Drawing the Pain
Daniel has a wife and daughter but he separately lived far from them. Through my high-school days I only heard a little about them until we have started to migrate in a province area here in Mindanao where he also lived a few months earlier.
This man had decided to live afar from them without knowing what his reasons were, he does not even tell a little about his family or even to make a question of how they were doing.
If I was not wrong his daughter Annie is about 2 years older than me and is about to graduate in high school. The last time I saw her was when I’m just 4 yrs old and after that I never had the chance to make any personal reunion with her; she’s truly intelligent and cheerful and one of the most adorable student of their school making her own history in academic performances since elementary till high school, I knew about that till my parents were last updated about them, but after that, no more news did I hear from them.
One morning I saw him in the Living room wrapping things up going to the municipal town to meet with some friends there and enjoy spending time with fiestas, hang-ups, parties or wherever they want to go, that was just usual, but only one single thing was seems to intriguing me; he left pieces of pictures on the table just located close to him while his busy with his routine; I came to be very curious about it so I waited until he got finished and have to move on his way. I made the chance to glance on them; the first picture I saw was a girl sitting down on a chair she was definitely smiling, she’s wearing a navy blue long skirt paired with a white blouse so I was able to say that she’s a student, on the second image she was with an older girl; awhile before I make it on the next picture at hand I tried taking a gaze at the back of each picture to find whether there are any notes written on it that would introduce them to me and I was right, I saw these very short sentence “Hope that you would be here. Things would be very different for me if our family would be completed on this most memorable day of my life” below those sentence were written in a well hand written prospective “Your loving daughter Annie.” That was just the time when I was able to figure out that those picture were Annie and her Mother in school and they were asking him to be with them on her graduation day that would be two months from that day.
Few weeks had passed and I never heard anything about that invitation, so I tried asking mom if she had heard anything about it and answered me nothing as a remark that she has no extent to know his decision, which had brought me to the conclusion that he has no interest about it anymore.
I don’t find it very easy to analyze his routine in life, enjoyment is the basic means of his living; always making his dependency on his father and mother’s income. Sometimes he would owe money from other people with that big amount that puts his parents name into shame. There would be times when he would not go home for several weeks or even months not knowing where his spending his time and money everyday, and the time of his disappearance would provide fear to our family of what was going on with him, if he could still take care of his health and make time to still remember that he has a family waiting for him or if he could still go home alive or the worse is with the opposite that nobody of us would dare to think, those were only few and supposed to be easy questions but neither anyone of us has nothing to make an assurance of giving any definite answer except for rumors we heard from other people.
I have graduated high school and had transferred in the city to continue my studies, that time I only heard a little about him not about his family that he doesn’t put into his routine anymore, but about the worries he provide the same when I was still living in the province.
For about a few little years that had passed after I had left our town my father had made a phone call and say some little hello to me, the conversation had flowed all about my studies and my life apart from them till I got the chance asking of how life was going on for them and responded in a very low voice “Not very fine.” The conversation had lasted for about 30 minutes and I was able to got the idea that Daniel just got an illness which causes him to suffer from a severe pain just from within his abdomen part; as we dig it deeper I was just able to comprehend how hard there situation was. They’ve sent him to a doctor and spent a lot of money just to cure him but neither those medicines prescribed were not fair enough to cure the pain, so they decided to send him here in the city to be seen by an expert which would cause him to leave his new family there in the province where he now have 2 daughters (not including his daughter from his first wife), but unlike from the first one he didn’t got engaged with his second girl.
Again were able to live at the same house where I was temporarily living for the reason of my studies. I could not just illustrate how I got pity on seeing him crying at the moment he would feel something was putting a deep drawing pain of line in his abdomen, I may not be able to count how many nights he was not able to make even a little rest because of that tremendous feeling, I could not do anything but try to buy those pain relievers prescribed to him that are absolutely expensive just to make him rest his day. For about a couple of weeks he lost the shape of his round body. Sometimes I would think that he was not Daniel anymore. Now things had changed; the days of enjoyment is now changed into months of tears and the days of spending had now changed into months of visiting the hospital and that is how his doing now for the previous years he loved living outside the house hanging around, but now even a single stand he got it hard to make because of the force that is dominating within him that causes him so much sacrifices due to the way of how he lived his past life.
