concentric circles

Tuhan closed the Pamanhikan by talking about concentric circles, the different identies and communities, family, friends, and with the acceptance of the dowry the communities that Rhett and I each brought to the table are now joined into one community, one family. Eileen and Tuhan brought Rhett's and my hand together acknowledging this new bond.

I looked around the room at everyone present. There was my family (cousins, uncles, aunts and such), my friends, others of the Kali clan, Rhett's friends, his siblings, old high school teachers, parts of who I'd consider my poetic family. They were all here to witness and to be a part of this union.

We couldn't have felt more blessed.

The circles of our lives were coming together as everyone mingled around the dining table ladened with food and the rest of the house. I realized it was one of the few times that people from all the different parts of our lives were in one place. For the first time I felt the layers of my life touching upon one another. I remember talking with my high school English teacher and looking into her eyes knowing, yes, she could see me for all the people I have come to be.

Many stopped at the wall of family photos my mother had created. Frames with pictures of me and my siblings over the years. Each of these circles knew of a certain side of me: the writer, the kali gura, the friend, the sister, the ate, the niece, the daughter. Some had knew of me from several different circles. But today, they were getting a chance to fill in the holes, find a bit more about these other people I am and to find more about what would be my future.

For all those times in my life where I felt like I didn't fit or that my life seemed incongruous, it all seemed to make sense now. Often it seems as though the people who knew you as a child, would never be able to see yourself now. But in that moment, I felt like an open book where people could see me as a child, a teenager, a young woman, a writer, a daughter, a gura, a friend, an ate, and now soon to be wife. For all the years I had been afraid to allow people to see different sides of me as if acknowledging these different aspects of my life would invalidate the other, there was in reality nothing to fear. I could pass from one moment a cold deadly stare wielding a knife to playing and skipping with the three-year-olds to obediently filling my mother's long list of grocery items through Chinatown.

If anything, instead of fear, I found love. I found love in each circle to its edge through and within every layer to the very core where two people now stood. In that way, for the first time, I felt whole.