Bye, Ketok, my trusted friend.

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Back in high school, she helped me in Home Economics, made my achara, a pickled papaya appetizer. When she heard me sing Puff the Magic Dragon with lyrics wrong, she wrote down the words so I could sing it right. She drew me cartoon images - like Mickey Mouse, so I could have bookmarks. When we reunited years later, she's a librarian at a College of Law. Wow, I said, that's tough. I couldn't even remember the Dewey Decimal System. And we collaborated collecting books, for book barrows, and started cataloguing, so we could also put up our own library. The pandemia put a halt to that. Last time we texted before the lockdown, she was asking me to pick up an encyclopedia set. I couldn't. That's pretty heavy. And the months passed. I texted and asked how she was coping with the pandemic situation, there was no answer. Nothing to be worried about, I thought, for perhaps she was not able to load the cellphone, as that often happens to me. No loading kiosk near her residence in a secluded village. From out of the blue, a classmate rang me up and said Ketok has passed. And my heart ached. Our God picked from my Treasure Box again, to fill heaven with purehearts. Bye, Ketok, till we have those calming conversations again in God's mansion.