Wala Lang

Three or four more days and 2005 will be gone forever.  My life was like a roller-coaster this year.  Early this year, I remember crying while driving home everyday, frustrated and angry about what some people are doing to my country.  Yes, I am that kind of a dork…I feel so strongly about the Philippines that anything happening there would elicit certain strong reactions from me.  Worse of all, I had the front row seat to all this hoopla! 

I felt so helpless then…so inutile since I was just an insignificant fly in the system.  I prayed so hard for someone to show me the way.  And then I fell in love and I thought that was it.  I wasn’t meant to serve my country, but I should go away and be somebody else.  I did leave my country, but I left it with a heavy heart.  My sister had to literally push me out of the car when she brought me to the airport.  I really didn’t want to go.

By the middle of the year, I was in a different land, my heart got a bit broken, but someone else is trying to piece it back together again. And my resolve to go home and serve has become stronger than ever.  I love this new land where I am in right now, but this is not where I belong.  My skin, my eyes, my heart will always betray the fact that I am a foreigner in this land.  There is a reason why I was made with brown skin, brown eyes, and a heart for danggit and lechon.

Yes, I always tell myself and the people around me that there is a reason for everything. There is a reason for all the things that happened to me this year.  And I am grateful for all of these things…both the good and the bad.

When I was a little girl, I used to love this story about a princess who finds a frog in her garden, takes it home, kisses it, and lo and behold, the frog transforms into a handsome prince.  It did not hold any meaning for me before except that I was just fascinated by the concept of kissing frogs.  As a teenager, that fairy tale took on another meaning for me.  My friends told me that we have to kiss as many frogs as we can to find our prince.

Well, tonight, one more frog was kissed and he has remained a frog.  No magical transformation happened. So, I guess it is time to bring this frog back to the pond where he will be happier with his own kind.  Yep, this frog is a frog and nothing else.

I wonder…how many more frogs must one kiss to find one’s prince?