a wedding!

I'm off to Tacloban for the weekend because my uncle's getting married! He's my mother's youngest brother (five of them in the bunch, mom being the eldest, and auntie being second to the youngest) and he's coming home from abroad with his wife and 16-year-old daughter to finally have that Church wedding that's about a decade and a half in the making.

I'm excited to get back to Tacloban - haven't been there for years, and the last time I was there for a wedding was in 1991. I was seven then and I was a flower girl in Auntie Benda's (Mom and auntie's other sister) wedding. I remember my gown was itchy as hell and that back then there was only three of us - me, my three-year-old sister Krista, and four-year-old cousin Mark.

Here, an illustration for your guidance:

1991. A time when the rest of the kids, including my own brother, haven't even been born yet. Imagine a time like that! Whenever that wedding comes back to me, it's always in flashes of old dusty photos like this one hehe. Krista and I were raised with Mark as practically our brother, and that time I thought it was just going to be the three of us FOREVER AND EVER. Haha.

But then we know how that turned out. The rest of them came and now we're all older and I'm now 25 and Krista's 22 and Mark's 23 and we're returning to Tacloban for another wedding. I'm not a flower girl anymore -- I'm not even a bridesmaid, but a reader and the reception emcee, if the invitation is to be believed. (EMCEE! SA RECEPTION! SNEAKY I TELL YOU! SNEAKY!)

I remember in 1991 we were holed up in our Lola's old house in front of the school where she once taught and when we got there she started introducing us in speedy Waray to the Invisibles of the old house (so as not to get sick) and then at night we kids would secretly chip away at the cake hidden in the kitchen while the elders were elsewhere and when the wedding day came and they discovered the half-eaten cake they'd just concluded, "Rats." We never spoke of it again LOL. That was fun. That was the last time I think I got away with anything. Ah, old age, you suck! LOL.

In that house my Lola had an old black and white TV and an old Family Computer and in the days leading up to the wedding Mark and I would sit and play Battle City maybe or take turns with Circus Charlie and do you know how hard it actually was to play those games sans color? Yeah, we didn't mind either.

I don't know if that house still exists -- a few years later my grandparents moved to another house entirely, and it's the same house along the highway that saw both my Lola and Lolo's wakes in 1994 and 2002. They're buried together in the same spot in the nearby cemetery, and I remember that their tombstone had lyrics from Color it Red's "Paglisan" -- I kid you not. I'll take a photo if it's still there and readable.

Since I was too young in 1991 to really enjoy a wedding, I'd always associated Tacloban and Jaro with deaths in the family, so really I'm just glad this time around it's for a wedding again -- even if I'm aware that, being of marrying age now, I hereby run the risk of being asked about my own wedding plans.

Sabi ko nga, magpakasal kayo dahil pwede kayong magpakasal! Kung pwede nga kaming magpakasal siguro kasal na kami kahapon pa! LOL.

Anyway. Too complicated so. BRB practicing my ~sly smile. =)