Why…

Now we come to the “why” of this so called quest of mine.  As I mentioned in some of my previous posts, why not?  And that should in itself be enough of an answer but being here now in the Philippines and thinking back on my past, I realized that it is also important to explain to you how I came about embarking on this quest.  If I tell you that I have it all figured it out and have planned this for years, then that would be a lie.  And quests should be the pursuit of truths.  So to be truthful, some people might call my approach as “winging it”.

I’ve introduced my sister Edwina to you in my “Who……” post and that gave you a little sense of who she is and what she was to me at that young age.  I recounted that she had a certain fondness for me and what I didn’t say was I shared that same fondness for her although I didn’t really appreciate it nor understood it then.

When she disappeared shortly after her high school graduation, that about destroyed our family.  As young as I was, I did not understand when my mom said that my “ate” (big sister) is not coming home after that fateful “trip” to Bacolod.  She and my aunt Letty (my dad’s sister) were on the way to aunt Letty’s home aboard MV Don Juan.  It was her graduation present.  She had gone to grade school there and it would have been a treat to see her grade school buddies.  I was supposed to go because, well…I was a kid and younger siblings always gets considered to go on vacations.  However for some unbeknownst reason, I just simply didn’t want to go the day we were leaving.  I don’t recall exactly why I didn’t want to go only that I remember feeling slightly ill that day and just didn’t want to be away from mom.

From what I can gather from different family sources and some old news articles, MV Don Juan collided with a tanker ship, M/T Tacloban.   There were issues of over capacity that led to the demise of the ship.  A lot of people perished including my dearly departed aunt Letty.  There were also many people that survived and discovered but my sister was not among them.   It about killed my parents and grandparents searching any trace of her.  They even went to faith healers, seers and the like.  The common theme was she is still alive but that she may have had amnesia.   After almost 2 years of searching, they didn’t find her.

Life went on in the Rosales household.  Somewhere in the year of her disappearance, I had dreamt of a house that I was staying at, seeing my sister, calling after her, her having a split second recognition of me and then a facial expression of fear, turning away and continued walking down to a blue colored cul de sac. I’ve kept that dream with me through the years and have told myself as I got older that I think she is telling me to look for her.    However, life happened in between.  This thought, this feeling of her would come and go through the years but it is only recently that I felt like now I can do something about this.  I was seeking internal inspiration.  I was coming to a stage that what I was doing wasn’t doing much good and that dissatisfaction was getting louder inside me.  I do not like living in negativity.  It is a toxic thing and I realize that I have to purge that internal struggle.

Hence, I took a leap and quite a long jump at that.  I could totally fall flat with my face on the ground but I know that I just have to do this.  I’ve had really close friends and family that have passed or have gotten seriously ill in the last couple of years that it makes you stop, smell the flowers and ask yourself the question what have I not done yet that may lead to regret if I don’t do it.  The resounding answer was to reconnect to that past and to try to and find Edwina.  You may still ask why?  My reason above may not be satisfactory for some but I am not asking them to jump on the band wagon with me.  We all have personal quests to take and they are never the same but there are absolutes that traverses to each of our souls.  The call of family (whether we were born to it or we chose it), that feeling of connectedness is in all of us I believe.  The feeling that we have a tether to someone.  And let us not confuse that with loneliness.  It is far from it.  It is not that it doesn’t make you complete without that connection but there is that tunnel to something else.  I am not articulating this well.  All I can tell you is that when you get that internal pull that someone or something is knocking, aren’t you curious who or what is on the other side of the door?

I hope you enjoyed my rant today.  Until next post, keep your chins up.  Presidents on both sides of the world are definitely keeping us at the edge of our seats.