Dawn Scene

It was sunrise. The sky turned a light color blue with traces of orange seeping into its vastness. A woman sits at an airplane window. As I looked through her thick glasses, I wondered if she saw what I saw – a world of beauty, a world of opportunities, the future.

A woman from Cebu city sits next to her American husband. Her hand slipped upon his. His hand is wrinkled and dry. Hers tell stories of places and people, travels and memories. Things forgotten, things remembered. She had always longed for foreign flesh and the day that she got something old, something new and something blue was the day that she left her country behind. He did not love her and that feeling was mutual. Theirs was a mutual beneficial relationship, almost business –like. He needed a woman who did not ask, did not challenge and followed him in his late night drinking sessions. He needed her to follow his every step which she did. Like a shadow she walked by him. Her children were white skinned. Vastly different from her own skin which she religiously bathed and painted a color white – with no avail. Life was comfortable, for her husband offered more financial stability than she ever could dream of. Her children went to decent schools and her house looked like those in magazines she used to see in shop windows and on telenovela’s.

Yet at every sunrise, every color and every cloud floating by reminded her of the laughter echoing through her old neighborhood in her hometown back in the Philippines. That morning when I looked at her from afar must have been no different. She could see nothing but her past.

- Scenes & Angles -

(C) Anthony Jake Huiskamp Atienza