‘Naibanan gayod adi’ and the science of friendship
It’s that same thing again. “Naibanan na naman ako,” I thought after receiving that message of being cut off as a friend for my reckless humor.
I learned this from Lola: whenever you stray off in any place, alone and in isolation, maiibanan ika. “Ibánan,” to be joined with, as the word in Rinconada suggests, frankly was not as horrible the first time I heard of it when I was six and with this large circle of friends. Another one can be welcomed. Kids don’t think much of friendships and presentations anyway. A bruise on the knee is a banner of valor after a patintero victory. In college, when I hit my knee against the door, someone teased me for kneeling too much—and not for prayer.
But no, I learned the hard way how friends can be fever-bringers; the delirious kind that you can almost mistake for an impending journey to that light. And when Lola came to our house when I was six and burning up, with a handful of her herbs and oils, she muttered, “Naibanan gayod adi.” She rushed us to Lola Neri, our healer, who so confidently proclaimed, “Naibanan ika ‘noy.”
I sometimes ask myself, ‘Do I even deserve friends?’ until the best healing I conclude with is to avoid making new ones, to avoid the paranoia.
Ay, to be joined with. How terrible that one can be left alone and left to be enjoined by spirits or creatures or souls or demons to fall into illness. And I marvel at its science: how a muttering of folk Christian incantations while licking an oiled porcelain plate with flames from a candle and crushing nganga between fingers and palms is medical enough for a diagnosis of my spirit, apparently joined by another. On numerous occasions, they differ: once I remember, it was a relative from generations ago from playing alone in the backyard, another an unidentified spirit from adventuring in the unexplored areas of the cemetery, and another from Mama’s school where she teaches, just behind her classroom. And I succumbed to sickness. One that reminds you of their forgottenness, and their incessant ways of insisting they once were there, in the same place they have joined you.
And then there were actual friends and the figuring out of its science. I fiddled with the formulas, chemical reactions and systems in high school as religiously as the books told me to. Everyone wanted something different from me—Vences and her friends the laughs, Jason and his friends the quiet, Micah and her friends my gossip that filled us more than our lunches, and Aimeil and his friends the gaming. And that one “Eureka!” I had may have disproved my science textbooks.
You see, Newton may have been wrong—for every effort I gave, there is no equal reaction, until I’ve listed down all the axioms of friendship at the back of a Values Education notebook I rarely brought out in class. Busybodiness, flamboyance, rowdiness, quietness, gentleness, I had it all bulleted out as cleanly as I did lecture notes in Science, my then-favorite subject before 10th-grade English held me in a chokehold. When we moved houses, that notebook was gone already, I suspected used as kindling to burn leaves in the backyard. But no matter, I had it all memorized.
One needs no cheat sheet for the science of loneliness anyway. All of it is taken to heart—how friends are volatile, how friends are just as spirits and souls suspended in the limbo of the cemetery, our backyard, my Mama’s classroom, and how even with time, years after high school, the back of that Values Education notebook never left me at all. It followed me on the 4th Floor of UP Diliman’s Vinzons Hall at the Office of Counseling and Guidance, as grown as I grew in college, when I exhausted myself on Discord friends coming and going. It followed me still in my workplace as a teacher when my rowdiness attracted regard, my cackles too clamorous, and my silence impairing. It’s just like the diseases I learned in Environmental Science in grade seven—the desire still for a best friend you had long given up on, and how, as innocent as your friendliness is, you still weave through its politics and science. On occasions, I ask myself, “Was I too loud? Was I too quiet? Was the joke too far?” and if someone else does the observation for me and points it out—“Do you even deserve friends?”—the best healing I conclude with is to avoid making new ones, to avoid the paranoia.
And I do lose some of those friends, and comes the sickness. There is no need for paracetamol, but the mind sickens with the consuming fire of it, the estrangement, and the joining with. An affliction that not even Lola Neri’s genius can remedy. You know, memories do haunt, and they cling to you in the auspiciousness needed to be maibanan. It festers there in the corners of my high school building, the now-abandoned Discord Servers, the hallways of Palma Hall at UP Diliman, at UP Town Center, Riverbanks Mall in Marikina, and it pounces on you to bring forth malady should you stray there alone. There is no getting accustomed to the agony of grief when you ache to forever avoid it.
Ay, I wished so hard to scream at a co-teacher last year during an after-ceremony lunch when our Senior High School students graduated just this May. “If there’s one thing I learned, it is that friends are fickle.” Much as I delude myself into the illusion of it, friends truly are fickle. They come and go, but the sickness may persist. There is no denying it—the science is clear.
So I just have to gather what I need—the porcelain plate browned with age, candle, nganga, and the prayer I memorized from Lola Neri’s invocations. This is what healing is anyway: the quiet negotiations with the mystic and the material, the supernatural and the science, until almost a year has passed and the “Let’s remain civil na lang muna” has softened its sting. The pain of the usual “good morning, tara breakfast” to a tensioned brush of each other’s shoulder when we pass each other by has slowly calmed. Little by little, you get better. Time is my Lola Neri here. You see, the spirit, for remembering, leaves a fraction of itself before the departure. I can never forget, but the fever, at least, can subside.
