Tagpuan

Salcedo Park

Makati Central Business District

There  is something in this open space that calls us back to its gates. It might be the kids at the playground with their  hearty shrill filling the park with boundless glee. Some swing back and forth on suspended seats while others run with their hands flapping in the air around monkey bars and over sand boxes. 

Ladies with hijab covering their heads sprawl on a carpet under a big tree. They speak in strange tongues punctured occasionally with boisterous laughter. But when a cute guy appears, they stop and giggle. The inattentive eye candy whose mind is fixed on that tummy buns he is dreaming then disappears as he jogs in flawless cadence with audio earbuds plugged in his ears.

Men with  pricey neckties follow the red brick passage as they rush to their offices, while flat dwellers stretches  their atrophied limbs on benches found around the greens. Some stay at the park to read  hard-bound novels or listen to timeless sounds played on their music players, while others pass the time reflecting where their life is heading by staring at the windowed sky or interpreting the divine found in the blades of  grass.

It  is  hard  to imagine  that just a few blocks away,  the  towering monoliths of  Ayala  push people to race up the career heights, while cars and  people squabble for available space in  fast-food joints and 4-lane highways. No wonder, many of our accomplishments are measured with material things. It's to remind us that happiness comes in  paper bags and liberation begins under the mighty spirit of alcohol. 

But after an overdose of  libertine pleasures, a voice within tells:  these are all empty fulfillment, there must be something more than just spending our cash or satiating our hunger with processed food to make us breathe.

We cannot hasten our already fleeting lives.

Thus, some of  us return to the park, where flowers bloom within a confined space and where old couples smile at  strangers for no reasons at all. Even stray cats sit on one's lap after letting you stroke it's fine fur and cigarette butts, which are thrown elsewhere are nowhere to be found.

But more than the evergreens that feed the soul or  the precious silence in the stillness of the night,  my reason for returning - with my beloved - in this spot  is to find sublimity in  that  bond we found. 

For  when surrounded with  life, we are stirred to nourish that love which is already growing and cast out, all  that destructive leanings born out of our shattered histories.