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You are still sitting at a church pew in the middle of a week day. In the last serial of this story you followed Congressman Bukad, Christina and the Maker here, into the Redemptorist Church at Mango Avenue. You hoped they would do something to continue this story but they just sat there doing nothing. You were hoping for an exciting and informative occurrence. You felt cheated and, offhand, wanted to call the editors of this paper to complain. You felt disoriented that nothing happened. Worse, they left without notice while you were distracted by your thoughts. "What is the point of this story?" You wanted to scream.
No, it was not your thoughts that distracted you. You were distracted by a strange unusual feeling as you sat there watching the three characters of this story sit, many rows in front of you. They did nothing but sit. They exchanged no dialogue. They were silent as a painting. And you must have gotten bored.
Or why were you overcome by a palpable sense of being comforted? You felt a cool wind blowing into the back of your head and felt good. You felt disconnected from "real" life, grinding away outside in a rush of movement and noise. For once, you felt the silent comfort of a church and without consciously realizing it, your brain raised inside you a lost memory of you as a fetus inside you mother's womb. You spent the first nine months of your life in this universe, this womb. There was nothing else. You do not consciously realize that the inside of a church is in fact designed as an iconic representation of the interior of the female reproductive devise. Yet even without this conscious realization, your mind still raised in you the same feelings you had as a fetus safely encased inside a woman's birthing organs. It was a strong unintelligible feeling that moved you inevitably to close your eyes.
When you opened them again. The three were gone. And while you did feel as if these characters played some sort of joke on you, you did appreciate the “punch line”. For if this event taught you something, it reminded you of the world of feeling. You realized what a strong influence the world of feeling has had on you; even though, you normally and consciously distrusted emotions. Emotions got you into trouble. They led, if not into rage and hatred, then into the complications of love, friendship, loyalty, allegiance and faith.
Congressman Bukad might have opined how subliminal emotions are being used now to get people to buy things as disparate as cars and stick deodorants. But as if using the word "faith" for cue, Christina quite suddenly walks in and sits down right next to you sans the other two characters of this story.
"I've been reading your thoughts and I really just wanted to add something," she says. She looks straight into you eyes and smiles. For some strange unexplainable reason, you experience a sudden increase in olfactory sensitivity. You smell everything, the flowers at the altar, the smoke of burning candles, fumes from the taxis racing by, even the faint trace of incense from what might have been the last funeral mass. You realize how good Christina smells.
"It is possible people may soon forget the emotional content of ordinary words. I am happy these texts are not illustrated and embellished with drawings and tables and graphs. Few realize and fewer still will in the future remember that every word carries with it a pure emotional aspect. Words are capable of giving pleasure. Such a pleasure as to make reading worthwhile even for the mere fact of the pleasure we derive from it; notwithstanding the more practical considerations like the transmission of data and learning."
You reply: "Yes, I see that now. True knowledge requires not just a realization of the aesthetic of words. It requires a true experience of it. Or what would drive us to act upon the things we realize from our experience with words, from reading?"
Christina holds your hand only for an instant long enough to contain the realness of her warmth, a slight grip to give you a reassurance you will remember for a long time. She moves her mouth closer to you ears and whispers: "We have to end this conversation now otherwise the story will seem more contrived than fantastic."
She walks away and turns only to answer, "Yes, you are", to a question you pose.
"I am a character in this story?"
