Feather heavy as stone

I was told this tale by my mother when she was still young and I was the boy I will never be again.

A young couple made their living from the sea to the north of Bangui. The man fished, or, when it was season, gathered the high-priced seaweed called gamet which grew on rocks far out at sea, while the wife sold whatever he’d harvested in the town market. On her way home one day, she was waylaid by a marauding band of bandits who mauled and violated her by turns, then left her for dead. After she had recovered from the ordeal, she found out that she was pregnant, but the husband would not accept the baby as his and sent her back to her parents in Laoag.

She died giving birth to a boy who was raised by his grandmother. This boy died of smallpox at age 10, and because the corpse had to be buried immediately, the grandmother forthwith summoned the fisher to come and view the boy for the first and last time. Great was his consternation to see for himself the truth of the rumor that had haunted him for the past 10 years: The boy who looked exactly like him was indeed his son.

The next morning, the man took a load of stones on his boat and rowed out to sea. He then filled his net with these stones, tied it to his neck, and threw himself overboard to drown, unable to carry the weight of his guilt.

Spring cleaning at the beginning of the year, I came upon the wooden chest where I have been keeping mementos of my father—his eyeglasses, inkstone, abacus, his books, and a sheaf of his letters written in Chinese, whose contents I cannot read. All these weighed no more than a few kilos, yet all these years, they were sitting heavy in my heart like a sack of stones.

I am weighed down by the past, by remembrances, by memories of roses pressed between the pages of a book no one reads, corpses of roses now desiccated to the consistency of wafer. Yearnings, longings and desires, rue and regret, the many what-ifs and if-onlys — these things burden me like a net full of stones wound around my neck, dragging me down to depths of despair.

Over a lifetime of collecting these and that — shells, rocks and stones, fossils, plants, pets, bad loves and good people — I’ve come to realize too late that I have allowed these possessions to possess me, to own me body and soul, till I found myself lost even to myself.

I recently returned to my mother’s hometown and went up the mountain I used to frequent as a boy. As I was ascending the mountain, this old man panted and sweated like a doggone dog from the oppressive heat, and I had to discard, one after the other, my backpack, jacket, cap, and camera, till I was left with just the shirt on my back and a water bottle. The more I let go, the lighter I became.

This mountain had grown old like me.

The white flowers of the kugon grass covering its flanks reminded me of the white hairs on my father’s head while the crown, shorn bald of the siniguelas trees I used to ravage for their fruits, resembled his tonsure. But the view from this vantage point was great—the rice fields the green of emeralds, the river blue from the happy color of the summer sky. I remembered very much my mother then, and my heart brimmed full. Yet, strangely, it also felt light.

I know I have to be light as a feather when I take that final vertiginous climb, emptying my pockets of all the shining stones I have owned and possessed.

I’ve let go of a lot of the things I’ve accumulated over a lifetime of fastidious gathering and collecting. In the end, I am nothing more than the sum total of what remains of me, the entirety of what I have willingly and willfully lost. Henceforth, I will travel light and strive to face my Maker in the exact same condition I was when I came to this world—with nothing on me I could call my own. I hope to get to God, who is farther than Timbuktu ever was, farther than eternity ever will be. I hope to be in the incredibly heavy, inconceivably ponderous but uplifting, elevating, and levitating presence of God.

How about you, my fellow sojourner? How much are you willing to leave behind in order to lighten your load?

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Antonio Calipjo Go, a former school administrator, turned 70 this April and has just published his fourth book titled “Pensamientos.”