I.

Jon, we moved your surfboard today. Nay found it beneath your closet, green paint peeling from the dark wood. The one you picked out yourself. Earlier Nay and I tried to fix it like you fixed it, smoothing and sanding; as the dust fell into our eyes, I thought about how you carefully chose this one, polished it with your brown limbs, and smeared it with paint until it became yours. Miracle boy, Manong Pedro told Nay, smoking and shaking his head. Now the board is sira, broken, and we have tucked it beside your bed.

Late afternoons I watched you slip into waves on that board. You glided on the dagat, your skin translucent, soft, and green. You pushed your wet hair from your forehead, grinned. Came up again. In the sunset, I saw your silhouette dark against the water, trembling and refracting. You shrieked, green glinting off that board. As I watched from my window, I remember thinking that you never let yourself be swallowed the way you were swallowed by our ocean: back pressed on the board, stomach open to these churning, chasmic waves.

II.

The first time you taught me how to surf, you had just failed an interview. You fisted your striped tie in your palm, yanked it, crumpled it into ugly lines. I told you that you didn’t need America. You told me you were going to teach me something beautiful.

We padded into the Boracay water, you and I. Your skin glistened with perspiration. You let me use your green board. Green for swerte, luck, a concept your aching fingers and lifted veins usually dismissed. A concept that I, watchful, waiting, clung to — adored.

You instructed me to keep my stomach on the board, and I felt the hard wood carve into my skin, the water soaking, stirring. Keep moving, you said, patient. Your feet connect to the board and the board connects to the ocean. Do you feel that?

Yeah, I said. Yeah. 

And I breathed and you were there. Your brown figure cut into something still and me, smudged, falling; but I felt it then. I was soaking and my limbs froze and burned, but I saw how in this large, unfathomable expanse, everything spilled into wind and water. Here, you were anchored. Here, you searched.

III. 

Everyone remembers when you won a scientific scholarship overseas. You were a hard-working boy from Boracay island, and Nay christened our house by hanging your portrait lopsided by the stove. All the manongs and titas and students stared. Suddenly, you were ironed white shirts and crisp khakis. Clean shoes. Biology rushing, heavy in your mouth. You only smiled when they looked. I liked how your eyes crinkled, chinito, like webbed starfish. Afterwards, routine, you took the traysikel home with me and surfed. Always for hours at a time. Once, you surfed with your shirt on, recklessly, and the fabric thinned and turned transparent. You rolled it into a ball, looked at me with starfish eyes.

You laughed. Are you going to tell Nay?

I held my board, and I drifted closer. 

IV.

There is no ocean in Kansas City, Missouri. I know because I called you yesterday, which I don’t do often. I couldn’t see your face over the black curl of our telephone line, but I imagined I could hear your warm, tired breath, the ballpoint scratching ink on your nursing care notes. You rattled facts I only pretended to be interested in, like Missouri’s thirty lakes, like Kansas City jazz. Like Filipinos making up 0.49 percent of the Kansas City Missouri population.

I stare at the telephone line, swinging, sticky from humidity. Is there any humidity in Missouri? I think, now, that you are always in the middle of something large, something foreign. Something where you, our miracle boy, are small and insignificant.

V.

Jon, I stole your surfboard the day you decided to leave for America. Stubbornly I dragged your board, let it get stripped away, the edges peeling, bruised. I poured my back into the solid wood and floated. I let the water stain my face. Let a wave engulf me on this bitter board of wood, let my elbows sink into the ocean that you loved so much.

Suddenly salty blackness washed over my eyelids. I choked. Gasping I saw your figure imprinted under my eyelids, and I could sob; and then you were there, miracle boy. Your body lithe and strong. You yelled my name, and I knew instinctively that in the ocean of my body you were integral. That this was not the first time, or the last, that you had saved me from drowning.

Jon, I said, and I felt you wrap me in your warmth. I remember you in your wetness: your skin and eyes glittering, your hair gelled. Wetness like blood, like the womb.

VI.

When I visit your room, I feel the smooth, splotchy wood of your surfboard. It rests patiently against your unwrinkled bed. It is doing okay, Jon.

It will always be here.