TO A GIRL NAMED OLEAH/THE SECRET OF "THE SECRET"

Are you somewhere else, traveling again? In Timbuktu?

I shared the Australian writer's Rhonda Byrne's best-selling book, "The Secret", with a young girl who will enter college this coming June. She enjoyed viewing it. She expressed gratitude for possessing the film version and audio rendition of the book now stored in her USB including your book collections authored by Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer. How old is the girl who uploaded into your USB this inspirational book? she asked. Maybe 22, I said remembering your email address (olelo_22@yahoo.com), your laughing voice and Chinese eyes. A million thanks for the "gifts" from the stranger I met on a Laoag-bound passenger bus on April 21. Meeting you was fortuitous. The bus that stopped at the plaza was full and there was only one vacant seat at the back where you were sitting by the right window. I sat beside you, a wisp of a girl in black T-shirt (?) and brown khaki shorts busy talking on her cellphone in Tagalog. I would learn later you were going to San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte, to visit your boyfriend, a medical doctor. I have just attended a board meeting of the Timpuyog dagiti Mannurat iti Iluko iti Filipinas, the national association of Ilokano writers, at the Patio del Sol in San Fernando and I was going to Laoag to visit my sick sister Inocencia. Did I meet my soul mate in that Partas bus? Or was it the dynamics of "The Secret" working and producing the circumstances that led me to you and acquiring the film version and audio rendition of a great book? You have wonderful, wonderful years ahead of you. You have "The Secret.

photo captions, from top: Laoag street in front of the Ilocos Norte provincial capitol, a Filipina Singapore girl