You can never run away from the sea

“YOU can’t run away from the sea,” Papa said, towing him into the slippery weeded seabed, at the peak of day. “Not especially if you’re a Cebuano.”

This was the first time they went to the beach out of ceremony. Papa’s granddad, he says, had them thrown off a cliff and into the sea to make a pointthat the only way out is to just keep going. No paid lessons. This was how they were taught to swim back in the late 60s.

To the boy this was weird since his idea of a father was a phantom — a fresh-smelling suitcase filled with chocolates and VCDs and the sounds of ripping packaging tape in the living room, and the scent of corned beef and eggs wafting through the air in the morning. This was a man the boy barely knew, and wading out in the sea with him felt like a test of trust.

Every step was a tighter ribcage, as if the sea was hugging him closer every time he takes another stride. This was the first, and only summer the boy will remember that his father had taught him how to swim.

In those days the boy had lived in a two-story wooden house hidden in the small back streets close to the old city center. He had grown to love the lazy humid summers in that house, where afternoons were Geneva Conventions of different barangay boys, representatives from Kalubihan, from Echavez, from Taga Ubos Merkado, and they’d congregate over Ghost Fighter and fight battles fought with luthang. The boy will have spent his childhood years with no fond summer memories of the sea.

Though papa was leading the way, the boy felt frightened when the hugging of the water soon turned into choking. It has become a battle between two things: for air and for a solid landing step.

The boy had to choose one. From under the water he can see his father’s feet planted firmly on the under-sea sand.

It was said among the secret society of newly foreskin-deprived boys that the seawater makes your dick wound heal faster. Before he had his manhood mutilated, he had seen those boys in the big shirts, pinching the front side as if it was a tentpitch, walk out into the water and scream for mama out of mixed pain and laughter. But in a few weeks, they’d be back wearing shorts again, and a couple months later their voices turned a deep tenor. To the boy, this ceremony was something that was waiting to happen — and he can never run from it — the eventual, certain kind of pain, and the only way to fix it fast was to let it be under the sea.

When his time had come, he was petrified with the idea that blood is barbeque smoke for sharks.

The boy shivered at the idea of jaws coming for his johnson as he was healing himself in the saltwater. So after he was cut, he laughed, went home, and played Mortal Kombat all afternoon.

This was how he spent one summer.

“You can’t run away from the sea, not especially if you’re a Cebuano,” his father said once, yet it was as if, somehow, he had run away from the sea all his life.

In his teenage years he never had stories to write about the sea. Nobody ever took him to the water, nor did he feel like he ever needed it at all. He felt more strongly about the verdant green canopies of the tropical acacia trees and the earthy scent of the soil in a blue camping morning, where they’d spend