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| Girl in the Woods by Vincent Van Gogh, 1882 |
The Last Summer
By Sigrid Vasquez
It was the summer of eight years ago, I could still remember. Everywhere, there was laughter and children playing. I remember how my friends and I skipped rocks by the cool lake in the morning, then our mothers would yell at us to come home and have lunch. After that they would nag and tell us to siesta, but not one of us really liked to sleep when there was much playing to be done. We would sneak out, all four of us girls: Martha, Poleng, Elay and I. We’d run for the little park right around the corner where our first task would have to be picking and making bracelets or necklaces with santan while talking and chatting and telling stories. We always had something to talk about, the girls and I. And not just the childish girly things like what to play next or how Elay’s older brother King picked on her again. Honestly, at our ages, I consider ourselves fairly more mature than others, or at least more curious and open. Ha, if only I could…
Anyway, when we’re satisfied with our little adornments, we’d play more physical things like hide-and-seek or tumbang-preso. Yes, us four girls were not very much into playing dolls or bahay-bahayan like the others. We ran, we skipped and we hopped more than most of the girls in the park. I think that’s the reason why we had more boy friends than the other girls; I saw that the boys didn’t really much like to play those silly girly things. Of course, we didn’t think those games were silly, we also played those (Poleng had many dolls), most of the time we just prefer to play games where we had to run and be sweaty ("amoy-araw", my mother would call me).
In all honesty, it was nice to play with the boys of the park. Actually, it was nice to be friends with them, period. They have all this energy and wit, and they never seem to run out of crazy ideas. I know we’re different from the other girls and to be frank, I think we’re superior to them for some obvious but ineffable reason. But being friends with the boys made me feel a whole new level of different. There was something about being with them that made me, in particular, feel challenged, like I have to live up to them and what they know. And little by little, I learned their ways and all. I could sometimes tell what they were going to do, what they were going to say. I guess you could say I’ve started to figure them out. For someone as curious as me, that is not a good thing. See, they lose their value once I’ve figured them out. I realized I had to find another with a challenge to keep my curious vibes in control.
One summer day, while making the biggest santan necklace after Poleng dared me to do it, Elay spilled something about a new boy in the neighborhood. He became friends with King, and he’s older than us. He was staying at his uncle’s house for the summer. I was so excited to meet this boy but I didn’t know why. Maybe because of my clever deductions, I realized that he must have more energy and wit than the regular boys in the park and would be overflowing with the craziest ideas. I shall befriend this boy, and we will have the best summer.