For Cj de Silva — Camille Pilar, writer

Surround yourself with people who fight for you in rooms you aren’t in.

Cj posted this on her Facebook wall three weeks before she suffered an aneurysm. Most knew her as the Promil Kid, the child with the gift for painting, but to me, her gift was believing in other people’s gifts so much that she’d do anything to defend them. Fresh from college graduation, I received a text message from Cj one afternoon. She was at her office, a distinguished ad agency, and she heard a new hire talking about me at the next table.

“Kamyl, kilala mo ba si _? Naririnig ko siya sa kabilang table. May sinasabi tungkol sayo.”

Yes, I did know _. _ didn’t like me because I was the student who asked too many questions during group reports. As a so-called “bibo kid,” it escaped me then how not everyone shared my enthusiasm for class. Meanwhile, Cj loved anything disruptive and intellectual. Subvert the dominant paradigm!, we’d doodle on the margins of our notebooks. Who could be a bigger “bibo kid” than the girl who painted on canvases larger than life?

“Yes, classmate ko yan. Hayaan mo na!”

“Hindi eh! Pagsabihan ko kaya to?”

I don’t know if Cj actually talked to _ that day but I took it upon myself to confront _. I received an apology quickly after and I never talked to _ again. But Cj and I would remain friends throughout our early careers, hers in advertising, and mine in the purgatory before I took up surfing, my eventual ikigai. Looking back, I wish I had done more to preserve what we shared when we were still figuring out our place in a world that rewarded conformity and compliance.

When I told my mom the news, she told me that she remembered Cj because she was one of my first friends when I moved to Manila from Cebu. The guy I dated then was into drawing and introduced me to his artist friends, one of whom happened to be a Promil Kid. Cj and I stayed friends longer than that relationship. We went to different universities but we found time to meet in Katipunan to talk about Neil Gaiman, Ghost World (the graphic novel vs. the film), and the philosophy of history. Narrate the Battle of Mactan from the point of view of a fish! Blub, blub, blub! We laughed so loud because we didn’t at all feel the weight of Heidegger’s “thrownness” as we belted out the lyrics to Augustana’s Boston.

During my junior year as a Communication major, I had to render on-the-job training hours to complete my practicum. Most of my blockmates applied for internships at broadcast channels, ad agencies, publishing houses, and film companies. Cj recruited me to do a “marketing stint” at a clothing store where she worked part-time as an in-house artist. So we spent my practicum days customizing clothes for the offbeat shopper: Cj painted portraits on Chuck Taylors and white Vans slip-ons; I would sew buttons and patches on jackets. The store was called the Store With No Name and it was on the 3rd Level of Robinson’s Galleria. No matter what keywords I typed on Google today, I couldn’t find anything about the store. All of the press releases I wrote went to broadsheets and magazines. No digital trace.

And the same goes for my friendship with Cj. We didn’t use Facebook a lot then. Instagram was but a bourbon dream. Our correspondences over Multiply and LiveJournal have since been erased, never backed up, and all I have left of our formative friendship are our long-form letters saved in PDF attached to emails. We were such nerdy 18-year-olds exchanging theoretical frameworks and comparative analyses over good old Yahoo! Messenger. Buzz! Buzz! I helped her write her thesis and her graduation speech. She’d send me funny doodles, which were always such elegant drawings.

Why didn’t I save more of it? Why do I have so little of such a keystone friendship? My brain betrays me: I remember more and more of Cj only now that I can no longer buzz her. How did we drift apart? We didn’t have a major rift; we never fought at all. For all of our philosophizing, we never saw our folly. One of the last times I saw Cj was on a rainy night in Cubao X. We watched Us-2 Evil-0 perform as we took swigs from lukewarm beer. It was the end of a chapter in our youth, our Ghost World.

Cj would continue to disrupt the world in her not-so-little ways. She got married to her crush, Us-2 Evil-0’s guitarist/keyboardist, in the same year I moved to La Union. In their podcast, Cj told Wincy that she found LU to be too party-party. I had to chuckle. Oh, Cj. Imagine my loneliness! But you would have loved the studio that Harold and I built for creative conversations. A place to subvert dominant paradigms. I thought about inviting you and now it remains a thought forever. Sorry.

I am writing this because I know you would have wanted me to remember you this way. Through a PDF letter attached to an email. I hear the shutters of stores closing all around Robinson’s Galleria and the opening piano chords of Boston play in a distant hallway. I think I need a sunrise, I’m tired of the sunset. We’re waiting for our dads to pick us up, we’re laughing about another philosophy joke, and we don’t hug before you go.