I was born in the middle of a dark stormy night, on a small but steady boat. At the end of my life, my eyes turned as red as the sky above and as dark as the cold ocean below. Tethered on the edge of unconsciousness, I could only think about the promise of paradise that was about to come. I saw Heaven’s metal angel silhouetted against that canvas of blood. It danced to a magnificent and profound sound that surely was not from the earthly realm I knew, like I’ve read from the scriptures of the Holy Book. And it flew overhead, unnamed and strange despite the familiarity and comfort it brought me. My mind turned one last time to the woman who bore me before quieting into an eternal slumber.

On that night I entered the world, the women in the island of Basco were skittish around my mother. She had barely managed to bring her boat to the shore while carrying me in her arms, still slick with the fluids and blood from her womb, as well as the droplets of rain that managed to reach me despite the thick swaddle of my mother’s alampay. Though they did not treat her as one of them, the women knew better than to leave a single ailing mother who had just given birth on her own to be at the mercy of the elements and of life and death. So they helped her off the boat and into her hut. They made her chew some leftover rice porridge from their own homes. They bound her stomach to help with the postpartum swelling. Then they fussed over me, warming up my body near a fireplace, rubbing oils on my forehead. They worried about how I got rained on, how this might make me go blind or be sickly when I grow up.

Thankfully, I grew up healthy enough. The people said that it was because my mother was the daughter of both the sea and the moon. And she did look the part, with her hair falling in wild but beautiful waves, as black as a squid’s ink during midnight, and her skin smooth and dewy as though she glowed with a divine light from within. They did not know her, but they knew of her. And they knew she only sang under the light of a full moon, or when the waves were lapping at the shore with a calm but excitable energy.

The people on the island regarded her with fascination at first, this strange woman whose name no one knew, whose manner of speaking hinted at a degree of intelligence which they interpreted as snobbishness and arrogance. Still, no one could tell her origins. All they had were theories and chismes on why she was here, as though she just popped up on the island from nowhere. Perhaps she was not just from another town, but another world as well. Even when the women elbowed each other and hissed at each other to approach this strange woman, they all shied away from her and the pretty and unfamiliar cadence of her words. They couldn’t even begin to ask the questions that nagged at their brains.

But all that changed when one night, someone found her laughing and dancing maniacally under the roof of her hut. A storm boomed and crashed, almost destroying the other huts that lined the beach. They could see her silhouette amidst the flashes of lightning that illuminated the dark sky. They heard her laughter in between each crash of thunder, uncaring about the cold rain that pelted at her skin and made her baro’t saya stick to her body. They then held her at a distance, too afraid to know what insanity or power she had. She did not fear the angry sky and sea that were at war with each other, just like from the creation story they told their children—which they learned from their parents, who learned it from their parents, who learned it from their parents.

Someone speculated that she was like an excitable and foolish child, laughing at the way her mother and father screamed at each other’s throats over an argument she had orchestrated. Another one suggested that perhaps she was worshipping the power of the storm. Despite it having the power to destroy, it was the storm that had accompanied her on the night she gave birth to me. The people then all nodded their heads resolutely, taking in the words as true as the laws of nature and the divine. They then called her either a diwata or mangkukulam while simultaneously crossing themselves and uttering prayers that Padre Salazar at Santo Domingo church had taught them.

Despite this, the people treated me more like one of them than they ever did my mother. This was not saying much, because even as a young girl, I always caught how they tried to include me with the other children almost as an afterthought. This was something I was both grateful and resentful for. They all tried to hide it, I knew. But as is the nature of children, I had frequently heard accusations that some of my playmates threw my way whenever we had a petty fight. “Di tayo bate,” they would whine. They would say that nothing good ever came out of playing with the daughter of a mangkukulam anyway. And every so often, when I would run up to Mama to help her with the fish she caught and to see if she had a book for me, I would catch her strained smile and tight eyes. And then whoever she was chatting or arguing with would greet me with a voice that was too bright and cheerful to be genuine, with poorly disguised wariness and guilt behind their eyes. But even with this simmering tension underneath, Mama would never fail to remind me to say my po’s and opo’s. To say salamat po and walang anuman po, and to always be ready with a polite smile to the islanders.