San Dagem: An excerpt

Dad Monologue: Scene 27
(A work of Fiction - any resemblance to a person, living or dead is unintended)

“Hey mom…” I watched her small form squirm into her mother’s lap to gaze intently at her face. She is five years old now…it’s amazing to see how fast she has grown. It almost feels like yesterday when she was just a small bump in her mom’s tummy. That she grew up so fast to become this inquisitive bright kid who always found a question to ask was simply a miracle and I couldn’t thank God enough for giving me the honor of being her dad.

“Hmmm?” Her mom tried to focus on her book but it was increasingly difficult with her daughter nestled snugly in front of her.

“How’d you meet dad?”

It was spoken innocently enough and I was also rather amused by it. Her mother looked at her daughter with a half-smile, an almost embarrassed look. She glanced sideways at me and I gave her a sheepish smile. I shrugged…luckily she was the one asked and not me.

She gave me a half cocked eyebrow raise. I grinned. Well, I’ll deal with the consequences later.

“Mom, how’d you meet dad?” She tugged at her mother’s shirt, impatient with an answer. She will continue to ask until she got an answer. That was her nature. Her mother laughed and put down her book.

“Well, he added me on Facebook…” she started.

I laughed.

It is amazing, you know how much more complicated life is now. Ten or so years ago, the medium of communication that would have opened doors between people would have been letters delivered by the mailman. Remember penpals?

And then a few years after that, Nokia gave us the 3310 and the 3315. And then it was all about textmates.

Now, we have Facebook.

Times change and maybe in a few years, Facebook will go the way of dinosaurs and another will take its place. But whatever may happen later, the reality is that we have Facebook to thank as a platform of sorts to voice out our hopes and aspirations. It is for the busy people of today, it serves as an unconventional platform for exploring the bonds that might go somewhere – particularly for people who are for lack of a better term, hampered by various factors that prevent the engagement of conventional methods of courtship.

But I actually wonder if the scenario above will play out someday with an actual daughter and you and it is not just a figment of my imagination…

I want to believe that at a certain level when you read these posts, you somehow get the feeling that I am talking to you. That at a certain way, you sense that these are meant for you like how I believe that in a certain way, your posts speaks to me. Or maybe I am just imagining things and I just convinced myself that this is what’s happening.

But this would make one hell of a story, don’t you think? When someday, someone will ask you how you got courted and you say that someone did it through blog writing. It would make one hell of a story.

But then again, maybe all this is my imagination gone wild…

It would not be the first time… or the last…

What are we really, I wonder…

We are in the gray area between two places, that much I know (at least on my side). If I had half the confidence to confide, I’d probably swallow all my reservations and put everything up for bust. But that is not me. My hands shake when I get the phone and my thumb shakes and refuses to press the dial button on the touchscreen and I can’t call. It takes hours for me to compose a message and awkward moments before I manage to press the send button.

I am exhilarated and at the same time pained when you turn me down and I do sneak glances at my phone just to see if you’ve answered. Call me stupid, coz I am… and maybe that’s how much I feel or how much you made me confused…

I like you…

That I cannot deny…

And maybe that little story above might be true one day.

“Mom?”

“Hmmm”

“How’d you meet dad?”

“He added me on Facebook…”

The story is deeper of course, but that’s one milestone…

This is my delusion of course. It will never happen, probably. But allow me to do a bit of imagining, a bit of daydreaming at least... before that inevitable day when the door slams shut on me forever.

(Excerpt from the work in Progress entitled San Dagem: The Story of Us – Copyright 2011. Johnny Domawa.  All Rights Reserved)