Fireflies

– are the most amazing things in the world. There is something very innocent and pure about them – a place with fireflies is a place with magic.


I only ever travelled to one place with these curious creatures and that is my mother’s home in San Pedro, Camarines Norte.


It would be summer, but the temperature would be cold as city –Bers’, and I would stay outside the front door, looking at the pine tree outside my lolo’s house; I would hide behind a column because I thought if they saw me they wouldn’t come out.


And there, one by one, they would light up and the pine tree would look like a Christmas tree. Slowly, and my smile would creep up my face just as slowly.


I would stay outside until my fingers would grow numb from the evening cold, until my mother or my grandmother or anyone who noticed my absence first called me inside. Only then, only then would I leave and even then it would be reluctantly, because I didn’t want to leave my friends. Friends who didn’t even know I exist, and that I watched them every night, and that I loved them.


Friends that probably only lived for a day or two and whose sole purpose that my little three-year-old brain could comprehend was to light up that pine tree across the yard.


“Bem!”

Oops, gotta go.