I'm Thirsty

I spent my Holy Week in Batangas, where my mother’s mother resides. During summer vacation, we siblings (at times with our cousins) are sent there almost every summer when we were children. In retrospect, we actually had ho-hum summers, doing practically nothing but playing (and secretly getting junk food and softdrinks from my lola’s small sari-sari store), and waiting for beach day, which is always the culprit of our sunburns bad enough to actually survive June. In contrast, a student I chatted with recently has a jam-packed summer consisting of three sports, and cooking class on top of that.

On Good Friday, the mayor of our small town decided to cut off the water supply. I suppose I’m the last to find out, waking up at around 10:30 a.m. and finding no water in the comfort room. Apparently, mister mayor wants us to involuntarily sacrifice, and he drove his point I guess, water being obviously essential. We had little water to drink as well. Talk about abstinence. Pork I can give up, breakfast I already did (for two days), but not water. I suppose there wasn’t any advisory, else we could have prepared water pails and all the containers. Losing water was such a horror; I didn’t move much so as not to get thirsty, since the water bottles in the fridge are all empty. Tell me, how can I live with no water? Can’t drink, can’t bathe with no water. Haha. There was also a 10-minute power interruption by 6:30 p.m., which we assumed was to last until whenever, making us conclude that mayor is a tyrant.

There was still no sign of water supply by dinner. My cousin got a pitcher, put plenty of ice, and poured Sprite. Soda’s effervescence (the jumping particles on the surface that can tickle one’s nose) has always amazed me. But there was no water. Hmmm. I haven’t drank softdrinks since exactly four years ago by Black Saturday, and I don’t want to ruin my streak. Man can survive for three days without water, said science, so the plan was to chew my food slowly to prevent me from choking. If I really need to, then I have to drink Sprite. It’s very odd that we have to drink soda to sacrifice for Lent. Plan B was get a block of ice and let it be water for x minutes, but that would take too long. I realized that my no-soda streak was about to end.

In a shocking twist of events, another pitcher apparently contained water. What. Sprite and water can be indistinguishable at times, especially in the dark, and when placed in translucent containers. Yey! No more dry throats. I wondered where it came from (since I couldn’t get a drink all afternoon), but I asked no more. Those two glassfuls were bliss.

Water supply was back the next day. Indeed, absence makes the heart go fonder.

I guess the same goes for other things that people take for granted. The same can be told about good friends. And school. Yearly, as March ends, I chat with a lot of students who were jubilant after the last periodic exam (or submitted requirement), troop to the malls, forego sleep for online games or PSP, yet were already bored after four or five days of “freedom”. In parallel ways like water, good friends and school refresh, support, and sustain us. No wonder, the first day of classes is one of the moments when pure joy is indeed both observed and experienced, and when the thirst for knowledge begins.

Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone, as the song goes.