose to the occasion of reprimanding him at his every antics. Earlier that morning, he dropped by my house, which was along the way, to wake me up to walk him to the terminal, my mother also went to drop him off. It was a cold morning and I was wrapped up in a ‘malong’- a huge sarong. Joy, feeling a bit chilly, had loosened my ‘malong’ and slipped himself inside hugging me, enveloping us together with the ‘malong’. He did it so swiftly, and besides not making anything out of it ,I had not been able to react. I didn’t know if it was inappropriate, but Ma’am Lucy was certainly flushed and insisted for Joy to get himself out of my ‘malong’. Joy laughed: “But why, it’s cold!”. There the bus came and I bid my dear friend goodbye. He was waving and laughing, as he always as. Except when he was crying out of anguish, my friend Joy was never in a bad mood when he was with me.
If Joy was alive today, he would have been about 44, a year or two older than me. I don’t know if there could have been a love story between us. I never wondered along this path of what ifs. What I always think of is what would it be like if I met Joy in heaven? Would we fall in love? Would we marry? Would we have children? Would we still torment each other? Oh, but for sure the laughter would never stop! In retrospect, I guess I might have been a little in-love with Joy, but I was too young to accurately define my feelings. Up to this point, I could not publicly acknowledge how much love I have for him, because I could not acknowledge what I had not always fully understood. I did love him, I still do and I will always will. I grieved for him, I still at times do. I don’t think of him everyday, but I carry him with me like the wind that touches my face each time I take a step outside. I have appreciated his death now more than I have before. There is a reason why he was taken away so soon. It has taken me twenty years to understand, twenty years to write about it, twenty years to make sense of it.
Some loves are not meant to be had physically, some times not event meant to be consummated verbally. It maybe meant to last forever, but only in ones heart.
When I think of all the things we had together right now, it makes me cry. I had known for years how much I miss Joy. When I am hurting, I would call up to him, I would talk and cry my heart out to him. I would be weeping curled up in my sofa and I would feel Joy taking my hands between his, holding me and consoling me. He would always be wearing the same white shorts and shirt he had the first time I had dreamed us together. At the time when I didn’t know how to decide on a love that I hold so dear to my heart, but whose object had betrayed me, I called up to him, challenging him: “Joy, I know you are up there and you must feel my pain, please do something and make it go away”. This is at the time in my life where I have discovered a new feeling I have no name for, an intensity of emotional destruction that I have not encountered before in my whole life. Try as this earth have, none of the soothing it could offer can quiet and calm the storms I had within me. So I turned to my dead beloveds. To my parents, to my friend Joy and my other loved-ones who has departed from earth and whom I am certain to be all in heaven. In imploring their presence and guidance, I have been able to summon into the surface all the lessons in life they had already whispered to me ahead of time. I had the answers with me all along, I just didn’t know to which question they are matched in answer to. Perhaps, if I had listened more intently I would have known how to use these clues and signs I have been gifted with and I would have been braver to move forward much sooner.
Joy has helped prepared me for this moment, of loving purely, truthfully, and yet unable to share the same sphere with the object of that love. Some love is not meant to be always present in the physical form, but it does exist in the ideals, between the mind and the heart, between the body and the soul, between earth and heaven. It does not fill-up the emptiness, but it can be touched, it can sustain ones being. It’s all I need, it’s all I should expect of love, of life, that everything that comes also departs, there is no exemption.
Life end, love ends, I too someday, either in the physical or essence, will end. But I shall hope that only the memory of my many small greatness will remain, that the memory of how much integrity I have given myself to love and to life will be remembered and everyone whose life I have touched will hope and look forward to happiness as to being with me again in heaven.
27 March - 23 April 2011
Hong Kong and Singapore
Post Script:
Thank you to Joy’s brother Mayet Lozada, for finding my old note to Joy and providing me with Joy’s photographs to be posted in my blog for this story.
In an old photo that I sent to Joy dated August 1988, which Mayet scanned and emailed to me, it revealed that I call him “Dsoi” and I have signed my name as “Suisse Mocca”, in reference to my favorite coffee flavor. In the dedication I had said, “A happy birthday smile for you! Missing you always!”
