There was a boy and there was a girl.
The boy was me and the girl was her. It was supposed to be simple, but of course, a lot of things just don’t turn simple. Sometimes it does, but most of the time, there are a lot of turns and twists with it.
She told me that she wanted to be a writer. “I’ve been writing since my childhood days,” she said. “It’s the career I want to take.”
It was the first time that I have encountered someone who wanted to be a writer. In the era when it seemed like everyone wanted to have blue-collared jobs, and other professions that involved a ticket to wider opportunities abroad, here she was, wanting to be a writer. Plus, I’ve always thought of writers as someone…not quite ordinary.
Take her, for example. Sometimes, when I need to research on something at the library, I would see her there, scribbling on her notebook, minding her own business without the least care for anything or anyone around her. Other times I’d see her at the café just outside the university, writing and writing, pausing only to sip from her coffee or smoke a cigarette.
I asked her once what made her want to write, and she told me that it came to her all of a sudden.
“Like a sudden light in the darkness,” she said.
I just nodded on her response. “Does the idea arrive like that too?”
“Sometimes it does,” she said, planting her elbows on the coffee table, resting her chin on her hand. “But sometimes, I leave the idea where it is.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. If it works then I’ll push it. If not, then I’ll leave it unfinished,” she said.
I lit a cigarette. “How do you know if it works or not?”
She gave it a moment’s thought, her eyes wandering somewhere. A few seconds later, she gave up. “I got no idea. I just find out at the process.”
I tried to think things over. “You just find out as the story goes.”
She smiled. She was always like this. I ask her one particular thing, and she’d go all the way. She’d almost tell you everything, but sometimes I find it hard to catch up. It was like she told a lot, but in context, she said nothing at all. The thing was, she’d be talking about a lot of things but never about herself. She might do so, on small pieces and mere touches, but as a whole, no. In my case, never.
And then I learned that she was writing a novel.
We were at the library when I asked her about the plot of her novel. We spoke in hush tones of course, in fear of the librarian who was known at the university as someone whose wrath was the equivalent of that of a bull while the red cloth flapped.
“My plan is to make each chapter feel like individual stories. I’m kind of experimenting,” she said.
I just nodded. “Would you summarize one chapter for me?”
“It’s hard to talk about a work in progress.”
“Even just a gist?” I insisted.
She gave me an okay-if-you-insist kind of look. She closed the notebook where she had been scribbling on. “Let me tell you about the one I’m working on now,” she began. She twirled a pen on her fingers. “It begins with the line ‘There was a boy and there was a girl’ and ends with ‘Long live the beehive!’” she said.
My eyebrows narrowed. I tried searching for the words to describe my confusion, but failed.
Noticing my confusion, she continued: “Before I write, I plan the first sentence to begin it. And as I write, I set the ending sentence. It’s like constructing a building. I wanna know how it looks like once it’s finished while I’m still building it.”
“Then why does it begin and end that way?” I managed to ask.
“Well, it’s about a boy and a girl. And then there are bees.”
“Is it based on anything personal?”
“Some of it,” she replied. There was a weak tone in her voice. Her eyes left my face. “But not all, of course.”
“Ah,” I said. It was clear that she didn’t like to talk about it, and I wasn’t about to pry. “You mean, is it fiction based on true events, or just plain fictional events?” I chuckled after my statement.
She muffled her laughter by covering her mouth with her hand. I always love it when she has her eyes on me every time she laughs. There was something in her look that made me feel important—like I am a mirror; and whenever she looked happy, I’d be the same.
“Remember the first time you asked me about this novel, at the café?” she said.
I nodded.
“And I said it’s about some doors I wish to close?”
“Yeah. I recall,” I said. I glanced around for a moment. Most of the tables at the library were filled with students. Some were flipping pages of a book while jotting down something on a notebook, while some were like us, talking in hush tones. Then I looked at her before adding: “Then it’s about the first guy you fell in love with?”
She gave a gentle laugh. “No, crazy! Yeah sure, there’s some romance, but it’s nothing like that,” she paused for a moment, and then looked at me again. “What do you do when you close a door?”
“I close the door and then I leave,” I said. It was the first thing that came to my mind. For a moment there, I tried thinking about the doors I have closed already. There was the town where I grew up; the house of my parents…will I ever open them again?
Her smile didn’t disperse from her face. “When you close a door, that doesn’t mean you’re totally leaving, you know,” she said.
“Well, when I close the door of my apartment, I leave it.”
“But you return moments afterward.”
I smiled. “Nice metaphor, then.”
“That’s not my point though,” she replied. “My point is, I close those doors so that when I leave, I know that what lies behind that door is safe.”
“You writers always have a way with things,” I said.
“Not really,” she countered. “Just got a lot of doors to close.”
We were at the café near the university when I asked her about the connection of the starting line and the ending line in that chapter of the novel she was working on. It was afternoon, and our vacant periods were not yet over. The café was not quite packed with students.
She lit a cigarette, stared at the smoke lingering for a while, looked at me and then smiled.
And that was when she told me about the beehive.
She was nine years old when it happened.
She was living with her parents in their house in Cavite. In their backyard, they have this huge Jackfruit tree, about 8 feet tall. Of course, she was nine, so it was so tall in her eyes. The fruit itself too big for her hands. Whenever the fruit was ripe enough to be eaten, it was her father who would cut it off from the branch, and then give it to her mother to be washed. Her mother would do various things to the fruit: mix it with vegetable dishes, turon, or use it for a very delicious atsara.
But other than that, the Jackfruit tree has its different uses.
Nine years old at the time, she used to climb the tree’s thick branches. She loved the presence of the leaves waving hello, of the ever-present wind blowing everywhere, and most especially—
“The beehive?” I blurted out after she told me it was one thing in the Jackfruit tree that was so special.
“Yes,” she said in a very serious tone. “We all have different ways of looking at things.”
“I know,” I replied. “A book is special to me. A particular piece of clothing is special for me. But a beehive?”
She smiled at me while twirling a ballpen on her fingers. I watched it spin around her fingers before laying flat on her palm.
“Do you know what a beehive is?” she asked.
“It’s a bee colony.”
“A beehive is a home.”
“That’s what I said,” I told her.
“A usual colony houses a thousand bees,” she replied. “But this particular beehive has only three.”
“It’s a small family,” she added. “There’s a Father Bee, a Mother Bee and a Baby Bee.”
“Now you’re just making things up,” I answered.
“Maybe. But it’s a lot of fun to think about it that way,” she said in a cheerful tone. “Father Bee goes to work, Mother Bee goes to the market, and Baby Bee is left at the hive to play.”
I just smoked a cigarette while listening to her. There was little noise inside the café. A few students like us were occupying other tables, submerged in their own conversations. A slow rock tune was flowing from the speakers. On the table between us lay her half-empty cold cup of coffee; I emptied my cup before it had a chance of cooling. An ashtray sat beside the cups, its mouth full of butts and ashes.
There was something in her words that crept through my head in an inexplicable way. A part of my brain told me that it was wrong to have asked her about her novel since all that it did was douse me in confusion; while a part of it still tries to break her words into small pieces; pieces that were small enough for my rational mind to comprehend.
“One day,” she continued, her eyes watching my hand as it crushed the cigarette on the ashtray. “I stopped climbing the jackfruit tree. It just came to me like a dream. But you know,” she looked at me. I didn’t know what kind of expression I wore while listening to her. “I never ceased to care about the hive and the bee family living there.”
“But that’s you, not your story, right?” I said.
She had her cup to her lips so she just nodded.
“So, how does it connect to your story?”
“I just used that memory of mine as a plot device,” she replied. “In my story, one of the characters, the girl, watches the bee family everyday. She admired them, like, she saw something different and amazing on them.” She paused. She placed her hands on the surface of the table, her fingers laid out like two starfish resting on a clear ocean floor. “Until Father Bee stung Mother Bee, and Mother Bee couldn’t sting back. So when Father Bee goes to work, Mother Bee goes out to play with the Wasps. In time, Baby Bee left the hive, just as the same time the girl in my story left her house to go to college.”
I just listened, trying to arrange the words she said inside my head.
She lit her second stick of cigarette, and after exhaling a cloud of smoke, she said: “It’s still messed up right now because it’s not yet finished. I’m still in the process of writing the first draft.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” I said. We laughed together.
“Did I made you curious about my novel?”
“You bet. Inform me once you’ve finished it.”
“Yey! I’ve got a reader!” she said, flashing her teeth.
“May I ask though,” I said after a moment. “Why ‘Long live the beehive!’?”
“Well, the girl’s always haunted by the memory of the beehive. It made her want to come back home, climb the jackfruit tree again, just to know if things somehow worked itself for the bee family. But she can never go back.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Well, she’s not sure if the beehive is still there.”
“But the beehive is still there, right?” I asked.
“Of course. It’s not going anywhere.”
“The girl in your story,” I said after pondering for a while on her words. “She’s a bit like you.”
“How can you tell?” she answered.
“I don’t know. The thought just crossed my mind.”
She gave a slight nudge of her head, the strands of smoke from her cigarette wafting around us before dissolving into memory. Her round, deep-well eyes were focused on me, as if seeing through me.
“This is why it’s hard to talk about a work in progress,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Remembering it now, I couldn't help but wonder why she talked about a lot of things, but avoided talking about what she called "too personal stuff": why she chose to leave her parents' house, and the reason she never wanted to talk about her family.
Reviewing these memories that I have of her, I think I understand it now.
Father Bee stung Mother Bee, and Mother Bee couldn't sting back. So, when Father Bee leaves the hive, Mother Bee goes out to play with the Wasps. Which one stings harder, the bees or the wasps? I never knew. I've never been stung by them. When I was a kid, I usually see some wasps buzzing around when I play in the yard of my parents' house, and I've always avoided them, and uh, that's another story.
Putting these thoughts aside for a while, I thought of the beehive hanging in that branch of the jackfruit tree. Are the bees still there? I wondered. Has the Baby Bee grown into a Lady Bee, perhaps wanting to become a writer?
But of course, the hive's no longer there. She told me in a much later date that the jackfruit tree has been cut down a long time ago. But I know the hive still exists, in whatever simple form or way, still hanging on to a branch somewhere in memory.
Long live the beehive!