Ramblings from My Soul

Coincidences have a strange way of landing right in front of us. Of all the nights that I decided to watch the movie The Fault in Our Stars, which centers on people coping with their cancer-stricken lives, it was also the night that I learned that my previous mentor, Ms. Gaye Cenabre, just passed away due to the same condition. I haven't been this much affected by the loss of one person. And Ms. Gaye is not even a relative so that should tell you how much I treasure her as a person. I haven't written about any person before and I would gladly make her my first. This article is about regret. Being a person who is into reading inspirational books, I have known about adages such as "Spend more time with the people who matter because you might never have another opportunity to do so." Yet it turns out that I failed to heed the wisdom of this quote. Since the start of this year, it has always been in my mind to visit Ms. Gaye. But this never happened. Busyness...

Untimely is an understatement. No one ever tells you when it will happen. Discovering that one has a penchant for words and the obsession with tugging soul strings was a slow and unromantic process for me.  It started out simply as writing my daily journals when I was still a kid. The pages were filled with endless narrations of what I did and how the day went. There was the occasional bragging of my academic accomplishments (the nerd!), a couple of crushes mentioned, and the childish complaints of a young one who thought that the world was against him. The last one, no doubt, a product of watching too much soap operas.  And then there were the yearly essays in school where the teacher required us to write on formal theme notebooks. At the start of every school year, my eyes would roll as the English teacher announced that the topic for the first formal theme entry was "What I Did In Summer." I might as well save myself the trouble and copy my essay from l...