Strawberry Fields for MM

The third episode of the Level-Up Brotherhood Salutations series of 2011.

“Hi, I’m MM!”

I looked at the girl who just uttered these words. I haven’t spoken to anyone aside from my seatmates and I certainly I haven’t asked this girl what her name was...but she said it anyway. I looked at her with an indifferent gaze and examining her stature, I wondered how she could’ve passed on as a college student. Standing like a 14 year-old girl, with short hair and a headband, she certainly looked out of place amongst the people in the room.  Her blue backpack appeared grotesquely larger than she was. She was fragile, and as soft-spoken as she was, she offered her name to a complete set of strangers. That was bold, I thought, for someone so little.

I’m sure you already had a fare share of “bansot” jokes; most of them courtesy of me. And I’m sure you must have heard almost everything about your height. I’m a bully, I know, and I’m not going to stop bullying you. But I ridicule you with awe and respect, with love; like that of a big brother to her younger, vertically-challenged sister. I am reminded that behind this little girl stands a person so tall and magnanimous, she has accomplished so far and so much in her life.

Having had the opportunity to be one of your closest friends, I am reminded that brave people do come in small packages. There’s Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Pharaoh Amenhotep III, and then there’s you.  We all had a tumultuous college life, with all of the Brotherhood members having their own epic story to tell. Each war story grand in its own right, but yours has got to be the most victorious of all. You came, you saw, you’ve fallen countless times but you have definitely conquered. I am truly humbled and proud at the same time to be your friend.

As the world celebrates your twenty-sixth year, I would like to express my numerous “thank you’s” to you. Thank you for the knowledge you have imparted: all things political which helped me become the philosophical man I am today. I owe you to be the person responsible for awakening my socially-relevant self. You were my biggest political influence. Thank you for imparting your vast knowledge on the culture and the arts, on literature and all things intellectual, for they helped me become the cultured man I am now (choz! J). Thank you for sharing your life, your numerous heartaches, your frustrations, for they remind me how human we are in the world. Thank you for sharing your achievements and triumphs, for showing us, your friends, that no matter how life treats us all, there is still a way to triumph above all things unfair and unjust. Thank you for always being a loyal friend.

Do you remember the time you wore a motorcycle jacket on our Pharm21 class? I laughed so hard and I teased you about it all day. We wore white uniforms and seeing someone with a jacket that a renegade bounty hunter would wear (especially if that person was you) seemed very funny to me at that time. But as I go back to that memory, I realized that it wasn’t surprising at all. It was not funny. It was very fitting, as you have always been bold and brave of a person, a maverick.

So cheers, to the smallest bravest person I know on her twenty-sixth birthday!

Happy happy birthday, M!

  

Your strawberry fields are definitely forever.

See how small she is?
Oh Pong  'wag kang magselos, alam mo yan!