Sylvia Mayuga (1943-2019)

Maybe if I had known that she was ailing, and in grief, I wouldn’t have been so jolted by her death. But we hadn’t been on speaking terms these last years, but which wasn’t new. Ours was an on-again-off-again relationship — most times we were simply on different wavelengths, she the Libra, me the Virgo, even as we shared the hippie’s faith in the promise of the Age of Aquarius, though we did wonder why its dawning was / is taking forever.

Met her in the late ’70s when I started running around Malate, reading birthcharts. She was one of the first to ask for a reading, and she said after that it was a test, she knew her astrology and was checking me out, as in, was I for real? “Authentic” was the word she used, and I passed with flying colors, it would seem, because she was in and out of my life, took me to my first Metropolitan Theater play, Ang Kiri. Decades later, I took her to Music Museum’s Vagina Monologues. Full circle? With many long conversations along the way, about everything under sun and moon. including why we had these interregnums when we just had to steer clear of each other for the sake of zen and sanity, lol. 

In ’84 I joined her on a roadtrip to Batangas yata iyon, with ATOM’S boycott-elections caravan, and with her usual candor she had asked to be reminded what brought on our last rift, and we got so deep into it, she missed a turn and we were lost for a couple of hours, but she never doubted we would find our way back to the group (Ching Escaler and Butch Abad among them), and to my amazement we did. This was after Ninoy’s killing, when Marcos opened up the Batasan elections to the opposition, and Cory agreed to field candidates but Butz did not, and we found ourselves on Butz’s side, which was so leftist, haha,  

Our last real chat (according to my FB messenger) was in 2011, when she was writing me a review of Revolutionary Routes, the family memoir I wrote, based on my Lola Concha’s Spanish orig that my mom translated into English that Katrina made into a book, and she was curious about, intrigued by, the mother-daughter dynamics across generations, and asked such probing questions, napaisip naman ako.  She had a way of going deep, not to speak of flying high and mystical, and slipping into high-priestess prose, sometimes mahihilo ka sa sudden dramatic shifts.

Not sure anymore why we stopped talking this last time. Politics, malamang, with some personalan isyus thrown in, not helped any by Facebook, which has changed the dynamics of friendship. 

But never mind. What matters is, she leaves behind writings, stories, and shared experiences of very interesting times.  In my book, one of the most colorful, and authentic, characters of the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s down through martial law — that’s Sylvia Mayuga, pre-Morningstar.