The Restless Firefly

“Music saves the soul.” Play softly while you read.

She worships the euphoric sun and weeps with the melancholic rain. She spends her days staring at the infinite ocean and listening to the crashing of waves. She is made of sand and water; she is meant to swim away unreservedly. She is the island and the sea, and these live in her veins and bones too undoubtedly.

She is a mermaid of the modern world and the reefs give her a different definition of a “city”. She’s a lost soul who seeks refuge in the land’s friendly faces and smiles genuinely. She is a wildflower whose courage is rooted from the beautiful likeminded beings that take away her timidity. She is a drifter who thrives on a soil and waters that sustain her wonderment and curiosity.

Her sun-burnt skin is dry and at times rashed and rough but continues to long for that passionate embrace and squeeze. Her lips are pale and salty but are never tired of finding that damn fleeting but unbelievably surreal kiss. She is most of the time wet with her hair often windblown and tangled severely. The smell of mixed coffee, alcohol, smoke and ocean water is the natural scent she wears unapologetically.

She’s a vagabond living the quote “Carpe Diem!” like the tattoo inked on her back when she got fed up of her monotonous lethargic routine. Every night, she declares the day is seized and then holds a glass of liquor with one hand and a cigarette on the other without caring if she’ll be questioned by the conservatives. She goes to bed grateful but is secretly burdened by her restlessness, by the thoughts of how tomorrow and the years to come will be. And when the sun is up, this rambler is more than appreciative of another day she might probably be wasting blithely and unrepentantly.

She is a contemporary gypsy, her heart desires to un-endlessly roam. Albeit may stop in a community where she thinks she somehow belongs. She stays, she leaves. She’s foreign, she’s home. She floats, she sinks. She loves, she hates. She’s clever, she’s gullible. She can be bold but she’s frightened. She’s both the peace and the wild. She’s calm and untameable. The bliss and the misery. The land and the sea. She’s the storm, she’s the rainbow. The magnificent and the damned. She likes to grasp in different languages both thankful and cursing words. She invokes empathy but she is the chaos. She is everything in the extremes, never in between. It is a mystery how she copes up with her bipolarity.

This is the truth about modern mermaids. This is the truth about you and me. You are her, she is me. I know you feel me.

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These are the strings of words which lingered in my head while enduring the long habal-habal ride from Panglao Island to Anda in Bohol. On my way back, I thought I should write about it. Spent a day in Anda with my trusted childhood partner in crime, Aubrey. Here are a few photos of Bohol’s hidden gem.