I call her “G”.
She was my first. I got her from my uncle on my 13th birthday.
She and I spent many hours together on the steps of the Science Building in high school. I shared her with my fellow social outcasts and eccentrics. We used to argue over who would get to play her next. When she was brand-new and shiny I would yell at anyone who scratched her or bumped her into anything.
I remember how I once tossed her over a fence and into some bushes, in a silly fit of rage after getting into a fight with my college boyfriend.
She went with me when I moved to Manila, where I rarely even picked her up, preoccupied by fleeting relationships and late nights of partying. I brought her with me when I moved back to Cebu, where I stored her in my closet. She stayed there, silent, with rusted, broken strings for 5 years.
Today I cleaned her up and fitted her with fresh, new strings. I’m leaving her in the care of my father, who first taught me how to do basic chords when I was a child. I’ve been re-learning to play for a few months now, on a borrowed guitar in Dubai.
I clumsily plucked at her strings, which seemed unnaturally pristine against her scratched and battered body.
She is covered in scars and is no longer the shiny, beautiful guitar she once was. But she still makes beautiful music.
Guitar Strings (Ruby Redulla, July 2007)
The chords in a loud whisper floating through the air
to the caresses of our fingers
declaring songs of Love Lost
Love Found
Love Taken Away.
Blissfully oblivious to a world bigger than High School
Sitting on those smooth, cool tiles
Fighting to be the next to hold her,
Laughing about nothing
We never thought one day the music would stop
And those stupid SongHits sheets that we both hated and loved
would just lie forgotten.
Traded for careers
And far-off places
Conversations over coffee and cigarettes
While they lie in some dark corner, never sung again
And she whom we all held,
with tattoos of our names all over her body
Does she still remember all our songs,
will she ever play them again?
