the greats are going home nvm gonzalez's home in up diliman went up in flames friday night. no one could have predicted this. old houses are crammed full of stories that sometimes they implode. it would have been all right, except that houses tend to take their best secrets with them, leaving children confused and picking at fragments of a life gone all too soon. sure, there's a time and a place for everything, but never for twice a death - first his physical presence passed, and now pieces of his legacy.

in my room are pages and pages of journals and books. i wrote them as a matter of survival. several times in our street, houses have gone up in flames. candles became a fad and my family was no different in that we had candles everywhere as well. i bought a secondhand chest and threw my journals and letters in it. i hoped, if our house was next, i hope the chest would at least survive long enough for me to run and retrieve it. i worried every time i left the house, if it would still be standing when i came back. i kept the candles in my room unlit. i would light a candle only if i'm there to watch it.

fires were springing up around the city, they said, caused by neglected cigarettes or spontaneously exploding gel candles or faulty electrical wiring or gas heating left to fend for itself.

later, the fires were somehow doused and replaced by building. the old houses that caught fire were rebuilt almost from the ground up. what remained of the old houses, how they looked, what bricks were used to build them, survive only in photographs. if someone remembered to take pictures, at all.

but no one will yet read my work. it's too raw. it's unprepared. and embarrassing. no one will yet study it, and no one ever will. they should have gone up in flames before any more notes by the great ones have.  ¶ 11/21/2005 04:05:00 PM