Dad once told me that storytellers are thieves, vandals. That in order to create, they must take, unapologetically, from the lives of the people closest to them, and display the intimate details for all the world to see. At the time, he was talking about Mama, about the ways her stories came to life. He didn’t believe in fate, destiny, in the burden of heritage or tradition. Like all the other stories, he believed the Alunsina myth especially was a figment of Mama’s imagination, woven from the mundane life they had built, a story to justify her repeated disappearances, to romanticize their disfunction.
Mama of course, as a weaver of words, saw things differently. She saw the ways the words could mold you, the way each telling, each version, builds on the previous, the ways each teller shifts the details to suit the audience, to add personal flair. For her, life without them, the stories, was rootless, unmoored. Without them, there was no framework for understanding the ways of the world. Like Lolo’s death story, and Vina’s birth story, they were ingrained into her being – she never knew another way.
Now, with some distance, both physical and temporal, I can see value in both versions of the truth. But, there was a time that I hated them both – versions of the truth, that is. Though Vina would be proud to think that I meant them, our parents. At this time, the time of hate, and more often anger, I prayed for a way to escape the stories, to shed the sticky web of words, the inevitable hand of fate. I hoped for an ending that I had not already heard unfold, in varying shades of sadness.
Home Sweet Home 