I've just awaken from a very intense dream, where my brother, Kuya Niño (a cousin of ours), and I were running away from our dad in a much larger and labyrinthian version of our home in Skyway. For some reason we were afraid that Dad was going to kill us, and it was such an intense experience to believe this in the dream. Towards the end of the dream, we realized Dad was really out to get Kuya Niño, who knew the family secret that Dad had been kicked out of the family by Lolo earlier in his life and that the only reason he was re-accepted into the family was because of the letters Mom wrote to Lolo during the time that she was writing letters to Dad. Something I realized in the middle of the dream, and even more clearly now that I'm awake, is that Mom and Dad really wrote letters to teach other when Mom was still in Saudi Arabia and Dad was already in Seattle. These letters were the transmissions of their international courtship, and the reason that I bought into the dream so hard was probably because I knew this to be true. The fictionalized detail that Mom was also writing Lolo to mend the relationship of her husband-to-be and her father-in-law-to-be seemed altogether plausible since my mom is a negotiator by occupation, as well as a strong advocate for peacemaking within the general state of our family. Also, the onset of doom that came in the form of Dad felt very familiar, something out of the paternal masculinity and strict disciplinarian I had once known but eventually forgotten (ever since Dad learned to cool his temper). For some reason, after Kuya Niño revealed the family the "family secret" in the dream (I can't remember if he spoke in Kapampangan, which would have made a lot of sense even though it's hard to form in my mind right now), I started crying, crying hard, really hard, but now I can't really remember Why. I think it was in part because I (dreamed I had) realized I didn't know certain things about my parents and our familial history, and also because there was some sort of threat of losing Dad once we had learned of his past, like it was dangerous information marked by an unknown power or fate. The end of the dream, before I woke up, was a bit weird too, in that I was blowing my nose into a lot of used tissues that we had used to kill these bugs that I didn't want to step on in a dream that I had earlier this morning, and I eventually started blowing my nose into a razor cellphone. Apparently it was Dads, and I eventually realized that he wanted me to record things in the phone that would get his life back together and reaffirm that I still loved him.
Dad, I love you and I wouldn't know what to do without you.
