Dateline: 30 September 2018, Pasay City
Last Friday, 28 September 2018, I lost one of my very best friends. I lost Eon to the darkness that had been progressively enveloping and swallowing him for at least a year (as I later learned). I received the saddest and most heartbreaking of news in the early hours of Saturday while still in Cebu City and due to fly back Manila at mid-morning. I wanted to grow my own set of wings then.
I was program coordinator for The Library Foundation in the early 2000's when I first met Eon, who enlisted for our peer education program. He was still completing college, and he was poised to graduate at the top of his class. His initial participation almost didn't happen, but I was glad that it finally did even when the circumstances weren't the best. Because like in his many other personal projects, Eon pursued his volunteer work with us with unqualified passion and sheer ironclad will, which eventually brought him to the Boardroom as the organization's (now called TLF SHARE Collective) youngest trustee.
I helped Eon and his classmates work on their thesis, while he volunteered in our NGO's programs and activities. I also witnessed his voracious appetite for reading; he was able to finish off our NGO's small library's collection easily. Between finishing college and awaiting employment, he was even able to join our community campaigns in the Southern Tagalog areas. All these and more: we had official joint endeavors like the HIV and AIDS awareness program during his senior year in college as officer of the student council, as well as the Gender and Development initiative for subject matter experts during his freshman year at work for a technology solutions company.
Eon was the first person to tell me what BFF means (i.e. "best friends forever"). He insisted that that's what we were to each other. It was like a May-December kind of BFF relationship, I a Martial Law baby, him a People Power (EDSA Uno) progeny.
Eon deeply loved writing. Writing was something we had in common, except for the deep-love part. Writing for me was a professional obligation, a means to demonstrate that I deserve the job I have and the salary I get. Eon would express his feelings for writing with the effusive romantic language; he read lengthy essays about writing. He introduced me to blogging when we started living together. We were two paired-up friends sharing a two-bedroom apartment (our own small commune), and he was my patient champion to write beyond the professional obligation. He was the one who had the vision to write for pleasure and be a success at it. He once teased me for my lack of "imagination": he was "hastydevil" in the blogosphere, I was, well, "glenncruz."
As time, circumstance, and "adulting" would have it, we'd later live more distinctly separate lives... until two years ago that I was able to land him a place next door to mine. But the adulting in us allegedly worked on different times and places - daytime in Manila for me, nighttime in Quezon City for him. Our BFF time no longer held carpe diem qualities. And apparently, us friends were looking down in our own hands while the darkness hovering above him gathered strength.
He stopped blogging; the hastydevil was the first one to close (i.e. restricted) from among his online accounts, then social media came later. I wanted to give him this, 642 Things to Write About (by the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, published by Chronicle Books) because I had a thought that all the work and some other circumstance (e.g. he once told me he's getting tired of trolls and flamers) might have kept him from his personal writing, and having something as casual as this book might wake the writing bug again. Or at least elicit a funny conversation at the corniness of it all. I wanted to give him this if not on his birthday, maybe on Christmas. He was big on remembering birthdays. And we were both big on sharing slices of Christmas ham.
I started blogging again. I have yet to tell him how I came to a decision about blogging old-school again as old-school blogging can get. I had hoped that once he gets to peruse 642 Things, or get him to at least comment on my recent blogs, he would get excited again with blogging, with writing, and in the process brush off on me that quality and level of infectious excitement I missed from him.
But Darkness had a pleasant face; it didn't give off any clue to brewing storms. Darkness forfeited my chance for a last conversation with my BFF, not for even just one exchange about one of the 642 things suggested in the book.
Emerson G. Miranda, "Eon" to his significant other and friends, was born on 13 July 1984 in Natividad, Pangasinan, and he died 28 September 2018 in Mandaluyong City. He was 34.
[This post is antedated: 20181022]
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