A Little Bit of Everything

Chapter 2

Here's the thing with me and expeditions: I love expeditions. If I could speak it with emphasis, or say it like how it is typed, then one would know how much I love expeditions. There's a thrill to it you can't get from drinking two whole mugs of Chuckie milk, or getting your shirt signed by your favorite artist; no, the thrill isn't anywhere near that.

Mom said that since I was a baby, before I could even walk, I was often crawling away to some part of the house on my own, searching for what, I don't remember (since that was back when I was a baby, obviously). I was always trying to get somewhere and trying to find something, trying to hold on to one thing while eventually losing interest in another. Mom used to say that teaching me how to walk was one of her biggest mistakes, because since then I wouldn't stop moving. The doctor said there's something wrong with me when I was about four years old (or was it three?), and since then my mom created the expeditions.

She would hide things in the house, just little things like an earring or a tiny toy, and she would give me the vaguest of clues and riddles to where it was hidden. Some expeditions took only minutes, and some took hours. For my ninth birthday, Mom started a more elaborate expedition: outside the house. She would accompany me as we searched through the bushes and underneath the park benches, and one night, with my parents' permission (and with my Lola with me) we went to the park and I searched the fountain for that missing earring Mom was making me find. I wore my swimming clothes and goggles and had a waterproof flashlight in hand. I even had a whistle around my neck just to be sure. Lola stayed near the fountain watching me as I splashed around in it, searching for the earring. My audience was Lola and the homeless people and I gave them a show. I even took some of the coins and added them to my piggy bank. Wishes don't come true from throwing coins in fountains. Obviously.

Anyway.

Before the Worst Day, about two or three days before Mom left for Maguindanao, she said that she will leave me with my biggest expedition yet. We were at a Starbucks near my school. It was around four in the afternoon; I remember every detail like I was watching it all unfold in front of me.

She had fetched me from school and said that we were all going to wait for Tatay because we'll have dinner out of the house. For about five minutes we playfully argued whether to choose Mcdonalds or Jollibee, and then she took out a folded map from her bag and laid it flat on the table. The table was a little too small so the ends of the map couldn't be shown, but before I could tell this to Mom, she began to talk of the expedition.

She told me that this was to be my biggest expedition yet. She put dots on names of cities and then connected them with broken lines. She encircled Manila, the very heart of it all, and I could feel it pulsing from the map, a steady ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum against the wooden table.

"Did you know," she said to me. "that before our kind came here, there were ancient people living in the center of Manila?"

"You mean, like, before the Ice Age and everything?"

"No, I mean, before the Spaniards came."

"But didn't they come in from Mactan?"

"They spread until they reached Manila, then they created Intramuros, et cetera."

"Yes, I know that, obviously. So why bring it up?"

"I overheard from some of my colleagues that certain anthropologists are looking for evidence that a certain tribe lived in the very heart of Manila, and that they would give half a million pesos to the person who finds at least five anthropological evidences such as plates or stone drawings, or even fossilized objects, that can come from that tribe."

"So this expedition wasn't really organized by you?"

"Oh, it is. Don't tell this to your papa, but I was able to find a piece of evidence that the tribe existed."