Yesterday while I was working on my IG puzzle feed at Canva, a sudden rush of feeling came to me – a deep longing to visit the ocean and bask in the sun again. I feel so lucky to have been born in a country that has plenty of beach lines and islands to visit. But with the pandemic happening, I am missing the sea so much as this is usually the time of the month where the whole family is on vacation. In fact this year, we were supposed to be in Mindanao to go beach hopping in Tawi-tawi and Misamis Oriental. Part of our goal as a family is to visit new tourist spots in the country at least once per year.
Last year we went to Batanes as part of the kids’ homeschooling lesson. You can read about it here.
I love the sea so much. I love swimming and skin diving into the turquoise to aquamarine salty water, in close, respectable contact from fishes and corals. My closest friends fondly call me a mermaid because of my obsession with ocean. I laugh every time I’m called that because when I was a child, I believed that I was a mermaid in my past life who decided to leave the sea to be born with two legs on land. I was funny like that, my imagination tended to run wild. I’ve highlighted this mermaid trait of me in a poem I’ve written while in Mongpong Island last February of this year.
I remember how it was particularly hot that day. I just had lunch and my stomach was heavy. I wanted to relax so I laid down on a narrow bamboo bed on the hut’s patio to let the summer breeze cool me down from the noon time heat. A hodgepodge of dead corals, shells, drift woods and dead leaves were scattered over the white sandy beach – a result of the recent storm that hit Mongpong Island. The kids, unperturbed by the heat, were playing with sand under the canopy of Talisay and palm trees.
The sea was calling to me but it was too hot so I decided to stare at it through the wood planks of the patio and write this poem on my phone instead. Then I took a photo and posted it on my Facebook and Mirakee accounts.
Let This Mermaid Sleep
The sea calls me
I listen
The bamboo bed creaks
I move about undecided
The sun radiates overhead
The sand hot under my bare feet
I return to the hut
To seek its friendly shadow
I tell my friends to wait
Let this mermaid sleep
Will dance when the sun sinks
Into the purple orange horizon
If you enjoyed this poem, you might also want to read about the poem I made for my daddy when he died last year and about my best friend.
The Fabulous Scientist 
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