Your country’s flag boasts a blue spinning wheel. Mine shines with the sun and three stars. In high school, you sat next to Vernon in the row before mine, and one morning came up to me, the new boy. I felt we were made to be friends, so one afternoon when Dubai’s heat hectored us, I sallied forth from my shell and tugged your backpack. You stopped in your tracks so we could talk as we walked, I to a waiting bus, you to your flat near school.
We could wreck receivers, playing longest call. We lingered before we hung up, outlasting old chats. E-mail’s novelty wore off too fast, and we were near enough to let it bide its time.
Compact discs waited, too. You lent me Sister Rosangela’s Mario Lanza, and I produced my own cassette copy. We adapted when CDs filled the shelves. We listened to Boyz-II-Men’s “Evolution,” Babyface’s “The Day,” Bryan Adams’ “18 ‘Til I Die,” and came to his concert, where we rocked and died and lived again.
I tried to play basketball with you. You all did, some in long-sleeved shirts and long pants. I slipped to the court side seconds after jump ball and feigned invisibility. You tried to sing in choir with us. But the Italian Rosangela detected your off-key “Silent Night.” Score settled. I benched myself. The nun pewed you.
A long scar marks your arm—right or left, I forget. You sustained the cut the first time you biked across the city of gold for pizza at our place. You crashed into a thornbush on the way.
After pizza, we biked back to your place. I gave you the Pinoy anti-scar cream, the manteca de cacao.
High school ended. We watched “Armageddon” on VHS on our last day together. You asked why did I not tell you I had seen it before. I wanted to see it again. Mark and you gave me John Grisham’s “The Testament,” hardcover for a parting gift. “God, bless you,” you two wrote on the first page. Your mother echoed the blessing, touched my head and hugged me, and then you motioned to do the same, and clumsy, I promptly stepped on your foot.
One long decade passed before we would meet again. E-mail became useful, and text messaging, too, and websites where we would send virtual cards on card sending days. Once, you went to Paris and Pope John Paul was there. You snapped a photo of the saint and sent it to me, and I used it as wallpaper on my office computer.
Vernon went to Canada. The Comboni Sisters reassigned teacher Rosangela. You started going to Mass with your father every day. Mark took a wife. You became a physician. I wrote, taught and stopped. On the tenth year, on a winter night on the brink of spring in Texas, because we were there visiting kin, Mark, Carlisle, you and I saw each other once more.
We had a great time catching up on our lives, dining on Indian and Vietnamese fusion dishes, watching dogs in a canine hotel, discussing medicine and physics and journalism and theology and watching “Constantine” and “The Dark Knight,” and since our Lord spins the threads of our lives on a wheel of blessing, I know, on this fifth year since our last reunion that in no time we will bask anew in the light of one another’s presence.